Tadinova Roza (Moscow, Russia)

Crying as an Element of Turkic Funeral Rites in the Ethnic-Cultural and Linguistic context

(57th Annual Meeting of the PIAC Vladivostok, 2014)

In the article there is made an attempt on the base of ethnology of Turkic words connected with funeral crying “joγ” (“funeral ceremony”), “jiγi” – “crying, sobbing” to determine some features of the system of religious and ethical conceptions being the inherent distinctive features of the ethnic community of bearers of the primo-Turkic language and codified system of actions intended for performing the funeral rite as a whole. For the first time there is set the task to system collection and study of the terms of funeral crying of primo-Turkic period. Moreover, there is an attempt of investigating the process not from the fixed ethnic-linguistic facts to the words of primo-lexicon (vocabulary) but from the reconstructed primo-Turkic lexemes to ethnic-linguistic facts they expressed. Regard as of paramount importance there was set the ethimologizaton of appropriated vocabulary; the inner form of the words of primo-language corresponds with meanings of words-reflexes in the Mediaeval and Modern Turkic languages and accompanied with ethnographic data. It is necessary to note that words-reflexes in Modern Turkic language are quite diverse. Most like such diversity is connected with a kind of crying depending in its turn with the form of expressing grief about the dead: to keen a dead person – aglayip sizlamak (Turkmen), akyryp zhyrlau (Tatar), yanip aglamak (Turkmen); sobbing violently – biri icin hungur hungur aglamak (Turkmen), cyiytlab dzhilargъa (K-Balk.); to lament over– zhoklau (K-Kalmyk), ytaan, sulan, onolui (Yakut). to moan – ynkyldau (Kazakh), to sob – yyer (Chuvash), hamsygyp aglamak (Turkmen), sygъyt etmek (Karaim), to cry bitterly – hurlansa yyer (Chuvash), enremek (Turkmen), etc.

The systematization of modern state of term vocabulary of such a group is complicated by the fact that in lexicological, ethnographic and the other sources there is no distinctive demarcation between kinds of crying and often different kinds of crying have got the common lexical indication (for example, in Karaim “to cry” – dzhilargъa, syiytlargъa, “to sob” – syiytlargъa, “to sob violently” – syiytlab, dzhylargъa; in Karakalpak: to keen – zhoklay aityi, to mourn – zhoklay, to lament, bewail, keen over – zhoklay, zhoklay aityi. That is in sources there is not always reflected the specificity of keening.