Ancient Turkic könül, bashkir kunel “heart”: etymological connections of one somatism

Abstract

The article is devoted to showing various etymological connections of the Turkic
names of the heart (somatism) as part of the anatomical vocabulary of the Turkic and Altaic
languages in the context of the nostratic macrofamily. Somatisms as a lexico-semantic group belongs
to the oldest layer of vocabulary, in which, on the one hand, the features of categorization and
conceptualization of the world in the human mind are manifested clearly, on the other hand, the
historical stability of the semantics of words and their phonomorphological appearance is
demonstrated. Based on the methodology of comparative reconstruction of proto-forms, the article
reveals the etymology of the word köηül, gives its direct and figurative meanings in the Proto-Turkic
language. The root proto- form of somatism, according to the author, goes back not to the
substantive, but to the verbal basis of көң – “wait”. Also significant in the article is the identification
of semantic parallels of somatism in the ancient Turkic and Bashkir languages, the definition of
direct and figurative meanings of köηül from syntagmatic connections in phraseological
combinations and derived words. In addition, the author establishes historical links between könül
and other Turkic somatisms, as well as with lexemes denoting kinship relations.
It is important in the article to identify on the basis of this somatism the semantic connections
of the Turkic languages, in particular, the Altai family of languages, as a whole with other languages
of the world, which confirms the verification of the nostratic theory of languages.
A more thorough examination and search for probable isoglosses gives a picture of a very
wide distribution of single-root words with the base *QVN / KVN also within the (hypothetical)
superfamilies of Indo-European, Sino-Caucasian, Austric and Amerindian languages.