Deverbal Nominals in Yakut: A Historical Approach

Yakut (or Sakha) is a Turkic language spoken in East Siberia. Since it has been on the periphery of the Turkic world for a long time, it has preserved a great number of archaic language traits. On the other hand, Yakut people had very intensive contacts to Mongols and Tunguses, as a result of which their language has changed significantly over the course of time. This dichotomy of 'archaic' and 'progressive' phenomena makes Yakut a very specific case not only for turcological but general linguistic investigations. László Károly's study presents an elaborated analysis and description of the deverbal nominal derivational suffixes in Yakut as spoken in the pre-Soviet times. Based on the analysis, various aspects of Yakut and at the same time Turkic and Mongolic word formation processes are discussed, such as historical development of the suffixes from Old Turkic up to modern Yakut, changes in the system through language contacts, similarities to and divergency from the other Turkic languages. Besides a formal description, the functional side of the analysed derivational suffixes is presented in a systematic fashion, providing a general framework for future works on comparative derivational morphology.