Scientific life. Congresses, conferences, and symposia

On July 11-14, 2005, the 48th session of the Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) was held in Moscow.

PIAC was established on the initiative of the outstanding German Mongolist and Altaist W. Heissig in 1957 at the XXIV International Congress of Orientalists in Munich with the aim of holding an international scientific conference of Altaists, Mongolists, Turkologists, Manchurians, Sinologists, and Korean scholars annually in different countries. V. Heissig was the General Secretary of the PIAC until 1960, and since 1960 he has been a world-renowned Altaist, orientalist, and Professor Emeritus at Indiana University (Bloomington, USA). Denis Sinor. He and his assistant, in fact, make up the headquarters of the PIAC at this university. The latter acts as a kind of spiritual sponsor of the association: he established the "Indiana University Gold Medal", which is awarded by a special PIAC commission of five people to one scientist for special services in the development of altaism. The Commission is formed at each session and includes the ex officio Secretary-General and the President of the respective session, as well as three members elected by secret ballot by scientists who have participated at least three times in PIAC sessions.

The main concerns and expenses for organizing and conducting the session are borne by a particular university, institute or other scientific institution of the host country.

The session was attended by about 70 participants representing various universities and research centers of the Russian Federation, countries near (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia) and far abroad (USA, Germany, England, Italy, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Romania). The largest group of participants was a group of scientists (13 people) from the Institute of Physics and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the organizer and sponsor of this session. Moscow was also represented by researchers from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian State University for the Humanities, and the Georisk Research Center.

Representatives of the national subjects of the Russian Federation - Buryatia, the Altai Republic and the Altai Territory, Tatarstan, Tuva, Khakassia, and Kalmykia-were very active. Their fruitful participation in the session, high-level professional presentations, etc.-

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high-level presentations and discussions, usually in excellent English, have become one of the notable features of the conference.

In general, the participants were very representative and had a successful combination of the older and middle generation of scientists and scientific youth, veterans and debutants of PIAC, which was also a feature of this session.

At the opening of the plenary session, R. B. Rybakov, President of the session and Director of the Institute of Information Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, addressed the audience with a welcoming speech. PIAC Secretary General D. Sinor delivered a brief opening speech.

Then there was a presentation of the book products of the publishing house "Vostochnaya Literatura", which the participants of the session could get acquainted with at the exhibition and sale.

After the break, the so-called "confession" procedure, which is traditional for all PIAC sessions and, according to the Secretary General, "very important", was held: each of those present in the hall alternately went to the podium, identified himself and briefly reported on the main directions and results of his scientific work recently or at the moment.

The main work of the session was held in two sections - "A"and " B". The topics of the reports in both sections generally corresponded to the stated main problem "Kinship in the Altai world". However, in section " A "it was mainly historical and ethnographic in nature, and in section" B " -linguistic and literary studies.

Among the topics of section A, the following reports should be noted: N. E. Bekmakhanova and N. B. Narbaeva (Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences) "Altai peoples in the XVII century: historical and geographical aspect", in which the boundaries of the settlement of the peoples of the Altai root in the XVII century were analyzed in detail; A. Sh. Kadyrbaeva (Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences) "On the question of the early history of the Argyns", based mainly on the Chinese dynastic chronicles "Yuan-shi" and "Xin Yuan-shi" and tracing the historical fate of a small Turkic tribe on the eve and in the era of Genghis Khan and his successors in the XIII-XIV centuries; I. F. Popova (St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences) "The Early Tang Dynasty and the Turks of Central Asia", which highlights the integration policy of the Tang emperors as one of the most important factors in the power of multiethnic Tang China in 618-907, as well as B. Kellner-Heinkele (Free University, Berlin) "The family of the Ottoman Ulema", on the example of the career of the famous religious figure Send Feyzulla Efendi (1639-1703) and his sons, who showed the importance of marriage unions and relationships for strengthening the political influence of Sheikh-ul-Islam at the Sultan's court.

