TATAR CULTURE-SPECIFIC WORDS
OF THE SEMANTIC FIELD ‘ANIMALS’
RELATIVE TO ENGLISH
Gulnara Mohtarovna Nurtdinova
Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia
Dilyara Marsovna Sadykova
Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia
E-mail: gnurtdinova@bk.ru
Recepción: 05/08/2019 Aceptación: 16/09/2019 Publicación: 23/10/2019
Citación sugerida:
Nurtdinova, G.M. y Sadykova, D.M. (2019). Tatar culture-specic words of the semantic
eld ‘animals’ relative to English. 3C TIC. Cuadernos de desarrollo aplicados a las TIC. Edición
Especial, Octubre 2019, 246-257. doi: https://doi.org/10.17993/3ctic.2019.83-2.246-257
Suggested citation:
Nurtdinova, G.M. & Sadykova, D.M. (2019). Tatar culture-specic words of the semantic
eld ‘animals’ relative to English. 3C TIC. Cuadernos de desarrollo aplicados a las TIC. Special
Issue, October 2019, 246-257. doi: https://doi.org/10.17993/3ctic.2019.83-2.246-257
3C TIC. Cuadernos de desarrollo aplicados a las TIC. ISSN: 2254-6529
248
ABSTRACT
The article is dealing with the problem of semantic gaps, the part of which is
a group of culture-specic words. The authors tried to systemize the research
by distributing such words into dierent semantic elds. While comparing the
elds on the example of a pair of languages anyone can see the dierence in
conceptualization of the world picture which is verbalized by the language. The
authors researched the Tatar specic concepts relative to English in the eld
‘Animals’. The results showed that the dierence is not so big, and it is proved by
the quantity of semantic distance coecient. It is 6.5, while the other semantic
elds present bigger dierence: it is 8.44 for the eld ‘family’, 8.2 for the eld
‘household objects’, 9.93 for the eld ‘Food’ and 11.7 for the eld ‘Measures’. So
far, the biggest dierence is in the elds of Religion and Measures. The dierence
between the Tatar and English elds ‘Animals’ can be explained by the fact that
Tatars were nomads in the past and such an animal like a horse (among 14 words
11 of them are denoting a house age and color that is not presented in English)
was important for them. One more argument is the number of Tatar proverbs
about a horse. We have found 757 proverbs in the dictionary of Tatar proverbs
and sayings.
KEYWORDS
Language, Linguistics, Semantics, Vocabulary, Lexical Gaps, Semantic Field,
Culture-Specic Concepts.
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1. INTRODUCTION
The linguists whose names are well known such as Chomsky, Lehrer, Nida and
others published a lot of works dedicated to the notion ‘non-equivalence’. They
believe that such words exist because of dierence in culture and denote the
objects or phenomena unknown to the people of other culture. One of them,
Nida (1964), the founder of the theory of formal and dynamic equivalence
supposed that several among civilizations maybe reason diculties in order that
the interpreter. His words are showing that the dierences between cultures
relate to a culture world picture, which is verbalized by a language and it is
proved by Russian researcher S. Ter-minasova. Each language preserves itself
over time and represents it to future generations, in his opinion, each language
represents the worldview of national culture (Ter-minasova, 2000). Moreover,
it is very important to learn a native language to preserve ethnical identity
(Babenko, 2015). The dierences between cultures are presented in the language
in grammar structures, stylistic devices, lexicology and other language levels
but we are dealing with lexicology. Non–equivalent words exist in any language
presenting the dierences between cultures because they present the notions
existing in one culture and that are absent in another one. Muscovite scholars
Vereshshagin and Kostomarov (1990) supposed which such vocabularies can
have the equipollent into tongue A however they cannot have it in the tongue B
(Cvilikaite, 2006). The reasons of existing non-equivalent words have been still
researched. As it has been mentioned above, the culture of some ethnic group
cannot have the objects or phenomena that are not presented in the culture of
other people, so the language does not have the word. For instance, Sabantui is the
celebration of Tatar people and the English language does not have the word for
it as the English do not have such a holiday. In Tatar there is no word for Easter
as Tatars’ religion is Islam and there is no such holy celebration. Translation
of such words is not dicult because there are some translation technics such
as transliteration, transcription and others. But the technics do not present the
meaning of the word, so a translator presents the explanation in the footnotes
or in the comments. One rather proof of the existing gaps can be described via
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the verity that some objects or phenomena exist in both cultures, but they are
not important for one culture and the language does not have the word whereas
the object or phenomena exist. For example, the Tatar word kodagy in English
has the following meanings: The mother-in-law and the mother-in-law of the bride and
groom’s parents, grand-sisters, or married relatives do not have the right English equivalence.in
English there is no exact equivalent for the mother of the wife or the mother of the husband for
the parents of the bride and groom and their relatives Certainly English people have such
relatives but the English language does not have the word. It is proved by the
results of the research made by one of the authors (Nutrtdinova, 2015), which
show that family hierarchy is broader in Tatar culture. For words that cannot
easily be equated well, linguists are looking for the right words, and for now,
vocabulary gaps, extraneous words, untranslatable words, non-existent words,
and so on (Janssen, 2012; Sankaravelayuthan & Vishwa Vidyapeetha, n.d.). We
are dealing with Tatar specic culture notions that are a part of non- equivalent
words relative their lacunas in English, namely we are presenting the results of the
research in the semantic eld ‘Animals’. Earlier we researched the groups ‘Family
and human being environment’, ‘Religion’, ‘Food’, ‘Measures’ and ‘Household
objects’.
