East Tusom

East Tusom is a Tibeto-Burman language of Manipur, India, belonging to the Tangkhulic group. While it shares some innovations with the other Tangkhulic languages, it differs markedly from “Standard Tangkhul” (which is based on the speech of Ukhrul town). Past documentation is limited to a small set of hastily transcribed forms in a comparative reconstruction of Tangkhulic rhymes (Mortensen & Miller 2013; Mortensen 2012). This paper presents the first substantial sketch of an aspect of the language: its (descriptive) phonetics and phonology. The data are based on recordings of an extensive wordlist (730 items) and one short text, all from one fluent native speaker in her mid-twenties. We present the phonetic inventory of East Tusom and a phonemicization, with exhaustive examples. We also present an overview of the major phonological patterns and generalizations in the language. Of special interest are a “placeless nasal” that is realized as nasalization on the preceding vowel unless it is followed by a consonant, and numerous plosive-fricative clusters (where the fricative is roughly homorganic with the following vowel) that have developed from historical aspirated plosives. A complete wordlist, organized by gloss and semantic field, is provided as appendices.

Russian development and toponymy of the Pelym region according to written and field sources of the 18th–21st centuries

The paper is aimed at the study of the under-investigated Russian toponymy of the north of the Sverdlovsk Region, specifically, of the oikonyms — the names of villages — along the lower reaches of the Pelym River. The basin of the Pelym River, a tributary of the Tavda River, is of interest as the Mansi native territory. It is also an area of the early land development by the Russians beyond the Urals, which began at the end of the 16th century. The objective of this study is to establish the origins of the earliest layer of names of the Russian villages along the Pelym River and to trace the history of their functioning from the 18th century to the present day. The work is based on the material of historical documents (customs books of the town of Pelym of the second half of the 17th century), information from written, statistical, and cartographic sources (travel materials of academician G.F. Müller of 1742, expeditions of B. Munkácsi in 1888–1889, lists of the settlements of the Ural and Sverdlovsk regions, and modern maps of the region), as well as field materials of the 1960s collected by the Ural University Toponymic Expedition. Research methods include descriptive, etymological, comparative, reconstruction, and statistical analysis of linguistic material. It has been ascertained that almost all considered oikonyms have anthroponomical origins and are derived from the surnames of first settlers. They reflect the history of the deve-lopment of the Pelym region, including its active settlement by the Russian riflemen Streltsy (villages Krivonogova, Khudyakova, Kuznetsova, Tolmacheva etc.). The names of the Russian villages which were founded in the Mansi native territory were subjected to adaptation in the Mansi language, or the Mansi were gi-ving them their own names, which is clearly shown by the materials of B. Munkácsi of the late 19th century (Po-nomareva village → Panamarovskaya in Russian and Varaulėχ-pɵwėl in Mansi, Kadaulova (Kaidaulova) village → Khɵitėl-p. in Mansi etc.). Of the 17 Russian oikonyms of the lower Pelym known in the 18th century and recorded by G.F. Müller in the description of his travel in 1742, only one has survived to this day — the name of the village of Vekshina, which is still extant. The memory of the disappeared Pelym villages and their names are preserved by the local microtoponyms present on the modern maps, as well as by the surnames of the descendants of the inhabitants of these villages.

Populism Studies: The Case for Theoretical and Comparative Reconstruction

Studies of populism have shifted from substantive to discursive/performative and institutional perspectives in recent decades. This shift resolved some long-standing problems but insulated the analysis of populism from theoretical and methodological debates in the social sciences. Theoretical restrictions have gone hand in hand with geographical neglect: The near-exclusive focus on the United States, Europe, and Latin America reinforces the blind spots of these existing approaches. An integration of overlooked regions holds the potential for theoretical reconstruction, even though such comparative broadening could as well simply reproduce the persistent impasses. Moreover, post-2016 developments have induced a return to substantive issues, throwing into sharp relief what populism studies have been missing during the past decades. The main challenge today is synthesizing socioeconomic analyses with institutionalist and discourse-theoretical advances without falling into eclecticism. Breaking away from the entrenched regional orientations to embrace a more global-historical methodology could help such an endeavor. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

ndividuals and Crowds. Presidential Leadership and Political Scenes of Representation in Media and Networks in Argentina (2008-2019)

This article offers a comparative analysis of the construction of political scenes of representation by two former Argentine presidents, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2008-2015) and Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), based on televised speeches and social media postings. As there is no political representation without staging, and any staging needs a material surface for its deployment, the comparative reconstruction of scenes of representation is required for understanding the impact of socio-technological transformations in the political field. Our analysis assumes that the political dramaturgy of representation entails: (a) that the leader must show a way of connecting with his constituents; (b) therefore, the leader must configure a preferred political subject (i.e., a predominant form of figurative citizenry); and (c) that this configuration constitutes a possible portion of the entire population that can be represented. According to our analysis, each leader is associated with a different type of representation scene. While one leader configures her scenes with large-scale crowds and via national television broadcasts, the other configures his encounters with individuals via social media. This engenders two opposing conceptions of citizenry, connectable to two different classes of Interpretants: a political-ideological Interpretant and an un-political and para-ideological one.

