Expression of rational and irrational understanding in the Buryat language

We consider the vocabulary of the Buryat language, expressing a rational and irrational understanding of a man. The actual material semantically close to the understanding model in the Buryat language is a lexical group covering more than 20 units identified from the dictionary, corpus, and contextual data. The participation of sensory perception through vision, hearing, and smell is determined to express rational understanding. Different types of expressions of irrational understanding are revealed: 1) through premonition, 2) through direct clairvoyance, 3) by clairvoyance through dream, 4) through premonition by heart, 5) through feeling like love, affection. In the contextual language material, additional “organs” of the understanding such as heart, liver, and soul in the Buryat linguistic picture of the world are highlighted, in addition to the mind/intelligence. The activity of Buryat verbs in the intensive aspect for both types of understanding is revealed, with the lexeme zүgnekhe (to anticipate) defined as a verb of irrational understanding in its pure form. The factual material of the Buryat language indicates that sensory perception (seeing, hearing, and smelling) contributes to rational understanding. The perception in question is not found in the expression of the irrational understanding. According to the contexts considered that express both explicitly and implicitly (e.g., cases of presupposition) a certain sense perception in connection with understanding, it is clear that all these contexts describe situations of rational understanding.

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