THE GRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST SYLLABLE VOWEL SYSTEM IN NENETS DICTIONARIES FROM A. M. SJÖGREN’S ARCHIVE

This article describes the graphic features of the first syllable vowels in Pustozersk and Obdorsk dictionaries from A. M. Sjögren’s archive. The graphic analysis is carried out against the background of the Proto-Samoyed reconstructions by J. Janhunen, Nenets current literary norm, “Nenets-Russian Dictionary” by N. M. Tereschenko, “A Morphological Dictionary of Tundra Nenets Language” by T. Salminen, and “Dialectal Dictionary of the Nenets Language” by S. I. Burkova et al. The dialectal features of the dictionaries are compared to the modern ones. The area of the Pustozersk region is referred to as the territory where the central (Bolshezemelskiy) dialect is spoken. In one word the graphic representation of the 18th century Pustozersk dictionary coincides with the form of the modern Eastern dialect word. At the same time, in another word, the Western variant is attested. The territory where the Obdorsk dictionary was recorded is the territory where the speakers of the Eastern dialects of the Nenets language reside. In the Obdorsk dictionary, a variant that coincides with the Eastern variant is recognized. Some outstanding consonant features of the first syllable are also taken into consideration. For example, in the Pustozersk dictionary, the initial /ŋ/ is not represented graphically, as in Proto-Samoyedic reconstructions. The Obdorsk dictionary contains three graphic variants of the modern initial /ŋ/. The results are presented in comparison tables. The word examples are presented accordingly. In many ways, the reflexes presented in the Pustozersk dictionary correspond with modern ones. The reconstructed diphthongoids are graphically represented by the diphthongs in the Pustozersk dictionary, which is not the case for modern dictionaries. In comparison with modern dictionaries, reflexes in the Obdorsk dictionary are more diverse. The diphthongs are also used in the place of reconstructed diphthongoids.

VOTIC-INGRIAN CONVERGENCE AND INTRA-IDIOLECTAL CONTINUUM (A CASE STUDY OF A CHAIN RUNE)

This paper analyses different variants of the Votic chain rune Kuza piippu? “Where is the pipe?” in the context of Votic-Ingrian convergent processes. The main focus is made on the alternation between the lexemes “granary” and “fence”, and the structure of postpositional phrases containing these lexemes. The analysis is based on 13 variants of the rune published by several researchers, and three variants of the same rune recorded by the author in the village of Luuditsa of the Kingisepp region. In different variants of Kuza piippu?, three lexemes alternate within the same line: ratiz ‘granary’, aitta ‘granary’, and aita ‘fence’. The paper concludes that the first variant is the original Votic lexeme meaning ‘granary’, the second one is an Ingrian word that was not fully adopted by Votic, and the third variant emerged as a substitution of the unfamiliar Ingrian word with the phonetically closest Votic word. The Ingrian influence is observed also in the postpositional phrase with the discussed lexemes (‘under the granary ~ fence’). In the earlier versions of the rune, one finds the postposition alla ‘under’ as a separate word. In more recent variants, the head noun and postposition are usually written together as one word, with a formative n between them. This n is the Ingrian marker of the genitive case that was later re-analyzed as the initial consonant of the postposition (alla > nalla). The research has revealed that even in the variants recorded from the same speaker, the combination of Votic and Ingrian elements is almost arbitrary. The Votic-Ingrian ratio is not as much a characteristic of the idiolect, but rather a characteristic of a particular text. Therefore, the idiolect cannot be considered as a minimal sociolinguistic object. The author introduces the notion of “variolect” as a language variant with a particular ratio of languages in contact that characterizes a given speech sample. The mixing of Votic and Ingrian in the western Votic villages is a vivid example of iterative convergence. The Lower Luga Ingrian that emerged as a convergent variety on the basis of several Finnic languages (Ingrian and Votic, most of all), gives birth to new contact varieties when acquired by Votic speakers.

