NAMES OF SERVANTS OF RELIGIOUS CULT AND THEIR RITUAL ATTRIBUTION IN THE ALTAI LANGUAGE

Abstract

The work presents a study of the names of the servants of the religious cult and their ritual attribution in the Altai language. The Altai people in the past are a nomadic people who have lived since ancient times at the junction of world religions, while preserving Altai shamanism. The modern territory of the Altai Republic from 1635–1756 was part of the Dzungar (Oirot) Khanate, where Tibetan buddhism was the state religion. After its defeat by the Manchu Empire of Qing, the ancestors of the Altai population from 1756 to 1865 became part of the Russian Empire, which was marked in the subsequent process of the revival of shamanism. In 1830 with the opening of the Altai spiritual mission in Altai, the process of christianization of the local population began. The article examines the religious vocabulary of the Altai language in a comparative aspect of the Turkic-Mongol peoples of Central Asia. In the course of the analysis of the terms, the researcher traces the phonetic transformation of the borrowings from Sanskrit, Old Turkic, Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian language, which have not received a sufficient description in Altai linguistics.