2. METHODOLOGY
Our study is aimed at the analysis of a semantic eld ‘Animals’. The words of
the eld have been selected from Tatar fairy tales published in Tatar. Researchers
at the Verona Academy have devised a method that we use. We use equivalence
indices in the dictionary of either the target language or the word created by
a free word combination in English (Fenenko, 2013). We have studied Tatar,
English, electronic dictionaries, and English explanatory dictionaries. In fact,
our main obstacle is that the dictionary is not comprehensive and reects the
specic Tataric culture concepts. Finding out that in learning Tataric culture,
Englishmen have no reason to misunderstand it and leading to conicts as the
marker of the category ailng/friend (Kalegina et al., 2015). Russian linguist Titov
(2002) proposed the method, which allows turning up the dierence of the world
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picture conceptualization. In his opinion, when we nd a direct equivalent in an
explanatory article of a dictionary that yields similar concepts for a word, we
must nd that both languages determine the semantic context in a similar way.
However, in the case when we need a few words to explain the word meaning
we can say that the pair language does not have an analogous concept. We also
use his formula to calculate the semantic distance coecient (SDC) showing the
dierence between semantic elds. SDC= D : Q , D is the summation of every
the paroles of the descriptions in the semantic eld and Q is the numeral of every
the descriptions into the semantic eld (Titov, 2002).
3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Words that are not present in the vocabulary indicate signs of a slit or a gap
that some linguists distinguish between these slots as a random order (Vlachov &
Florin, 1986). Words that do not exist but can be expected to appear seemingly
ordinary to be termed random slots, but random slots can be dened as lexical slots
and can be realized in a semantic sentence at dierent levels (Sankaravelayuthan
& Vishwa Vidyapeetha, n.d.). In the opinion of Russian linguist Fenenko (2013)
the rst step while conducting the research of semantic gaps is to select the words
that do not have straightforward equivalents in another language. However, we
should exclude proper names. Also, it is necessary at the rst stage to choose
nouns only as usually specic culture words are expressed per nouns and rarely
by adjectives derived from the nouns (Vlachov & Florin, 1986). It is obvious that
it is easier to work with the dictionaries but in the case of the Tatar language (the
ocial language of the Republic of Tatarstan – one of the regions of Russia) we
still have a small number of English-Tatar dictionaries and they frequently do
not contain non-equivalent words.
The question is what can be referred to semantic gaps. Russian researcher
Barchudarov (1975) distributed them in the following groups: proper names,
specic culture words and occasional lacunas. We are dealing with specic culture
words. One of the ways to solve the problem how to present their meaning is to
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make an Explanatory dictionary of Tatar specic concepts that can be used in
developing machine translation process for the language pair Tatar – English.
In the opinion of Linguist Rajendran Sankaravelayuthan “A dictionary in such
cases provides a mere explanation of the concept encoded by a source language.
Unfortunately, such meaning explanations usually are not good in natural
language use” (Sankaravelayuthan & Vishwa Vidyapeetha, n.d.). Because of
above mentioned reasons and being Tatar native speakers who speak English we
have selected Tatar specic culture concepts from Tatar fairy tales published in
Tatar. The choice is diseased per the reality than the ctions were told by residents
of Tatar villages who spoke natural language and later the tales were published
with comments of the researchers. We have distributed specic-culture words in
a few semantic elds, one of them is ‘Animals’. Fenenko (2013) believes that while
comparing smaller elds anyone can easily see the dierence in conceptualization
of word picture verbalized by the language.
