The Perception of Bookish Religious Lexicon in Selected Poetry of Akmulla: Comprehensibility, Lexical Complexity, and Poetic Effect

This study examines how bookish religious vocabulary in Akmulla’s poetry is perceived by contemporary Kazakh-speaking readers. The aim is to identify the relationship between text comprehensibility, lexical complexity, and poetic effect. The research materials were drawn from a corpus of 60 poetic stanzas, of which 10 were selected for experimental analysis, each containing one target lexical item. Data were collected through Google Forms, where participants evaluated stanzas containing Arabic-Persian-derived words. The results show that overall text comprehensibility remains relatively high despite lexical complexity. Although lexical difficulty is moderate, it does not significantly hinder understanding. At the same time, poetic effect scores are consistently high, indicating that readers are able to appreciate the aesthetic value of the text even when some lexical items are not fully understood. Correlation analysis reveals a weak relationship between comprehensibility and difficulty, and a slight positive relationship between difficulty and poetic effect. The A/B comparison results demonstrate that participants tend to prefer simplified variants in terms of clarity. However, the original bookish forms retain their aesthetic impact. These findings suggest that the perception of poetic texts operates on both cognitive and aesthetic levels. The study contributes to understanding the role of historical bookish vocabulary in modern reader perception and the mechanisms underlying poetic language processing.