The Opposition of the Definite/Indefinite Past Tensein the Kyrgyz Language: the Semantic Effects of the Translation of Chingiz Aitmatov Story “The White Ship”

Abstract

The article considers the category of time as a phenomenon of language and literary text based on the story of Chingiz Aitmatov "The White Ship". The interest to the category of time is caused by the asymmetry of the semantics of time in the Russian and Kyrgyz languages in the works of Aitmatov, which plays an important role in the translation of the text from Russian into Kyrgyz. The purpose of the study is to analyze the functions of the past tense, especially the past definite/indefinite in the Kyrgyz version of the story. The analysis is based on the onomasiological approach. The results of the analysis are summarized as follows. In the Russian and Kyrgyz languages, when expressing the grammatical category of time, there is a structural and semantic discrepancy between the forms of past and future tense. But in both versions of the story the past tense lies at the central place. On the one hand, this is due to the non–subjection of the future to human nature, on the other hand, to respect for the past of ancestors as an experience that warns the next generation against mistakes. In the Kyrgyz version of the story, thanks to the various forms of the past tense, the translator was able to vividly convey the whole range of emotions of the boy when it came to the Mother Deer, and the translator was also able to show the importance of the ancestors for the boy.

Keywords

• Kyrgyz language
• Russian language
• artistic bilingualism
• artistic time continuum
• grammatical category of time
• translation