Shor vocabulary against the lexical background of other Turkic languages: terms of “literary genres”

Shor terms denoting literary genres are used in modern processes of developing the literary form of Shor, the utmost necessary condition for the regeneration of the language. The terms concerned are compared with analogous units in the Turkic languages of different status. The comparison involves the genetically close Teleut and Kumandy languages, with their literary and schooling process interrupted for nearly fifty years. The other languages under comparison are Khakass and Altai. These are genetically close to Shor and have been developing their literary forms from the start, from the end of the 19th century under Russian Orthodox Church guidance. The languages of more distant relationships are Tuvan, with Buddhists being the native speakers, and Yakut, with native speakers baptized in the 19th century. The comparison material includes the terminology of Western and southern Turkic languages with an Arab-Persian literary tradition. The results of the study show a high degree of preservation of the literary genre terminology in the modern Shor language and their significant material similarity with the Siberian Turkic terms. The genre terminology in the Western and Southern Turkic languages reveals an Arab-Persian lexical base. However, these languages retain some inherent Turkic features: word-formation models of the terms, the Turkic “core” lexemes in combined terms, e.g., sӧs (word). The nomination motive of some terms coincides with the same phenomenon in the Siberian Turkic languages, e.g., the notions of “laughter”, “joke”, “game” form a term “a funny story”.