(Al-Farabi Kazakh National University)
Color Terms in Toponymy of the Altaic World:
Structural Types of Kazakh and Tuvan Place Names
68th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Bangkok 2026
Toponymy constitutes a significant layer of linguistic and cultural heritage, reflecting how communities conceptualize and structure geographic space. In the Altaic world, place names frequently incorporate color terms, which function not only as descriptive markers but also as carriers of cultural and environmental knowledge. This study investigates the structural and semantic features of color terms in Kazakh and Tuvan toponyms. Both languages demonstrate productive patterns of color-based naming, where elements such as ak (white), kara (black), kök (blue/green), and sary (yellow) combine with geographical descriptors to form stable naming models. These constructions encode information about landscape characteristics, including terrain, vegetation, hydrology, and spatial orientation. In Kazakh toponymy, color terms often reflect physical attributes of the environment as well as symbolic meanings embedded in traditional worldview. Tuvan place names similarly employ color-based elements, though with variations in structural formation and semantic interpretation influenced by local ecological and cultural contexts.
The comparative analysis reveals both shared Altaic patterns and language-specific distinctions, highlighting the role of agglutinative structures and compound formation in shaping toponymic systems. The findings suggest that color terminology serves as a culturally embedded mechanism for organizing spatial knowledge across Altaic languages.
This research contributes to comparative linguistics and cultural studies by demonstrating how lexical elements preserve and transmit knowledge about the environment within the Altaic linguistic space.