Dictionary of P. S. Pallas: Archaic and Innovative Features

Introduction. The paper examines and describes some archaic and innovative features identified in a word list of P. S. Pallas from the treatise titled ‘Comparative Dictionaries of All Languages and Dialects Collected by the Order of Her Imperial Majesty’ and printed by I. K. Schnor (St. Petersburg) in 1787–1789. Special attention be paid to specific traits once inherent to various Kalmyk dialects. Goals. So, the study attempts a description of archaic and innovative features traced in the Kalmyk word list contained in the mentioned work of P. S. Pallas. Materials. The analysis focuses on the Kalmyk word list (including word combinations) from the specified dictionary that comprises a total of 531 entries. The former be supplemented with Proto-Mongolic reconstructions by H. Nugteren, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Kalmyk dictionaries by G. F. Müller, B. Bergmann and J. Klaproth published in G. Doerfer’s Ältere Westeuropäische Quellen zur Kalmückischen Sprachengeschichte, The Dictionary of Kalmyk edited by B. Muniev. Results. The LingvoDoc-based survey has yielded certain correspondence rows of vowel graphemes compiled from ones in the dictionary of P. S. Pallas, that of modern Kalmyk, and reconstruction works of H. Nugteren. There are some archaisms and innovations that may have been recorded from an unidentified dialect, and the traces can be observed in other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionaries too. The examined materials contain features of both Dorbet, Torghut, Buzav and Orenburg dialects.