PHONETIC FEATURES OF NENETS LOANWORDS IN THE OB-UGRIC LANGUAGES

The article deals with the Nenets borrowings in the Ob-Ugric languages: Khanty and Mansi. The main list of these borrowings was compiled by Wolfgang Steinitz in a work published more than half a century ago. In the paper I focus on phonetic features of the borrowed words. These borrowings represent predominantly the cultural vocabulary and are geographically quite limited being presented only in the northern dialects of Mansi and Khanty. Despite of this many of these words retain very archaic features of Nenets phonetics. This allows us to consider linguistic contacts between the Ob-Ugrians and the Nenets as rather old. Consideration of the corpus of the borrowings also allows to shed some light on the relative chronology of historical sound changes in the Nenets language. In the paper all Nenets loans in Mansi and Khanty are compared with their possible sources in Tundra Nenets and in Forest Nenets. This comparison shows that in Forest Nenets a potential corresponding word is often missing or looks phonetically too different and therefore can not be regarded as the source of borrowing. Thus, the donor language was definitely the Tundra Nenets, and not the Forest Nenets language. Mansi and Khanty words borrowed from Tundra Nenets may reflect the following archaic features of Nenets historical phonetics: final vowels (before reduction into °); final consonants, changed into the glottal stop in modern Nenets; intervocalic -m-, changed into - w- in modern Nenets; final glide -w, disappeared in modern Nenets. All words borrowed in Ob-Ugric languages from Nenets can be divided in two groups with respect to these parameters: some of them definitely preserve a more archaic state of Nenets phonetics, whereas others are phonetically much closer to modern Nenets words. Another feature that allows to evaluate the relative age of borrowings is the labialization of vowels in Kazym Khanty and in Mansi: in earlier borrowings Nenets vowel a has changed in Kazym Khanty and Mansi into a labial vowel, whereas in later ones it has preserved its original quality.

A PRE-STANDARD CHUVASH TEXT WITH A DATIVE-ACCUSATIVE DISTINCTION

This paper introduces the linguistic evidence extracted from the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Chuvash, which was published in Kazan in 1820. On the basis of a detailed analysis of dialect-specific features, and especially phonological and morphological innovations, the attested variety should be classified among the Kărmăš—Xĕrlĕ Čutay varieties of Viryal Chuvash. Such a conclusion is consistent with the available extra-linguistic evidence regarding the dialect affiliation of this early Bible translation. Many of the archaic features found in the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Chuvash were previously documented in other preStandard Chuvash texts from the 18th—19th centuries. One salient feature that distinguishes the Gospel translation from the other contemporary sources is that the attested variety retains the old distinction between the dative and accusative case markers (after a limited number of lexical and grammatical morphemes). Modern Chuvash makes use of the syncretic dative-accusative case suffix -(n)A, dial. -(j)A, which developed through the merger of reflexes of Proto-Turkic dative and accusative case markers, owing to phonological and paradigmatic factors. The loss of the dative-accusative distinction is usually considered an early phenomenon in the history of Chuvash because there is no trace of such a distinction in the modern Chuvash dialects. However, the fact that at least one of the Viryal Chuvash varieties featured the dative-accusative distinction as late as the 19th century provides evidence for a recent origin of the case syncretism in Chuvash. This makes the first translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Chuvash a key source on the development of the Chuvash case system prior to the emergence of the dative-accusative syncretism.

VERB MORPHOLOGY IN THE MONUMENT OF MARI WRITING “THE BEGINNINGS OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE...” (1839 / 1841)

The article deals with the verbal morphology in the monument of Mari writing “The Beginnings of Christian doctrine...” (published in Kazan in 1841). Among the earliest publications in the Mari language, this is one of the most voluminous texts, including Concise Sacred History and Catechism. The dialectal basis of the considered text is a Meadow dialect, at the same time the verbal morphology (mainly in the plural forms) differs significantly from the literary norm of the contemporary Mari (Meadow-Eastern) language. As a result of comparison with dialectological data, the correspondence of the verbal morphology in the monument to the conjugation in the western subdialects (Volga, Yoshkar-Ola) of the Meadow dialect is revealed. (These dialects turned out to be peripheral during the formation of the literary Meadow-Eastern Mari language in the 20th century. The verbal morphology of the literary language is based on the Morki-Sernur subdialect of the Meadow dialect and the Eastern dialect of the Mari language.) At the same time, the specific verb forms of Western subdialects of the Meadow dialect revealed in the monument and described in the article largely correlate with the conjugation in Western Mari dialects (Hill and North-Western), including the literary norm of the Hill Mari language. In general, the analysis of the verbal forms (with preliminary consideration of phonetic and vocabulary data) allows us to define the “The Beginnings of Christian Doctrine…” (1839 / 1841) as a most important early written monument of the Volga subdialect of the Meadow dialect and a valuable source on the historical dialectology of the Mari language. Keywords: Finno-Ugric languages, Mari language, Vol

