Pyt-Yakh

Pyt-Yakh is a city in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug-Ugra. Population - 40,910 [2] people. (2016). The city of Pyt-Yakh and the urban district are equated to the regions of the Far North. Pyt-Yakh is a Khanty word in the Surgut (Yugan) dialect.

Yah - people, community, community, settlement. Compare: Ramid-yah (“people of the great channel”) is the Khanty name of Norkahs; Ohsar-yah (“fox people” or “people living on Okhsar-Yuhan (Fox River)”) is the Khanty name for the pando genus; in the revolutionary time, the Khanty called "red" and "white" not only as vyrd-yah ("red people") and neyvi-yah ("white people"); the obsolete Khanty name — Ostyaks — is derived from the word “as-yah” (“Ob people”); Kant-yah, Hanti, Khanty - the self-name of the Khanty.

The word Yah can also mean "river." In the Nenets language, the “river” sounds like “yakh” (the rivers of the Yamal: Mordy-yakha, Yassovey-yakha, Yanzor-yakha, etc.). Ramid-yah, most likely, means "big river", and Okhsar-yah - Fox river. The Khanty genera could be called along the rivers on which they were settled. By the way, the city of Pyt-yakh is named after the river Pyt-yakh, which flows into this place in the river Big Balyk. Nearby there are rivers Kut-yakh and Sivys-yakh on which banks there are settlements of the same name. It is quite logical that in the composite names of the rivers part “yah” means precisely “river” (similarly with the Nenets “yakh”), and not “people, community, settlement”. Usually rivers give names to settlements, and not vice versa.

The word “pyt” has an ambiguous meaning among nations that lived closer to a given locality: 1) according to I. P. Frolov's etymological dictionary, “pyt” means “the way”; 2) Khanty meaning of the word "pyt" - "den".

From the above word-forming parts, a reasonable meaning is derived, in which Pyt-Yakh is revealed as a “river path”.