Article

Name: Cyrillic in the system of written culture traditions of the Kalmyk people

Authors: P. Ts. Bitkeev, G. S. Bitkeeva

Kalmyk State University, Elista, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract: The paper considers the Cyrillic-based Kalmyk writing and is timed to the 95th anniversary of its introduction into practice in 1924. The advantages of this writing are considered in the context of the centuries-old rich tradition of writing culture of the Kalmyk people. First of all, it was the common Mongolian writing with more than one and a half thousand-year history, and “Clear writing” created in the middle of the 17th century. The Kalmyks chose a new script on a Cyrillic basis, leaving their traditional national scripts for socio-cultural, political, and technical reasons. It was impossible to print on a vertical line the merged writing of letters peculiar to traditional writing systems in those years. While using Cyrillic writing, the Kalmyk people, like other peoples of our country, achieved remarkable success in the sphere of educational, cultural, and economic development. The national intelligentsia was formed. Classical works of Russian and foreign fiction, as well as works of oral folk art and new Kalmyk literature, were published in the Kalmyk language. The extensive practice of establishing and using Cyrillic-based writing by the peoples of Russia, including the Kalmyk people, proves the completeness of alphabetic characters, the possibility of combining them for the written transmission of systems of different types of languages and their structural units, as well as the universality of the Cyrillic alphabet.

Keywords: the written culture of the Kalmyk people, Kalmyk language, writing system, Cyrillic alphabet, “Clear writing”

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