The article analyses the system of folk knowledge, representing white and black in the composition of toponyms. Rational and irrational types of knowledge are distinguished. Rational knowledge covers different aspects of economic and practical life in a nomadic society in a developing environment and contains empirical information saturated with a variety of cultural semantics. The irrational type of education concentrates systems of values, stereotypes, spiritual, moral and ethical norms of the nomadic Kazakh ethnos, embodied in the linguistic matrix, cultural semantics of folk geographical names. The irrational form of popular education reflects mythological, esoteric, animistic, religious notions, customs and folk beliefs, the ethno-semantics of which have deep roots. Rational knowledge, concentrated in the semantics of geographical names, contains information about the surrounding world, "hidden", embedded in the code of modern linguistic and cultural society, concerning nomads' daily, economical and practical life. The linguistic matrix of toponyms reflects the ethno-ecological and ethnobotanical cognitions of the population. Therefore, the article examines the conventional lexical-semantic features of toponyms and the cultural-linguistic semantics associated with ethnic culture in their content. The relevance of the research is predetermined by the need to make the same cultural information and knowledge available to native speakers in the structure of toponymic semantics. The relevance of the topic is also related to the need to increase the cumulative potential of language and anemic names. After all, over time, they can be erased from the collective memory of the people. For the first time, the linguistic matrix of toponyms presents the ethnoecological, ethnobotanical knowledge of the Kazakh people, in which the emphasis is shifted not to lexica-semantic, word-formation, etymological features of toponyms, but to the cultural aspect, to ethnocultural semantics. The article uses the method that reveals topological characteristics of toponyms with the adjectives white and black in their composition, as well as the method of linguistic matrix, which allows identifying ethno-cultural component in the underlying semantics of geographical names.