MONTH NAMES IN THE CHULYM TURKIC DIALECTS – THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING

Our article presents not just a review of the traditional month names in the Chulym Turkic dialects, but also its analysis from a lexical, etymological, semantic and ethno-graphic point of view. Studying the traditional month names may uncover interesting and important infor-mation about aspects of the lives of their users, e.g. their main occupations, means of obtaining food, impact of natural phenomena, plants and animals important to them, the influences of foreign cultures or religions. It is especially important to in-vestigate less well-known peoples like the Turkic peoples in Siberia, among them the Chulym Turkic peoples. Our aim is not just a review of the existing material,1 but also its analysis from a lexical, etymological, semantic and ethnographic point of view. Among younger generations of the Chulym Turkic peoples, we may expect the use of Russian names for the months, but they are not recorded in the literature, not even in the most recent monograph by Li Yong-Sŏng (2008). Traditional Chulym names for the months of the year were first recorded by J.P. Falk2 in his Beiträge zur topographischen Kenntnis des Russischen Reichs, III