The semantic expansion of the Islamic concept of halal in Kazakh: the case of «adal»
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48010/xzg1bf91Keywords:
Adal, Halal, Haram, Conceptual History, Kazakh Worldview, Semantic Field, IslamAbstract
The article examines the semantic structure of the concept of adal in Kazakh and its relationship with the Islamic concept of halal. The order of senses in dictionaries may suggest that the word was first a religious term concerning food and acquired a moral meaning only later. The study tests this assumption against historical evidence. The material comprises dictionaries, pre-1917 texts (zhyrau poetry, nineteenth-century poets, Abai, Shakarim, A. Baitursynuly, heroic epics and others), proverbs, and 194 occurrences of adal in the Almaty Corpus of the Kazakh Language. The collected contexts were classified according to what the word evaluates. The analysis draws on R. Koselleck's conceptual history, A. Wierzbicka's key-word approach and D. Geeraerts's diachronic prototype semantics. Three forms of the word, halal, alal and adal, were used side by side in the nineteenth century, and adal prevailed by the early twentieth century. In pre-1917 texts adal and aram applied not only to food but also to labour and income, marriage, character, the justice of rulers and personal loyalty. The moral meaning therefore did not emerge later: its basis lies in the Islamic system of halal and haram itself. The extension of the concept to persons is also known in Turkish, but in Kazakh it developed especially towards loyalty to a friend, a spouse and one's service. In the twentieth- and twenty-first-century corpus adal rarely refers to food (3 of 194 occurrences).
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