A COMPARATIVE-LEXICOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF GASTRONOMIC TERMS IN ENGLISH, UZBEK, AND KARAKALPAK LANGUAGES

This article presents a theoretical and methodological framework for the comparative-lexicographical analysis of gastronomic terminology across three distinct linguistic systems: English, Uzbek, and Karakalpak. Belonging to separate language families and branches—English to the Germanic branch of Indo-European, Uzbek to the Karluk branch of Turkic, and Karakalpak to the Kipchak branch of Turkic—these languages offer an exceptionally rich field for contrastive lexicology. Rather than focusing merely on compiling empirical lists of dishes, this study explores the underlying lexicographical principles, structural semantic fields, and cross-linguistic equivalence models that govern food-related vocabularies. The paper examines the systemic organization of gastronomic lexemes, the challenges of cross-cultural semantic mapping, and the methodologies required to compile trilingual specialized dictionaries. The theoretical findings demonstrate that while English utilizes a diglossic Romance-Germanic hierarchy to organize its culinary register, Uzbek and Karakalpak manifest a Karluk-Kipchak dialectal split that is further modified by distinct sedentary-oasis and nomadic-pastoral ethnosemantic substrates.