The Word Bičiq in the Language of Official Kalmyk Writing: 18th–19th Centuries

Introduction: Official Kalmyk writing — like that of any other Mongolic language — had been well developed since the emergence of the Mongol Empire and its successor states. Even within Russia’s boundaries the Kalmyks kept sophisticating their writing practices, special emphasis having been paid to administrative correspondence and records management.
The National Archive of Kalmykia contains 18th-century documents addressed by Kalmyk nobility to Russian authorities. The bulk of the texts date back to the period of the Kalmyk Khanate when regular state contacts facilitated the development of official Kalmyk writing to meet the requirements of Imperial Russia’s correspondence protocols.
Documents in Clear Script mirrored both the then literary and conversational variants of the Kalmyk language, and now serve as the basic sources for historical linguistic studies.
The official lexis contained in the sources constitutes an integral part of the Kalmyk vocabulary and is still largely understudied. Identification and further exploration of this lexical stratum is important and urgent to understand the Kalmyk — and basically Mongolic — linguistic development in the long historical context.
Certain efforts have been made to facilitate this, namely, those by D. Suseeva, N. Kokshaeva, and D. Gedeeva.
Goals: The article aims to review document names containing the word bičiq.
Methods: The diachronic lexical research applies descriptive, historical and comparative methods.
Within the investigated texts, the word bičiq and related word combinations have a number of meanings. Except for the main ones, such as ‘script’, ‘credentials’, ‘letter’, those are used as names of official documents. In modern Kalmyk it is the word цаасн ‘paper’ which serves to denote various documents being etymologically related to the source material of such documents. In the language of the investigated the same role is played by the word bičiq ‘record; letter’ which stresses the recording of official information as a hard copy.
Results: The study has discovered some obsolete — though still relevant — lexis dealing with records management. Its introduction into the active vocabulary shall significantly enrich modern Kalmyk, since those words have become rare in view of their obsolescence but due to current Russian-language records keeping (written correspondence) protocols.
Conclusions: The discovered archived texts containing the word bičiq in their titles show there is quite a layer of similar lexis in official recordings of the 18th–19th centuries. In turn, this proves that records management practices had been developed enough in the Kalmyk Khanate. Only small part of the mentioned sources have been examined, and there are still many more Kalmyk lexicographic units to discover, investigate and describe.

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