Ancient Turkic könül, bashkir kunel “heart”: etymological connections of one somatism

The article is devoted to showing various etymological connections of the Turkic names of the heart (somatism) as part of the anatomical vocabulary of the Turkic and Altaic languages in the context of the nostratic macrofamily. Somatisms as a lexico-semantic group belongs to the oldest layer of vocabulary, in which, on the one hand, the features of categorization and conceptualization of the world in the human mind are manifested clearly, on the other hand, the historical stability of the semantics of words and their phonomorphological appearance is demonstrated. Based on the methodology of comparative reconstruction of proto-forms, the article reveals the etymology of the word köηül, gives its direct and figurative meanings in the Proto-Turkic language. The root proto- form of somatism, according to the author, goes back not to the substantive, but to the verbal basis of көң – “wait”. Also significant in the article is the identification of semantic parallels of somatism in the ancient Turkic and Bashkir languages, the definition of direct and figurative meanings of köηül from syntagmatic connections in phraseological combinations and derived words. In addition, the author establishes historical links between könül and other Turkic somatisms, as well as with lexemes denoting kinship relations. It is important in the article to identify on the basis of this somatism the semantic connections of the Turkic languages, in particular, the Altai family of languages, as a whole with other languages of the world, which confirms the verification of the nostratic theory of languages. A more thorough examination and search for probable isoglosses gives a picture of a very wide distribution of single-root words with the base *QVN / KVN also within the (hypothetical) superfamilies of Indo-European, Sino-Caucasian, Austric and Amerindian languages.

COLOR MENTALITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES: principles of medievalist cognitive-quantitative comparative reconstruction (based on Old High German and Middle High German texts)

The article focuses on theoretical concepts and their inter categorical interaction in the process of medieval cognitive-quantitative comparative reconstruction of color mentality in the Middle Ages. The authors point out that the reconstruction of the mentality of this period, which represents part of the culture, should be guided by a holistic method using formalized-quantitative methods, as deep symbolism permeated the lives of speakers of the German Middle Ages at all levels. The article also states that to describe the mentality as an expression of culture, it is advisable to choose important linguistic and cultural categories such as separate modules (eg, color notation) in the language picture of the world. The article notes that both in the texts and in the dictionaries the language picture of the world is represented by words and phrases grouped by semantics into multi-part lexical-phraseological fields. The authors of the article found that the reconstruction covers all linguistic means related to different, as a rule, the main parts of speech, which reflected historically the ancient syntagmatic thinking and its syncretism. Reconstruction as a process and result of hypothetical reproduction or establishment of certain, mostly non-existent characteristics of the medieval mentality is proposed to be carried out on three levels: 1) through the analysis of literary remembrances; 2) through the analysis of certain patterns of the language picture of the world; 3) through etymological and semantic analysis of words. At the same time, the article proposes to consider the holistic paradigm as the basis of the "new philology", which is defined as a combination of linguistics and literary studies, culturology, logic, ethnolinguistics and psychology. In the future, a comprehensive study of Old High German and Middle High German words according to these principles and using formalized quantitative methods will help to determine not only their linguistic and cultural peculiarities, but also to establish objectively the language picture of the world of the Middle Ages on the background of its culture.

Фотообразы буддистов Бурятии

Goals. The paper examines the issue of visual images in the everyday ritual practice of ordinary Buddhists in Buryatia. The relevance of studying rare Buddhist photographs as a historical and cultural source cannot be questioned, since this perspective reveals unknown aspects in the formation of Buryat identity and the role of Buddhism in this process. Materials. The work investigates the collection of rare photographs at the Institute for Mongolian, Buddhist and Tibetan Studies (Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and photographs of the ritual complex ‘khoimor-gungurba’ collected during expeditions of the 1950-1970s and in the early 21st century. Results. A method (metalanguage) of describing Buddhist photo images was developed during preliminary works to clarify the mechanism of actualizing this material in Buddhist discourse, including elements as follows: a mechanism of image selection; cultural context; ritual and social goals; nature of materials; registration of believers’ reactions to visual images. The paper shows a close relationship between the local visual practice of Buddhists and the formation of Buryat identity from the late 19th towards the 21st century, which is concluded from a comparative analysis of the two databases. After a comparative reconstruction of the structures of the collections, the work argues that the everyday ritual practice of praying before these photos is an important aspect in the formation of local identity. The most interesting finding of the study is that pre-revolutionary images of Buryat Lamas are central in the culture of the photo-visual practices of Buryat Buddhists nowadays. The comparative analysis confirmed that a fundamental change in the transmission of the Buddhist tradition in Buryatia, social changes, and the economic situation led to a change in the development of the traditional Buddhist culture of the Buryats that currently prioritizes autocephaly and the preservation of ethnic identity.

A brief response to Fellner and Hill’s “Word families, allofams, and the comparative method”

In a recent article, Fellner & Hill (this volume) level a strong critique against what they view as the misguided prevailing methodology of historical-comparative reconstruction in the Sino-Tibetan (aka Trans-Himalayan) language family. The central focus of their criticism is the assembling of “word families” and the reconstruction of ST proto-forms exhibiting variation to account for those word families. In this response, I argue that the methodology is basically sound and is appropriate to the current state of our knowledge. At the same time, I dispute some of the assertions made by Fellner & Hill, which I believe are mischaracterizations of the methods and assumptions underlying the work of Sino-Tibetan scholars.