On Some Graphophonetic Features of Old Kalmyk, Mid Eighteenth to Early Nineteenth Centuries: Analyzing Kalmyk Wordlists by G. F. Müller (1760–1762) and B. Bergman (1804–1805)
Authors:   Kalmyk Scientific Center of the RAS, Mirzaeva Saglara V. 
Published: February 2025

Introduction. Lexicographic sources in Old Kalmyk are of particular importance for studies of Kalmyk historical phonetics. Such earliest sources include a variety of dictionaries and wordlists compiled by German scholars engaged in the research of Imperial Russia’s peoples — including Kalmyks — and languages between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The definite linguistic value is that those are records of colloquial language made by ‘external’ observers unfamiliar with oral-to-writing rules inherent to Oirat (Old Kalmyk) Script. If compared to written texts from the same period usually characterized by classical/literary language forms, such records would reflect the then Kalmyk phonetic features in a more accurate manner. Goals. The paper attempts an analysis into grapho-phonetic peculiarities inherent to the Kalmyk language throughout the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Materials and methods. The study focuses on Kalmyk wordlists compiled by G. Doerfer (Ältere Westeuropäische Quellen zür Kalmückischen Sprachgeschichte, 1965) from G. F. Müller’s Sammlung Russischer Geschichte (1760–1762) and B. Bergman’s Nomadische Streifereien unter den Kalmȕken in den Jahren 1802 und 1803 (1804–1805). The wordlists have been formatted to MS Excel, each entry to contain the authors’ spelling, German/Russian translations, and a modern literary form — to be further uploaded onto the LingvoDoc platform for comparative analysis with Proto-Mongolic and contemporary standard Kalmyk patterns. Results. The insight into the Old Kalmyk graphophonetic system articulated in G. F. Müller and B. Bergman’s publications makes it possible to conclude as follows. All the involved dictionaries and wordlists (including ones by P. S. Pallas and J. H. Klaproth) contain some archaic features of Old Kalmyk (from the examined period) that coincide with Proto-Mongolic forms (o — std. Kalm. ɵ, ai — a, u — ү), and innovative ones (e — std. Kalm. ɵ (Proto-Mongolic *ö), ä — e, ü — ө, o — у) that differ from both Proto-Mongolic and modern Kalmyk. It can be assumed that these were characteristic of Old Kalmyk in the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries at large — and not just for individual dialects. As for the consonant system, the correspondence k / c — std. Kalm. х is present only in G. F. Müller’s materials, where one can also find double spelling patterns for some lexemes with [k] and [ch] (e.g., kogur / chojor, kori / chori). This may indicate the archaic feature started to vanish in the 1760s and virtually disappeared by the early nineteenth century, since in materials of B. Bergman and J. H. Klaproth the correspondence can be traced only in spelling patterns of the verbal affix -kö. The correspondences tz — std. Kalm. ч and sch — ч have been discovered in both G. F. Müller and B. Bergman’s wordlists, which attests to these be viewed as phonetic features of Old Kalmyk from the period under consideration. Some correspondences identified in the examined wordlists (b — std. Kalm. в, e — ɵ, o — ɵ, i — ү, ö — ү, o / oo — у) are found in modern Buzava and Dorbet dialects, as well as in Orenburg and Ural subdialects.