‘May You Eat Your Father’s Flesh!’: Concept of Father in Kalmyk Curses

Abstract

Introduction. Curses constitute an earliest stratum of ethnic oral narratives and still remain somewhat understudied. The former’s shaping resulted from belief in magic and the latter’s supposed ability to bring harm onto one’s opponent. The article attempts a textual analysis of oral curses once recorded from ethnic Kalmyks. Goals. The study seeks to outline semantic features inherent to formulas of curses in B. Bergmann’s dictionary of Kalmyk phraseological units, and investigate his letters for cursing phrases containing the lexeme ‘father’. Materials and methods. The phrases subject to descriptive analysis have been selected via continuous sampling. The paper focuses on B. Bergmann’s Kalmyk phraseological lists and letters (‘Nomadische Streifereien unter den Kalmȕken in den Jahren 1802 und 1803’), other Mongolian language materials. Results. The linguoculturological and contextual insights into the formulas of curses make it possible to delineate the latter’s communicative essentials and semantic components. Thematically, the variety of curses can be reduced to a number of ill wishes, such as loss of health and life, misfortunes in family and decreased living standards, etc. Our semantic analysis suggests the formulas are largely culture-specific and may be viewed as manifested spiritual experiences and mental attitudes of the then Kalmyks. So, the paper comprehensively examines the not that widespread Kalmyk curses containing the lexeme ‘father’ from B. Bergmann’s letters.

Keywords

• curse (kharal)
• phraseological unit
• concept of father
• b. bergmann
• kalmyk language
• folklore
• magic formula