Number in Official Kalmyk Texts, 17th–18th Centuries: Letters of Khan Ayuka and Their Russian Translations Analyzed

Introduction. A number with peculiar symbolism is closely associated with the shaping of a certain linguistic worldview, and can articulate essentials of material and spiritual culture. However, official Kalmyk texts have not yet been examined for numeric symbolism. Official narratives usually tend to desacralize numbers, the latter to function only as denoters of quantities and measures. Still, such letters may contain tokens involving numbers to be characterized as sacred and able to preserve elements of symbolic semantics in definite contexts. Goals. The article aims at revealing peculiarities of number as ethnolinguistic component in Khan Ayuka’s letters, and comparing 17th–18th century Kalmyk-language texts to synchronic Russian translations. Materials and methods. The paper analyzes letters of the Kalmyk Khan Ayuka housed at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts and the National Archive of Kalmykia. Both synchronic and diachronic Kalmyk-to-Russian translations of 18th-century letters are investigated for culture-specific vocabulary translation strategies. The employed research methods include the descriptive, comparative ones, and that of contextual analysis. Results and conclusions. 18th-century official Kalmyk letters are abundant in numbers, the latter to be divided into ones that preserve semantic elements of sacrality — and desacralized ones that convey quantitative meanings only. Those are the numbers one, three, and four that retain symbolic semantics in materials analyzed. The number one conveys meanings of insignificance and extremely small quantity — virtually equal to ‘naught’ and ‘absence’. The number three retains its traditional messages to have been traced in etiquette formulas mentioning the Three Jewels of Buddhism. Synchronic translations articulate the deep cultural meanings of three without the number as such — with tools and concepts of a different religious tradition. Both in the original and translated texts, the number four maintains its spatial semantics in etiquette formulas mentioning the four cardinal directions — to convey ideas of dividing the world into ours and theirs, the latter to exist beyond the addresser’s locality characterized by four-side structure oriented towards the center.

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