The Semantic Differentiation Function of Vowels in Kazakh: Quantity and Size Categories

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of sound symbolism in Kazakh and other Turkic languages, focusing on its role in the formation of the binary concepts “small–big” and “one–many.” Although the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign has long been a dominant principle in traditional linguistics, recent psycholinguistic, typological, and experimental studies provide substantial evidence for systematic and universal associations between sound form and meaning. From this perspective, sound symbolism is viewed as an ancient linguistic mechanism for representing fundamental cognitive categories related to space, size, strength, and quantity. The main objective of the study is to identify how the articulatory and acoustic properties of vowels in Kazakh contribute to the semantic differentiation of the concepts “small–big” and “one–many,” as well as to demonstrate how these distinctions are reflected in mythological and fairy-tale discourse. The study employs a combination of descriptive, comparative-historical, typological, semantic, and discourse-analytic methods. The research material includes Kazakh ideophones, kinship terms, and lexemes expressing quantitative and dimensional meanings, as well as parallel forms from Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Yakut, Turkish, Khakas, and Turkmen. In addition, the analysis incorporates character names from Turkic folk tales (e.g., Toŋqıldaq — Šiŋkildek,
the bald trickster and seven brothers, the cunning hero and forty merchants). The findings demonstrate that low-pitched, back, open vowels (“a,” “o”) are systematically associated with the meanings “big,” “many,” “strong,” and “spatially extensive,” whereas high-pitched, front, close vowels (“i,” “ɯ/ı”) correlate with the concepts “small,” “one,” “weak,” and “compact.” This pattern consistently appears in ideophonic vocabulary, kinship terminology, and mythological-folkloric narratives. The study confirms that sound symbolism constitutes a motivated, proto-linguistic layer of the language system and contributes to a deeper understanding of
the semantic typology of Turkic languages.