Republic of Kalmykia

Kalmyk corpus created by Alexandra Vankaeva

Internet, with its vast amount of information has become firmly established in our lives. Every year more and more people are getting their users. Under the heading “Khalmg NET» we are going to tell our readers about the most interesting online projects related to the Kalmyk culture, having any relation to the Mongol world at large.

One of the most significant projects is the online resource: http://web-corpora.net – «The case of the Kalmyk language”.

The author of the project – graduate student and lecturer at the Institute of Linguistics State Humanitarian University in Moscow Alexandra Vankaeva.

This autumn, Alexandra made a presentation and gave a brief report about the project at the first meeting of the “Union of Young Teachers of the Kalmyk language”.

The essence of the project – to collect the largest possible number of texts in the Kalmyk language. In fact, any linguistic body is – an array of texts, selected according to certain criteria and equipped with a search engine. These housings allow us to study the grammatical and lexical features of the target language, his style, as well as track the history of the formation of words and phrases.

The case of the Kalmyk language – is a great help in the research, study and teaching of our language. For example, typing in the search box the word “sәn”, we get a huge number of uses of the word in different contexts, which will help us to see how the word in spoken language. ”

Kalmyk Corps was established in 2011 with the support of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, “Corpus Linguistics”. At present, the body contains about 800 thousand tokens, his collection consists of texts of various genres, mostly fiction and nonfiction. One of the nice features is the case – subcorpus, which allows you to search for works by a particular author, one or more of the works, by genre or date of creation. The case will help the teachers and the Kalmyk language. Using this resource can conduct classes with children on analysis of morphology, syntax, learning new words and their use in speech, etc.

The idea of ​​creating the Kalmyk body came to Alexandra Vankaeva in 2008, working on the thesis work, she was faced with a shortage of material for study. Many teachers RSUH stood at the origins of the Internet resource “Russian National Corpus” in the early 2000s., And Alexandra decided to try to create a similar project for the Kalmyk for all those researchers, teachers, students, school children and people who study Kalmyk language and contribute to its development.

Of course, such a large project is to be extremely not easy. But Alexandra was someone to gain experience in this matter. This linguists, scientists, educators State Humanitarian University and other universities, such as the VA Plungian, Rachel E., S. Yu Toldova, MA Daniel, etc. The search engine for the site was provided by Eastern Armenian National Corpus, and the system Automatic analysis the TA Archangel with the skills of creating such projects.

In conclusion, I would like to say about the importance and necessity of such decisions as the creation of an Internet resource: http://web-corpora.net – «The case of the Kalmyk language.” Given the situation with the mother tongue in Kalmykia, the project of a young scientist Alexandra Vankaeva, sure will make a significant contribution to the further development of the Oirat-Kalmyk language. In the nearest plans of the project – the creation of transliteration into Latin. This will allow Oirats China, Mongolia, the United States and other countries also have access to a resource body of the Kalmyk language.

Naran Etenov