Religious Texts of the Khotons of Mongolia: “Garvaa Gorvoo”

Abstract

The purpose of this article is driven by the need to interpret linguistic facts found in the folklore of particular people in order to archive their extinct language. To achieve this goal, a task was set to study one of the religious texts of the Khotons – a small Turkic ethnic group living in Mongolia – which has been preserved orally. Using a comparative-historical research design and the methods of internal and external reconstruction, morphological structures within the sampled text were studied and loanwords identified. Variation A of Garvaa Gorvoo in the Khoton language acted as the primary source for this study. a distributive analysis was conducted encompassing both semantic and phonological features of the Mongolian language and the text written in Mongolian Cyrillic, which greatly resembled the Khoton language of the sampled text. For the first time, the unique winding speech style of the Khoton ethnic group in Mongolia was analyzed, translated into Kazakh and English, and its content revealed. The results reveal that due to the close connection of religious texts with Arabic, Garvaa Gorvoo was determined by the meaning of the Arabic word ġurbat (غربة) or gharbā; hence proving the association with the Arabic language. This analysis also revealed grammatical forms and previously undocumented lexical items. The results of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the historical and cultural identity of the Khotons in Mongolia. Furthermore, they help determine the phonetic and lexico-grammatical characteristics of their spoken language, revealing its connections to Turkic languages, and open the way to archiving the language by presenting a "living fact" of this extinct language to the international scholarly community.