Noun Case and Declensional Paradigms of Old Written Kalmyk

Abstract

The article examines the noun case paradigm which is relevant to virtually all nominative parts of speech in Old written Kalmyk. As is known, a Kalmyk word - like words of any other agglutinative language - can be divided in two parts, namely: an uninflected part - a stem, and an inflected one - affixes. Moreover, the stem of a word is to be followed by word-forming affixes and particles in a strict order. Nouns of Old written Kalmyk are characterized by grammatical categories of case and number; they can also be followed by indicators of possessiveness. The strict order according to which indicators of the grammatical categories are to be added to the stem is as follows: an indicator of the plural comes first, it is followed by case and possessive suffixes respectively; the latter sometimes merges with the case suffix and, thus, makes an integral indicator. All suffixes can be written separately from the stem-word; in this case they are divided by hyphens when transcribed. When it comes to the case paradigm of Old written Kalmyk, one should distinguish the nominative case and forms of oblique cases that are basically suffixal. Suffixes of all oblique cases have phonetic variants (allomorphs) to be determined either by the final sound of the previous morpheme (root or suffix) or by vowel harmony; sometimes both the factors should be taken into consideration. It is noteworthy that the earliest works on the grammar of Old written Kalmyk describe the phonetic, lexical and grammatical processes that occurred in the written language of the 18th-19th cc. A. Bobrovnikov pointed out the gap between the literary language and the actual speech of the Kalmyks in the 19th century.

Keywords

• ранние тексты, падежная парадигма, простое склонение, алломорфы