The Linguistic Origin of the Hori-Buryat Pagan Name Odo / Odoy / Otoy

Abstract

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of personal names of pre-Tibet-Mongolian origin of the corpus of the historical anthroponymicon of the Khori-Buryats. The purpose of the article is to introduce the historical anthroponymicon of the Khori-Buryats as one of the Mongolian-speaking peoples written out from the censuses of the State Archive of the Trans-Baikal Territory for 1850–1851 in the aspect of comparative linguistics. One of the tasks of this study is to determine the preliminary meaning of names like Odo / Odoy / Otoy and, accordingly, the possible linguistic origin of these names. Materials and methods of research. The anthroponymic material is personal names with unclear semantics, written out from the censuses of 11 Khori-Buryat kins for 1850–1851 from the documents of State Archive of the Trans-Baikal Territory. It is known about the complexity of the ethnogenesis of any people, not excluding the Khorin Buryats as one of the Mongolian peoples. Historical anthroponyms of any ethnic group with an adequate «deciphering» of their meaning can serve as a kind of proof of the hypothetical participation of different tribal communities of the historical past, both in language and in their ethnicity, and of the peoples and territories of their modern habitat. The research methodology is based on the comparative method, the component method, and the comparative-historical method. The scientific novelty of the study of the names of the historical anthroponymicon is obvious for the following reasons: firstly, historical personal names that have been documented in archival documents have been introduced into scientific circulation; secondly, these names have not been studied for their ethnolinguistic before this article; thirdly, the preliminary results of the meaning of these names, and most importantly, their linguistic origin, have an absolute perspective for the development of many humanities, primarily Siberian onomastics, in the context of contrastivistics and comparative studies.