Traditional picture of nature of olonkho: deep sense

Abstract

In recent decades, folklore studies are particularly relevant research related to the problem of semiotic mechanisms of oral collective memory, and this topic is closely intertwined with the issue of understanding and interpretation of the meaning of the cultural text. The purpose of this article is to identify the deep semantic level of the folklore text based on the semiotic language of the ethnocultural tradition of the Yakuts and other Turkic peoples of Siberia. Her author uses a comprehensive technique, combining a linguistic analysis of the semantics of words with the structural-semiotic method of studying folklore and a hermeneutic approach to the text.

The author concludes that the traditional description of the nature of an epic country at a deep semantic level of the text carries a completely different kind of information: plant symbols inscribed in a four-membered horizontal scheme encode social structures. The fact that the folklore text contains an implicit meaning at a deep level is due, according to the author, to the peculiarities of storing and relaying culturally significant information in a non-written society. The reconstruction of the implicit meaning of the text takes place on the basis of the entire cultural presupposition of native speakers of language and folklore; linguistic metaphor, mythopoetic pathway, proper name, etymological meaning of a word, compositional structure of description – everything is used by oral memory to preserve and transmit cultural information. A special role in the transmission of folklore text from generation to generation belongs to the symbol, which has a high informative richness; it can be considered as a special tool in the language of culture, which expresses thoughts about the world and human being in it. Compression of meaning can be achieved by using ready-made, well-known schemes (matrices, stencils) that enclose the whole world as a “framework”. The function of such a “convenient scheme” is performed by the “four cardinal directions” structure, which is of a universal classification character. The article also defines the semantics of plant symbols, spatial directions, landscape terms, reveals relics of the female cult in the traditional culture of Turkic peoples.

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