<i>kük</i> ‘blue’, <i>zäŋgär</i> ‘sky blue’, <i>jäšel</i> ‘green’
in the Bashkir language
The paper aims at studying the genesis, evolution, and development of the color terms kük
(blue), zäŋgär (sky blue), jäšel (green) in the Bashkir language. The semantics of the terms
under study reveals the interesting shifts both in the dialects of the Bashkir language and Turkic languages in general. Bashkir language dictionaries and corpus data of Bashkir prose and
folklore have served as sources of examples for identifying the meanings of words. In the literary Bashkir language, the lexeme kük is used to denote “blue,” zäŋgär – “sky blue,” jäšel –
“green.” However, there are discrepancies in the meanings of these tokens in the dialects: kük
can denote all three colors; zäŋgär – indicates in some dialects only “sky blue,” while in others – “blue”; jäšel means “green” in some dialects and “blue” in others. The lexemes of kük
and jäšel go back to the Pre-Turkic words, the word zäŋgär – to Persian. The lexeme kük in
the Bashkir language also has retained the pre-Turkic meaning of “grey, gray,” and at the
same time, it has a connotative meaning “western” in this language, different from other Turkic languages. Most of the additional meanings of the word jäšel are connected with the fact
that originally it was the name of the color of young fresh vegetation, greenery: fresh, young,
covered with greenery, not ripe, unripe. Only the word zäŋgär is used to designate only a color – “sky blue” or “blue.”
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<i>kük</i> ‘blue’, <i>zäŋgär</i> ‘sky blue’, <i>jäšel</i> ‘green’
in the Bashkir language // Сибирский филологический журнал. 2021. № 1. Pp. 224–238. DOI: 10.17223/18137083/74/17.