Reports on such historical and educational subjects as the genealogical and marriage-related structure of the Girei Khan family in the Crimea in the XV-first half of the XVI century (I. V. Zaitsev, IV RAS), the Kalmyk genealogy of the Russian princes Dondukov - Korsakov (K. V. Orlova, IV RAS), the image of the Khagan were also heard with great interest in the Orkhon monuments (S. G. Klyashtorny, St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences), fictitious marital relations between the imperial houses of Sung China and the Khitan Liao dynasty in the XI century (D. Wright, Calgary University, Canada), marital genealogy of kinship between the Mongols and Taichus before the latter were defeated by Genghis Khan (T. D. Skrynnikova, IMBIT SO Russian Academy of Sciences, Ulan-Ude), the evolution of tribal relations and exogamy in the Mongolian clan society (r. Pop, Institute of Oriental Studies, Bucharest), etc.

If all these reports were rich in new information about the historical past of the peoples who inhabited a vast territory from the Mongolian steppes to the Near East, then the reports presented at both sections on the traditions of tribal relations among small peoples of Siberia, the Urals, and the Volga region and their reflection in languages, customs, wedding rites, and marriage ceremonies concerned burning issues. the issues of our time were very relevant. Moreover, the central idea of these reports was that these traditions, in general, kinship, kinship ties serve as a certain protection and guarantee of preserving the national identity of these nationalities.

This idea was carried out especially consistently, for example, in the reports of A. Ch. Kudachinova (Moscow) "Kinship as a survival strategy for Altaians" and N. D. Almadakova (Center for National Problems in Education, Gorno-Altaisk)"Genera and tribal relations among Telengites". However, while the first report emphasized the importance of family ties for the self-preservation of the entire indigenous population of the Altai Republic, the second report gives a rather detailed description of the resilience of modern genera and their relationships in one of the indigenous peoples of the Altai Republic.

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indigenous ethnic groups of this republic, namely the small Telengit (Telenit) people.

At section "B" Yu. V. Normanskaya (Institute of Linguistics) made a report on the reflection of the traditional birch cult in the modern languages of the Altaians, Siberian Tatars, Shors, Yakuts, Chuvash, as well as Komi, Udmurts, Mari, and Khanty, and F. A. Turan (Ankara) reported on the existence in Turkey and in the Russian Federation. present - day beliefs and rituals associated with the cult of various tree species, including the so-called mythological Tree of Life, as symbols of the distant ancestors of the inhabitants of Anatolia.

In their reports on the ancestral mother of the Manchus, T. V., they discussed the preservation of certain ancestral and religious cults and traditional customs. Pan (St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences), on the motives of honoring parents in modern Mongolian poetry - M. P. Petrov (St. Petersburg State University), on the levirate in Mongolia - A. Sarkozy (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest), on a special folklore genre - generic teasers of the peoples of Central Asia - T. M. Sadalova (Institute of Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences). Altai Studies, Gorno-Altaisk), etc.

Sad facts of the revival of house-building customs in the family life of women in modern Uzbekistan were presented in her emotional speech at the section "Uzbek women between tradition and modernity" by the representative of the Japanese International Cooperative Union in Tashkent, S. S. Abramova. Ikeda.

In general, the reports mentioned above reflect the growing interest in our country and abroad in cultural heritage, ethnography, and the current situation of the peoples of the national suburbs of the Russian Federation, in particular in their study on the basis of field research. The presentations of young participants of the session are indicative in this regard. Thus, the reports on section " A "of RSUH researchers V. S. Kostyrko - on the peculiarities of mytho-ritual traditions of the Yakuts and A. S. Arkhipova - on wedding rites among modern Mongols and their reflection in fairy tales were based mainly on field materials, and the report on section "B" of a trainee at the University of Cambridge, a Czech by nationality Ludek Broz's book on the generic terminology of the Telengites (see above) is entirely the result of his one - year stay in their environment in the Altai.

