Kalmyk Word List in Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia Comparativa by P. S. Pallas: A Graphophonetic Analysis of Vowels

Introduction. Quite a number of eighteenth-nineteenth century Kalmyk dictionaries have been subject to linguistic analysis. However, the Kalmyk word list in the major work by P. S. Pallas — despite being well known to the scientific community — was never analyzed, yet that was an earliest attempt to record Kalmyk vocabulary and contains decently precise spellings (closest to actual oral patterns), which makes it a unique lexicographic source. Goals. The study attempts a graphophonetic analysis of Kalmyk vowels from the dictionary of P. S. Pallas, and seeks to identify reflexes of such vowel graphemes. Materials. The paper focuses on the Kalmyk word list consisting of 531 units, some to repeat but differ in spelling. Results. The study has yielded some rows of vowel graphemic correspondences between entries contained in the Pallas Dictionary, lexemes of modern standard Kalmyk, the latter’s IPA transcriptions, and H. Nugteren’s proto-Mongolic reconstructions, which makes it possible to conduct a graphophonetic analysis of the mentioned Kalmyk word list. The latter analysis has resulted in a table introducing data on reflexes of regular vowels (i.e., three examples least). There are significant phonetic differences between graphemic patterns of the Pallas Dictionary and present-day Kalmyk lexemes, in most cases those are essentially systemic. The differences from the modern literary language are mainly derived from historical changes that have arisen in vowels and vowel complexes under the influence of certain phonetic processes. In the absolute beginning of a word and after a consonant in the first syllable, vowels experience few changes, the bulk of such transformations be observed in further syllables and relate to reduced positions.

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