THE FACTORS INFLUENCING THE PROJECTION OF PRESUPPOSITIONS IN CHUVASH: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

The current paper experimentally studies the projection diversity of the following presupposition triggers in the Standard Chuvash language in assertive sentences, in negated assertive sentences and in conditional sentences: kallex ‘again’ (adverbial), ta ‘too’ (conjunction), mansa kaj ‘forget’ and pəl ‘know/find out’ (mental factive verbs), and pəter ‘finish’ (aspectual verb). Relying upon the presupposition projection in various contexts, [Abusch 2002] suggested to distinguish between hard vs. soft presupposition triggers. According to this view, the former two Chuvash items belong to hard triggers, whereas the latter three items represent soft triggers. The papers by [Xue and Onea 2012; Smith and Hall 2012] among others experimentally confirmed the distinction between hard vs. soft triggers in several West-European languages. The current paper verifies the hypothesis about the distinction between hard vs. soft triggers on the basis of a non-Indo-European language and suggests using a verification task: participants have to choose one of the values on the five-point Likert scale while answering a given question with respect to a given context. The paper only partially confirms the distinction between hard vs. soft triggers. As in [Xue and Onea 2012], the paper shows that soft triggers exhibit a more heterogeneous group than hard triggers. Moreover, contrary to the recent paper by [Tonhauser et al. 2018], the paper does not reveal further distinctions either within each of the presupposition trigger groups or between the presupposition trigger groups. The paper gives two plausible interrelated reasons for the obtained results that are a linear position and a syntactic status (independent vs. embedded) of the first clause in a question that contains the denied presupposition.

Dụ̈ysenȧlị Ȧbdịlȧšịm. Eskị Ḳazaḳ ǰazba tịlị [The Old Kazakh written language]

The paper presents a review of Düysen ̣ ȧlị Ȧbdịlȧšịm’s monograph “The Old Kazakh Written Language” (“Eskị Ḳazaḳ J̌ azba Tịlị”), which is written in Kazakh and published in Beijing in 2014. The monograph is a linguistic description of the documents of the Kazakh Khanates written in the period from the first half of the 18th century until the early 19th century. The Old Kazakh documents were mostly written by Kazakh Khans and Sultans and sent to Chinese emperors of the Qing dynasty and to officials in charge of the border. Currently all the documents are preserved in the First Historical Archives of China in Beijing. The monograph is designed as a manual for university students studying Kazakh philology. The significance of the book lies in its being the first and only book providing a comprehensive linguistic description of the Old Kazakh historical documents. The monograph is divided into three chapters. The phonetics and writing system of the Old Kazakh documents are studied in the first chapter. Chapter 2 investigates the nominal morphology, in which five word classes: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, and function words have been discussed. The last chapter presents lexical terms for temporal units. The review provides a short description of all chapters and points out that the usage of the term “Turki” is more appropriate for defining the language of the presented documents than the term “Old Kazakh Written Language”, since it manifests prevalence of non-Kazakh features.

A. A. Petrov. Istoriya izucheniya tunguso-manchzhurskih yazykov v Rossii (Ocherki i issledovaniya) [The history of the study of the Tungus-Manchu languages in Russia (sketches and researches)]

This publication is a review of a new book by A. A. Petrov devoted to the history of the study of the Tungus-Manchu languages in Russia from the 18th century till the beginning of the 21st century. Reference books of this type on the Tungus-Manchu languages and other languages of the peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East of Russia have not been published for over 70 years, and they are especially relevant due to the increase in the volume of publications on these languages, a significant part of which are regional publications of universities and Siberian scientific centers. The main part of the book is the literature on the Tungus-Manchu languages dating back to the 20th century. It is divided into three periods: the pre-revolutionary period (1900—1917), the Soviet period (1917—1991), and the Russian post-Soviet period (1992—2000). There is a certain logic in this: the biographies of most researchers of the older generation fit into one period, and each period reflects certain trends in views on the subject and asks of the study. The book includes a number of supplements for reference. These applications make the book by A. A. Petrov a convenient textbook for students of specialized universities, a guide for refresher courses for teachers of the Tungus-Manchu languages and independent work of teachers, and a guide for foreign researchers who may have difficulties with the Russian bibliography on the subject. A. A. Petrov’s book is unambiguously useful as an everyday reference book of literature on the Tungus-Manchu languages, although, of course, researchers of biographies of scientists as well as researchers of some special problems of studying Tungus-Manchu languages will turn to other sources that provide special requests.