As we can see, historical and ethnographic problems were presented very widely in the work of the 48th session.

In accordance with tradition, issues of Altaic languages and literatures also occupied a large place at the conference.

Special attention was drawn to the reports that represented the direction in Altaistics, concentrated in Moscow and headed until recently by corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences S. A. Starostin. S. A. Starostin in the report "Etymological dictionary of Altai languages and the future of Altai research" presented the recently published fundamental dictionary and summed up the interim results of his team's research. He noted that the Altaic hypothesis, which was questioned in the second half of the 20th century, is confirmed in the dictionary on considerable material, but the reconstructions of G. J. Ramstedt and N. Poppe required significant revision, since the founders of Altaic studies were largely based on the material of ancient borrowings from some Altaic languages to others. The dictionary offers a fundamentally new proto-system of vowels and consonants, which makes it possible to reliably establish correspondences between Altaic languages, including Korean and Japanese. S. A. Starostin also spoke about the prospects of Altaic research, pointing out, in particular, the need for further reconstruction of the grammatical proto-system. This was one of the last speeches of the outstanding scientist, who died prematurely on September 30, 2005.

O. A. Mudrak (Moscow) in his report "Development of combinations with / in the Proto-Altaic language" proposed a number of new Altaic reconstructions. In the report of I. A. Gruntov (Moscow) "Glottochronological approach to the classification of Mongolian languages", a largely revised classification of these languages is proposed.

A special session was dedicated to the memory of Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences E. R. Tenishev (1921-2004). It discussed issues of Turkic comparative studies. In the report of A.V. Dybo (Moscow) "Paleoculture, ancestral homeland and ancient connections of the Turks according to linguistic reconstruction", a method of pre-Turkic reconstructions is proposed and a hypothesis is put forward about the location of the ancestral homeland of the Turks in the space from Ordos to the south of the Mongolian Altai.

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R. A. Tadinova (Moscow) studied the vocabulary of various Turkic languages related to funeral rites.

In accordance with the stated main theme of the conference, a number of reports were devoted to kinship names in various Altaic languages. One of the sessions was entirely related to the Turkic terms of kinship. It was attended by famous Turkologists: E. Tryjarski (Warsaw) ("Terminology of family and kinship in Kypchak texts of Polish Armenians and in the Codex Cumanicus"), G. F. Blagova (Moscow) "Terms of kinship in Proto-Turkic anthroponymy" and I. V. Kormushin (Moscow) "On some kinship terms in Yenisei monuments". V. M. Alpatov (Moscow) "Kinship names in Japanese", C. Carlson (Seattle) "Kinship terms in Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages", L. Brozh (Cambridge) "I told you: he is not my brother, he is my brother...", T. Osawa (Osaka) "Aspects of the ancient Turkic social system based on fictitious kinship, revealed by the analysis of the term kul "slave" in the Orkhon-Yenisei tombstone inscriptions", D. M. Nasilova (Moscow) "Features of the" female language " or the tender subsystem of kinship terms?", A. I. Chaikovskaya (Tallinn) "" Child"in the terminology of kinship of Turkish and Estonian languages", R. Fincha (Hanno, Japan) " Suffix- ko in Japanese." A large number of reports on this topic, which together covered many languages, caused a lively discussion and exchange of experts ' opinions.

The report of A. M. Shcherbak (St. Petersburg) "On Mongolian and Tungus-Manchu verb roots formed in an unusual way from Turkic words" aroused great interest. The report of A. V. Solntsev (Moscow) "Once again about the Altai problem. Hypothesis about the genesis of the Japanese language at the junction of two civilizational streams".

