From the Experience of Inventory of the Vocabulary of the Lost Turkic Language

The article describes how the Turkic khoton Ethnos living in the western region of Mongolia, who have forgotten their native language, found themselves in this region, the meaning of the khoton ethnonym and a review of research on them. At present, the languages of the khotons have fallen into disuse and disappeared, becoming themselves a Mongolian-speaking community. Nevertheless, information has been preserved in the minds of the people that they are descendants of the Turks and that their ancestors spoke a language different from the Mongols. In this regard, there are also remnants of household lexicology. The Customs and culture of the khotons differ from the Mongolian peoples. According to religious beliefs, it adheres to the Sunni branch of Islam, but in everyday life, elements of Witchcraft and Buddhism, Lamaism are also used in parallel. A group of texts spoken during Muslim rituals have been preserved orally. Due to the restrictions of atezim, which prevailed in socialist countries from the beginning of the twentieth century, the prayers of the khotons – “Moldoo Naryn halleg” (the word of the mullahs) – were secretly passed from father to son. The text in the mouth has undergone an unrecognizable change, “broken”. These texts have not been studied and analyzed by researchers, they have reached the present day under the heading “incomprehensible texts”. The article describes the first experience of compiling a dictionary using all possible sources of a lost language in such a state. The focus will be on identifying and typing individual hotonic lexemes, maximizing its lexical series, and this process will be analyzed with concrete evidence.