The Great Explanatory Dictionary of the Yakut Language: A New Achievement of Yakut Lexicography

Abstract

The present article describes the Great Explanatory Dictionary of the Yakut Language. The Dictionary is the outcome of 46 years of work done by lexicographers at the Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The editor of the Dictionary is Pyotr A. Sleptsov, professor, Doctor of Philological Sciences, member of the Academy of Sciences of Sakha Republic. The Dictionary includes 15 volumes of about 800 sheets, 9,500 pages in total, containing some 80 thousand words and phraseological units. The Dictionary provides a full description of Yakut vocabulary in all its centuries-old richness. The lexical units are from various sources: phraseological units, compounds, archaisms, rarely used words or folk terminology, as well as common dialect words. The authors point out that the Dictionary employs almost all literature written in Yakut: published folklore texts of various genres; translations of classic Russian and world literature; works of all Yakut writers, from classic to modern. The Dictionary is based on the academic card index which presently includes over three million cards with citations showing the lexical and phraseological stock of the Yakut language in its fullness. It would not be possible to create such a huge lexicographic work without a high level of theory of the Yakut language and the present lexicographic tradition that has been bilingual since its foundation. The article shows the relevance of the great multi-volume lexicographic work, describing some characteristics of Yakut vocabulary as reflected in the Dictionary. Also, examples of lexicographic presentation of certain groups of vocabulary are provided. These include a bulk of figurative words and their verbal derivatives, a large number of modal words, particles, and word groups, compound words and terms, phraseological units. The authors of the Dictionary paid great attention to words denoting various ethnographic notions. These words denoting realities that in many cases disappeared from modern life as well as purely Yakut phenomena needed encyclopedic, or close to that, treatment. The Dictionary is targeted at the widest audience. However, its academic reference direction is also important since it will become an essential source for comparative studies of the lexico-semantic system in three large language families: Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages, at the intersection of which Yakut developed.