Several reports dealt with the problems of grammar and word formation in Altaic languages. Z. M. Chaliapina (Moscow) in her report "Some aspects of valency inheritance in Japanese" spoke about poorly studied issues of Japanese syntax. E. L. Rudnitskaya (Moscow) investigated various types of nominalization in Korean. G. Ts.Pyurbeev (Moscow) devoted his report to the syntactic features of the Mongolian part of the monument of the XIV century "Muqaddimat al-Adab". The syntax of Mongolian languages was also discussed in the report of P. P. Dambueva (Moscow) "Passive voice constructions in the modern Buryat language". F. A. Ganiev (Kazan) in the report" Types of affixes in the Turkic languages " justified the allocation in these languages, along with suffixes, also a special class of affixes - interfixes. T. N. Borgoyakova (Abakan) reported on Khakass analytical constructions in her report " On the polyfunctionality of the "adverb + auxiliary verb" model in the Khakass language". J. Stari (Venice) considered the history of the formation of complex names in the Manchu language of the XV-XVII centuries. Bichelday (Moscow) in her report "Rhythmmelodic study of the category of interrogativity in the Khakass language" turned to the experimental phonetic problems that are rarely touched upon at PIAC.

L. M. Gorelova's report "Typology of information structures in Altaic languages" (Moscow) was also original, which developed the idea that sentences, in addition to their formal syntactic structure, also have a special information structure. Usually, this structure is considered in modern linguistics within the framework of the "topic - focus"opposition. The report examines the features of sentence information structures that are common to Altaic languages.

Among the literary reports, the largest number was devoted to the folklore of the Turkic and Mongolian peoples (two sessions were held). These are the reports of A. S. Arkhipova (Moscow) " Rules of matchmaking as an ethnographic reality and some plot riddles of the Mongolian fairy tale (based on Kalmyk and Mongolian material)", E. E. Baldanmaksarova (Moscow) "Artistic symbolism of the horse image in the verbal art of the Mongolian peoples", E. Kovach (Debrecen) "Ancient Turkic elements in Hungarian folklore", V. S. Kostyrko (Moscow) "The horse/bull opposition in the mytho-ritual tradition of the Yakuts". T. A. Anikeeva's report "Kinship in the epic genres of Turkic folklore (on the example of Kitab-I Dedem Korkut)" was connected with the reflection of the leading theme of the conference in folklore.

A smaller number of reports were related to the study of written Turkic and Mongolian literature. These are the reports of A. Kh. Aleeva (Kazan) " The formation of the genre of travelogues-

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seyahatname in Tatar literature", M. P. Petrova (St. Petersburg) "Modern Mongolian poems about parents". T. A. Pan (St. Petersburg) on the material of the Manchu genealogical tables considered the cult of the ancestress of the Manchu people Fodo-mother - a rope on which either scraps or small bows and arrows are attached.

Thus, in total, about 67 reports were heard and discussed at the sections, which together, no doubt, bring a lot of new things to the study of kinship and kinship relations among the peoples of the Altai root in the past and present, as well as other aspects of Altaism.

On the last day of the session, on the morning of July 14, a business meeting was held, at which a venerable turkologist, author of many works on runics and the history of nomadic peoples of Eurasia, and long-term head of the Turkic-Mongolian cabinet of the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, S. G. Klyashtorny, became the new recipient of the Indiana University Gold Medal.

The cultural program consisted of getting acquainted with the exposition of the Historical Museum, participation in the opening of an exhibition of woodcuts in the Library of Foreign Literature, where samples of woodcut art from China, India, Japan, Mongolia, Tibet, etc. were presented.

In general, the 48th session of PIAC was successful, with a high scientific professional and organizational level. This is a great achievement of the organizing committee of the Institute of Information Technologies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by the Institute's Director R. B. Rybakov, who is the session's president.

PIAC Secretary General D. Sinor expressed gratitude for the work of the President of the organizing committee and, separately, its Secretary, an employee of the Korea and Mongolia Department of the Institute of International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences E. V. Boikova.

The next session of the PIAC is scheduled to be held in Berlin in July-August 2006.

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