Mansi language

The Mansi language (previously, Vogul and also Maansi) is spoken by the Mansi people in Russia along the Ob River and its tributaries, in the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug and Sverdlovsk Oblast. According to the 1989 census, there were 3,184 Mansi-speaking people in Russia.

The base dialect of the Mansi literary language is the Sosva dialect, a representative of the northern dialect. The discussion below is based on the standard language. Fixed word order is typical in Mansi. Adverbials and participles play an important role in sentence construction. The written language was first published in 1868 and was revised using a form of Cyrillic in 1937.

Varieties

Dialects of Mansi (and Khanty).

  Northern Mansi

  Western and Southern Mansi

  Eastern Mansi

Mansi is subdivided into four main dialect groups which are to a large degree mutually unintelligible, and therefore best considered four languages. A primary split can be set up between the Southern variety and the remainder. A number of features are also shared between the Western and Eastern varieties, while certain later sound changes have diffused between Eastern and Northern (and are also found in some neighboring dialects of Northern Khanty to the east).

Individual dialects are known according to the rivers their speakers live(d) on:^[3]

Northern Mansi has strong Russian, Komi, Nenets, and Northern Khanty influence, and it forms the base of the literary Mansi language. There is no accusative case; that is, both the nominative and accusative roles are unmarked on the noun. */æ/ and */æː/ have been backed to [a] and [aː].

Western Mansi went extinct ca. 2000. It had strong Russian and Komi influences; dialect differences were also considerable.^[4] Long vowels were diphthongized.

Eastern Mansi is spoken by 100–200 people. It has Khanty and Tatar influence. There is vowel harmony, and for */æː/ it has [œː], frequently diphthongized.

Southern Mansi was recorded from area isolated from the other Mansi varieties. Around 1900 a couple hundred speakers existed; in the 1960s it was spoken only by a few elderly speakers,^[4] and it has since then gone extinct. It had strong Tatar influence and displayed several archaisms such as vowel harmony, retention of /y/ (elsewhere merged with */æ/), /tsʲ/ (elsewhere deaffricated to /sʲ/), /æː/ (elsewhere fronted to /aː/ or diphthongized) and /ɑː/ (elsewhere raised to /oː/).

Phonology

The inventory presented here is a maximal collection of segments found across the Mansi varieties. Some remarks:

1. /tsʲ/ was only found in Southern Mansi and corresponds to /sʲ/ in the other varieties.
2. /ʃ/ is absent in most dialects of the Northern and Eastern groups, having merged into /s/.
3. The voiceless velar fricatives /x/, /xʷ/ are only found in the Northern group and the Lower Konda dialect of the Eastern group, resulting from spirantization of *k, *kʷ adjacent to original back vowels.
4. According to Honti, a contrast between *w and *ɣʷ can be reconstructed, but this does not surface in any of the attested varieties.
5. The labialization contrast among the velars dates back to Proto-Mansi, but was in several varieties strengthened by labialization of velars adjacent to rounded vowels. In particular, Proto-Mansi *yK → Core Mansi *æKʷ (a form of cheshirization).

The vowel systems across Mansi show great variety. As typical across the Uralic languages, many more vowel distinctions were possible in the initial, stressed syllable than in unstressed ones. Up to 18–19 stressed vowel contrasts may be found in the Western and Eastern dialects, while Northern Mansi has a much reduced, largely symmetric system of 8 vowels, though lacking short **/e/ and long **/iː/:

Alphabet

The first publication of the written Mansi language was a translation of the Gospel of Matthew published in London in 1868. In 1932 a version of Latin alphabet was introduced with little success. The former Latin alphabet:

In 1937, Cyrillic replaced the Latin.

Grammar

Mansi is an agglutinating, subject–object–verb (SOV) language.^[6]

Article

There are two articles in Mansi: definite ань (aɲ), which also means "now" when placed before verbs, and indefinite акв (akʷ), literally "one".^[7]

Nouns

There is no grammatical gender. Mansi distinguishes between singular, dual and plural number. Six grammatical cases exist. Possession is expressed using possessive suffixes, for example -зм, which means "my".

Grammatical cases, declining

Example with: пут /put/ (cauldron)

Missing cases can be expressed using postpositions, such as халнэл (χalnəl, 'of, out of'), саит (sait, 'after, behind'), etc.

Verbs

Mansi conjugation has three persons, three numbers, two tenses, and four moods. Active and passive voices exist.

Intransitive and transitive conjugations are distinguished. This means that there are two possible ways of conjugating a verb. When the speaker conjugates in intransitive, the sentence has no concrete object (in this case, the object is nothing or something like something, anything). In the transitive conjugation, there is a concrete object. This feature also exists in the other Ugric languages.

Tenses

Mansi uses suffixes to express the tense. The tense suffix precedes the personal suffix.

The language has no future tense; the future is expressed in other ways.

Moods

There are four moods: indicative, conditional, imperative and precative.

Indicative mood has no suffix. Imperative mood exists only in the second person.

Personal suffixes

The suffixes are the following:

Thus, the conjugation of the verb мина (lat. mina [go]), in past tense (remember the suffix -с):

Active/Passive voice

Verbs have active and passive voice. Active voice has no suffix; the suffix to express the passive is -ве-.

Verbal prefixes

Verbal prefixes are used to modify the meaning of the verb in both concrete and abstract ways. For example, with the prefix эл- (el-) (away, off) the verb мина (mina) (go) becomes элмина (elmina), which means to go away. This is surprisingly close to the Hungarian equivalents: el- (away) and menni (to go), where elmenni is to go away

ēl(a) – 'forwards, onwards, away'

χot – 'direction away from something and other nuances of action intensity'

Numbers

Numbers 1 and 2 also have attributive forms: акв (1) and кит (2); compare with Hungarian két, and Old Hungarian "kit").

Example

ам хул алысьлаӈкве минасум. – I went fishing (literally "I fish catch went").

Comparison with Hungarian

Here are some invented sentences in Northern Mansi (IPA transcription) and Hungarian. They demonstrate well the relationship between Hungarian and Mansi.

Notes

References

• Nyelvrokonaink. Teleki László Alapítvány, Budapest, 2000.
• A világ nyelvei. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
• Honti, László (1998). "ObUgrian". In Abondolo, Daniel. The Uralic Languages. 
• Kálmán, Béla (1965). Vogul Chrestomathy. Indiana University Publications. Uralic and Altaic Series. 46. The Hague: Mouton. 
• Kulonen, Ulla-Maija (2007). Itämansin kielioppi ja tekstejä. Apuneuvoja suomalais-ugrilaisten kielten opintoja varten (in Finnish). XV. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. ISBN 978-952-5150-87-2. 
• Munkácsi, Bernát and Kálmán, Béla. 1986. Wogulisches Wörterbuch. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest. [In German and Hungarian.]
• Riese, Timothy. Vogul: Languages of the World/Materials 158. Lincom Europa, 2001. ISBN 3-89586-231-2
• Ромбандеева, Евдокия Ивановна. Мансийский (вогульский) язык, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Linguistics, 1973. [In Russian.]

External links

Mansi language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• Mansi at Omniglot
• Digital version of Munkácsi and Kálmán's dictionary
• Mansi language dictionary
• Mansi basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
• Red Book of the Peoples – Mansi history
• Endangered Languages of Indigenous Peoples of Siberia – Mansi education