Morphonological phenomena in the Kalmyk language of the 18th century (exemplified by the documents of the National archive of the Republic of Kalmykia)

The results of the analysis of morphonological phenomena in the words of the Kalmyk language of the 18th century are presented in the article. The research material is comprised of the official business documents of the Kalmyk khans of the 18th century and their contemporaries, written in the old Kalmyk language, called Todo bichig “clear letter”, which were deposited in the National Archive of the Republic of Kalmykia (Fund 36, Inventory 1). In Kalmyk linguistics, for the first time, information was obtained about the compatibility of morphemes of the Kalmyk language of the 18th century and about morphonological phenomena caused by the processes of word- and form building. It was found out that at the junction of morphemes such morphonological phenomena as truncation, overlap, augmentation, alternation, interfixation, vowels lengthening often occurred, and within morphemes – the alternation of short and long vowels. It is revealed that the paradigms of root and subordinate morphemes of the 18th-century Kalmyk language differ from similar paradigms of the modern language. The results obtained are important not only for understanding the historical grammar of the Kalmyk language, but also for the theoretical grammar of the modern Kalmyk language. The perspective of this study is that its results are the starting point for a new direction – the comparative study of morphemics and morphonological phenomena of related Mongolian languages belonging to the agglutinative type of languages. It becomes possible to compare and contrast not just their single identical root and affixal morphemes (the traditional approach), but also their morphemic paradigms, consisting of allomorphs and variants in both diachronic and synchronous aspects.