Abstract

Horse is the saint and holy animal for Kazakhs. Horses shift from being a quarry, to become a herded economic mainstay, a source of military power and, up to present, a symbol of Kazakh culture and prestige. It is therefore unsurprising to find that horses feature heavily in the rituals, art and cuisine of the region. This paper will focus on the essence of horse culture from the ethno-linguistic view point, ethno-linguistics is an ethno-semantic, anthropolinguistic branch of linguistics which appeared on the border between ethnography and lexicology and which is engaged into a comprehensive investigation of the mutual relation of ethnos and its language. It aims at transferring to the future generation the ethnic cultural knowledge from diverse lexical riches of language, a so-called treasury inherited by grandsons from their grandfathers throughout centuries.

Kazakh traditions, culture, customs, rituals, world outlook, beliefs and many others will be examined in this paper because all of these segments of traditional culture become clear at their consideration through the prism of "horse" and by examining "horse" from the ethno-linguistic view point. The horse here acts as a peculiar key to understanding the culture of Kazakhs - a culture of nomads.