Proverbs and sayings collected by A.E. Kulakovsky: language analysis as a source of ethnocultural information

Abstract

Since proverbs and sayings reflect the historical experience of the people, they are of value to historians, ethnographers, folklorists, linguists. The layer of archaic phenomena of the language found in folklore, lost in the process of its development, can serve as valuable sources in the study of the language, culture, and features of the way of life of the people. In the late XIX-early XX centuries A.E. Kulakovsky managed to collect and record proverbs and sayings expressing the wisdom and spiritual wealth of the Yakut people, their keen and deep aphoristic talent. The researcher believed that proverbs and sayings are the most valuable part of the folklore material he collected as the focus of the accuracy, compression and strength of the language. The paper attempted to study proverbs and sayings from the point of view of the presence of historicisms and archaisms, which not only reflect the realities of the life of the people of a certain historical time, but also serve a valuable source of study of the ethnography of the Yakuts. The division of obsolete words in the composition of proverbs and sayings into parts of speech is dictated by the need to identify signs of the greatest variability in the language development.