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Introduction. The articles examines etymologies and semantics of Mongolic words denoting the sky. The system of astronomical terms in Mongolic languages is structurally complicated due to multiple layers of pre-Buddhist, Buddhist and other beliefs adopted by proto-Mongols. Goals. The work aims to identify etymological and semantic dominants characterizing this thematic group within the common Mongolic vocabulary. The concept of sky clusters with most basic ones, and lexemes to denote it are to be found in each and every language. Materials and methods. The study examines dictionaries of Mongolic languages, involves reliable proto-Mongolian lexical reconstructions by H. Nugteren and O. Mudrak. Furthermore, the paper analyzes various etymological works and Altaic dictionaries, as well as databases on semantic transitions and colexifications. Results. The Mongolic vocabularies contain four lexemes denoting the sky and two for air/airspace — all of them being largely associated with different beliefs and faiths across different areas and in different eras. So, the word *teŋgeri attests to some elements of the cult of heaven had been practiced by earliest Mongols and the latter had maintained contacts with Turkic groups. The second lexeme *hogtorgui is a Buddhist scholarly term semantically derived from the one denoting emptiness, i.e. a suggested semantic calque from the Sanskrit word that was borrowed to northern Mongolic languages from translated texts of the Buddhist Canon. The third name *köke is a hapax from the Muqaddimat al-Adab that may have arrived in western Middle Mongolian from Chagatai Turkic. The fourth word *asman is a later borrowing from Persian to vocabularies of Muslim Mongols, sometimes via Turkic languages. The fifth lexical unit *agaɣar may have been included from Buddhist Sanskrit, and the sixth word *kei — from Middle Chinese. The unexpected conclusion is that the original proto-Mongolian word to have denoted the sky simply cannot be reconstructed. Evidently, the ancient word had been displaced by the loanwords throughout most intensive cultural contacts.

Tungus-Manchu and Samoyed peoples inhabit adjacent territories and live in a similar environment since antiquity. Both of these language families also underwent divergence at roughly the same time. It is interesting to see which dwelling names can be reconstructed for the different proto-language states of these families, and with which ethnographically or archaeologically attested dwelling types these words can be correlated.

The main aim of this article is to demonstrate some new results obtained when working on the Dialectological Atlas of the Turkic languages of Russia and the Electronic Corpus of Khakas. Material and methods. While preparing the Atlas, in addition to the already available published and archival sources, the team of authors is collecting field material using specially compiled questionnaires focused on some facts from the history of the Turkic languages. . Results and conclusions. The study shows that the collection of materials based on historically oriented dialectological questionnaires helps obtain data that sheds additional light on the genealogical classification of the dialects, the ways in which they diverge and converge, as well as on archaic and innovative phenomena in the areas under study. Also, considering of all materials, both field and archival, allows conducting micro diachronic studies on the spread of linguistic phenomena in the dialects at different periods of time and building well-founded hypotheses on the causes of changes. In the current paper one phonetic and one mophological feature of the Khakas dialects are compared, being described in the end of the XIX century (based on the archival data) and nowadays (according to our field recordings). We show the shift of their isoglosses and discuss why the language has changed.

The problem of the speech norm and deviations from it in various forms of communication will never lose its relevance. Firstly, linguistic rationing is included in the sphere of state regulation aimed at stabilizing it, and, secondly, variation in the norm is an inevitable consequence of the impact of a dynamically developing speech pattern. The article discusses the problem of the multiple of factors that cause deviations from the speech norm (standard) and their mutual influences. The attention primarily focuses on the interaction of interlingual interference and internal trends in the development of language in its various forms. The problem is considered on the example of deviations from the speech standard in case forms in the regional version of the Russian language – in the spoken language of Shor-Russian bilinguals. The variability of the case forms is caused by the wide spread of bilingualism in the region and the substrate influence of the mother languages on the speech practices of bilinguals speaking Russian. The analysis model presented in the article can be applied to other linguistic contacts and intra-lingual interactions. The source of the material is the Shor subcorpus of the Corpus of Russian oral speech of Turkic-Russian bilinguals (RuTuBic). The corpus includes morphological annotation, common for linguistically marked corpuses, as well as marking of deviations from the speech standard. The model was tested on the material of interview records of 11 respondents (15 hours). The main sources of deviations from the speech standard are the interference of the Shor language, the dialectal influence of Siberian Russian dialects, structures of colloquial speech, active tendencies of Russian grammar, and discursive and genre features of speech.

In this paper, we present the results of our analysis of the 110-item basic wordlists for four reconstructed and one ancient languages, the linguistic ancestors of five language families which are hypothesized to constitute the Altaic (a.k.a. Transeurasian) macrofamily: Proto-Turkic, Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Tungusic, Middle Korean and Proto-Japonic wordlists. Protolanguage wordlists were reconstructed according to strict criteria of semantic reconstruction, based on accurate semantic glossing of forms in daughter languages. Each involved form was encoded into a bi-consonantal CC-shaped sequence using the consonant class method, after which a recently developed weighted permutation test was applied. In a typical situation, our algorithm makes a small number of type 1 errors (false positive), but the number of type 2 errors (false negative) can be substantial. Our main finding is that pairs between the Nuclear Altaic taxa – Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic – as well as the Turkic-Japonic and Tungusic-Japonic pairs demonstrate significant p-values. In some cases, this can be attributed to either ancient contacts or genealogical relationships, but at least for the Turkic–Japonic pair, a contact scenario is unlikely owing to geographical remoteness.