About semantic transformation in the udmurt language: word кун ‘state’ and эксэй ‘king’

Abstract

The article is devoted to the history of the fixation of some Udmurt words, starting from the first monuments of Udmurt writing (XVIII century) and ending with our days. The material was lexical units presented in the early monuments of the Udmurt written language, as well as data from modern dictionaries of the Udmurt language of the 20th–21st centuries. The relevance of the research topic is due to the need to study the lexico-semantic transformations that were noticed by the author in the process of getting acquainted with written documents on the Udmurt language. A brief review of the word kun in Udmurt manuscripts and lexicographic publications shows that at the initial stage of the development of Udmurt writing (in the 18th – early 19th centuries) it was used mainly with the semantics 'king, sovereign, ruler', and the lexeme eksei acts as its synonym. At a later time, in textual monuments (beginning, perhaps, with the first translations of the Gospels – from 1847), kun begins to acquire a secondary meaning ‘state; kingdom', which is already characteristic of later and modern dictionaries of the Udmurt language. The author of the article attempts to show that the change in the semantics of words is typical for texts, and it was one of the main ways of development and formation of the Udmurt lexical-semantic system in the first half of the 19th century in voluminous Gospel translations. Materials for further research in the field of the history of words can be embodied in independent historical dictionaries, monographic studies or collections of essays, and also used in the preparation of textbooks on normative and historical lexicology for universities, the historical component of the historical and etymological dictionary of the Udmurt language.