Shynaray Burkitbaeva and Mereke Kassymbayev
Determining the origin of meaningless pairs of hendiadyoins in the Kazakh language
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Reduplicated words are widely used in all languages and serve as important expressions that add emphasis to sentences. They are also actively used in Turkic languages. Reduplicated words, which are particularly abundant and diverse in the vocabulary of ancient Turkic written monuments, especially in the Old Uyghur language, have not lost their significance in modern Turkic languages. This article explores the issue of identifying the origins of the meaningless pairs of reduplicated of reduplicated words in Kazakh, one of the modern Turkic languages. Reduplicated words are frequently used in the Kazakh language as well. However, in many of them, while one component is clear, the other is entirely obscure. In the article, we analyzed such reduplicated words and identified their origins. We discovered that in many cases, the obscure components in Kazakh have full lexical meaning in other Turkic languages. For instance, in the Kazakh reduplicated word “em-dom”, the first component em means “cure, remedy, medicine” and is easily understood, whereas the second component dom is completely unclear in modern Kazakh, as the word “dom” does not exist in the language. However, our research revealed that in Tuvan language, dom means “medicine, charm, potion,” which means “dom” also conveys the meaning of “healing, cure.” Although the word “tokty-torym” in the first part of the Kazakh word “tokty” is used to mean “one-year-old sheep”, the word “torym” in the second component is an incomprehensible word that does not exist in the Kazakh language. Yet, in the Tuvan language, torym means “young camel,” which implies that “toqty-torym” was once a fully understandable reduplicated expression. Similarly, in Kazakh reduplicated words such as “bala-shaga” and “zhora-zholdas”, the second components shaga and zhora appear obscure today. However, since “shaga” and “zhora” mean shaga “child” and zhora “companion, friend” respectively in Turkmen language, we can conclude that they originally had meaningful definitions in Kazakh as well. The article analyzes several ambiguous words in the Kazakh language and determines their origin.