Some features of Old Kalmyk orthography and grammar of the of the middle of the 19th century (based on the record of “Dzhangar” epic belonging to Baga Tsokhor cycle)

The article discusses an Oirat manuscript containing two Baga Tsokhor cycle songs of the Dzhangar epic. The manuscript was brought to St. Petersburg in 1856 by K.F. Golstunsky after his first academic journey to Kalmyks and nowadays is kept at the manuscript fund of the Oriental Faculty’s Library of St. Petersburg State University. Investigation of such early records of Kalmyk folklore in the context of textual and source studies, transliteration of the Old Kalmyk texts, comparison with modern Kalmyk variants seem to be extremely important to academic society. The Calm C 17 manuscript was recorded, according to S.A. Kozin, in the domain of Tumen noyons. It contains two songs - the “Song about fierce Khara Kines” and the “Song about fierce Mangas”, which don’t have titles and are not demarcated inside the text. An analysis of the text’s graphical system shows that it is quite close to Classical Oirat ‘Clear Script’ (except non-standard graphic form of ng letter), since it keeps the angular graphic form of labial o/o vowels and accurate usage of diacritic marks. Special attention is paid to j letter. Initially it was one of the additional transcriptional marks used for spelling of Sanskrit or Tibetan words, but by the 19th century the letter was included in the Old Kalmyk alphabet. The letter j, imitating the Tibetan syllable bya, in combination with the vowel a in Classical Oirat script was written according to the rules of Tibetan spelling, i.e. the vowel a which actually is not marked is included in the syllable by default; various examples can be found in Calm C 17. A comparison with another “Dzhangar” epic record, Calm C 4 from the same repository (1862), which contains three songs of Baga Dorbet cycle, demonstrates a change in syllable ja spelling rules, when scribes began to denote the vowel a by a separate tooth. Having analyzed some graphic and grammatical features of the text we conclude that it bears strong influence of Kalmyk colloquial language of the 19th century.