In this essay, we attempt to provide a draft of an English explanatory passage for
the semantic context of Tataric. The string is small, 14 word only while the eld
for kinship has 42 words, the eld for food has 16 words, the eld for religion has
25 words, the eld for measures has 16 words and the eld household objects has
44 words. We think that because of climate conditions English and Tatar people
have the same animals but there is some dierence due to dierent historical
conditions. English people live on the island and have a settled way of life. Tatar
people were nomads and lived mostly in prairies and woodlands, so a horse
was very important for them in the past. Among 14 words referring to the eld
‘animal’ found by us in Tatar fairy tales 11 words denoted horses of dierent ages
(taj, kolyn, kolkai, baytal) and colors (kyzgylt, akbuz, zhiran), etc. It is also proved by
the fact that in the dictionary of Tatar proverbs (3 volumes) we have found 757
proverbs dedicated to a horse.
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In fact, we bring up an explanatory dictionary draft, and nally provide the
necessary word modications to explain the meaning of the word. As it has been
mentioned above, in the case we need a few words to explain the word meaning
we may tell than the mate tongue does not have a similar sense. The rather mots
we demand the imperial is the interval amid the senses.
Animals
Kyzgylt - adj. (the color of a horse
coat) chestnut, red and shot with
pink 13.
Yelky – n. a herd horse breeding
specially for meal 9.
Kashka – n. (for an animal) horse
with a blaze 8.
Taj – n. a foal up to three years old 8.
Kolyn – n. a foal up to one year old
8.
Kyrykmysh taj - a foal from one to
two years old 8.
Argamak – n. Central Asian breed
of saddle horse 7.
Zhanvar – n. predatory animals,
beasts of prey 6.
Akbuz – adj. white and grey color 5.
Kolkai – n. a yearling foal 5.
Kiek – n. fowl, game, game animals
5.
Baytal – n. barren mare 3.
Zhiran – adj. chestnut, red 3.
Zhanlek – n. wild animals 3.
Table 1. Semantic Distance Coefcient (SDC) for Semantic Field Animals.
Number of Explanatory
Words
Number of specic culture
words
Total number of words
3 3 9
5 3 15
6 1 6
7 1 7
8 4 32
9 1 9
13 1 13
Q=14 D=91
SDC= D/Q=90/14=6.5
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In the rst column we presented the numeral of the mots we demand against
illustrate the purpose. The second column shows how many words we have
selected with the same number of words to explain the meaning. We found 3
words that need 3 words to describe the meaning, 3 words that need 5 words,
1 word that need 6 words, etc. The third column shows the total number of
words, which we are getting by multiplying the gures of the rst and the second
columns.
We used the formula SDC =D/Q proposed by Titov (Kalegina et al., 2015)
(where D is a total number of words and Q is a number of specic culture words)
to calculate the semantic distance coecient, which is 6.5. In average we need 6.5
words to explain the meaning of the words for the eld ‘Animals’.
4. SUMMARY
We suppose that the most confusing fact for English people is the one that Tatars
breed horses for eating (Yelky) which is natural for people who were nomads in
the past. Also it should be taken into consideration that the colors and ages of
horses in Tatar are also dierent from English. Three words that do not have the
straightforward equivalents are denoting wild animals: zhanvar, kiek, zhanlek. In
Tatar there are special words to single out wild animals which are presented in
English by a few words. So SDC for the eld Animals is 6.5 as opposed to 8.2 for
the eld Household objects, 8.44 for the eld Family, 12.44 for the eld Religion,
9.93 for Food, 11.7for the eld Measures.
5. CONCLUSION
The semantic gap has created profound problems for linguists that have led
to various denitions and names, as discussed above: lexical gaps, non-lexical
words, untranslatable words, non-existent words, and so on. The problem is not
easy to solve as the gaps can exist in language A relative to the language B, but
they are not presented relative to the language C. It is obvious that it is necessary
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to research them by studying a pair of specic languages. Many researchers tried
to systemize the methods and one of the most eective methods is the method of
semantic elds. While comparing the elds anyone can easily see the dierence
in conceptualization of the word picture which is verbalized by the language.
Moreover, the method helps to simplify the process of making an expositive
glossary of specic civilization meanings besides supports the development of
machine translation. What is more important research results can show the
dierence in culture world picture and prevent conicts into the proceeding of
Intercultural relevance.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work is performed according to the Russian Government Program of
Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal University.
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