Semantic analysis of Tuvan proverbs: Models, imagery, concepts (against the European paremiological background) [Семантический анализ тувинских пословиц: модели, образы, понятия (на европейском паремиологическом фоне)]

As it is with all other languages, Tuvan proverbs have a certain ethnic and cultural character, which manifests itself both in the presence of specific language units (proverbs endemic for the Tuvan language) and in the local versions of the paremias which also exist in other language (universal, international or borrowed proverbs). In both linguocultural and typological aspects, the most urgent and hence the most difficult thing is to outline the common features and ethnically and culturally determined differences between the proverbs in Tuvan and modern European languages. Our study focuses on the semantic analysis of Tuvan proverbs upon the wide background of European languages - Slavic, Baltic, Germanic and Romance. We aim to define the principal factors of describing the ethnocultural specificity of Tuvan proverbs - on the level of paremiological models, key terms and imagery (as different from those of modern European languages). The sources for comparison came from published editions of Tuvan proverbs and sayings, and polylingual paremiological dictionaries, such as “The Dictionary of European Proverbs” by E. Strauss (1994), «European Proverbs in 55 Languages, with Equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese» by D. Paczolay (1997). The authors examine the Tuvan proverbs which have their counterparts in European languages (i.e. cases of common proverbial models of various types). These proverbs use the imagery identical or close to their European counterparts and have analogical key concepts (in the sociocultural, axiological or empirical sense, also known as cognitemes. Also differentiated are the models, imagery and notions in Tuvan proverbs which contain paremiological code of various types - natural, animalistical, somatic, gastronomical, etc. - and have appeared due to cultural transfer or linguocultural assimilation. We have concluded that most of the Tuvan proverbs which share models, imagery and notions with proverbs in European language possess both linguistic and ethnocultural characteristics of its own, including ethnic semantic models, ethnocultural versions of imagery and ethnolinguistically and ethnoculturally determined connotations of key notions. We have proved that semantic analysis of proverbial models, imagery and key concepts can help comprehensively differentiate between the common and the specific in the corpus of Tuvan proverbs. This is of paramount importance for both linguocultural typology of Tuvan proverbs and identifying ethnocultural specificity of Tuvan proverbial corpus as compared with those of other languages and cultures. © 2021 New Reaearch of Tuva. All rights reserved.