Ob-Ugric, I
Uralic languages map (that includes some non-Uralic langauges)
Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family of languages, which is split between Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic subfamilies (link opens in a new window). A more detailed map of the Uralic languages is available here.
The major languages of the Finno-Ugric are Finnish, Estonian (Balto-Finnic) and Hungarian (Ugric). The closest living relatives to Hungarian are Khanty (also known as Ostyak) and Mansi (also known as Vogul), both of which have (or had) many dialects. According to the Russian Federation census of 1990, Khanty has around 15,000 native speakers, while Mansi has only 3,000.
We began the Ob-Ugric classes with Peter Sherwood in December, and the first text we studied was in the northern (Sygva) dialect of Mansi, in which a Mansi woman, Evdokija I. Rombandeeva (b. 1928), recounted her trip to Helsinki to attend a conference in 1965.
To read the full post, click on ‘more’.
The text is very simple, although in any case there is nothing particularly complex in Mansi syntax. There are some obvious similarities with Hungarian: agglutination, no grammatical gender. However, unlike Hungarian, the northern dialect of Mansi enjoys neither vowel harmony nor an accusative marker. (The southern dialect, Tavda, did have vowel harmony, until it died out in the 1920s).
At first sight, Mansi appeared completely unintelligible (as it should). At the Wikipedia entry for Mansi, a few sentences are compared to ‘demonstrate well’ the relationship between Mansi and Hungarian. Here’s one:
Huremszáthusz hulachszäm ampem viten äli.
Háromszázhúsz hollószemű ebem vízen él.
Or, in other words, ‘My 320 dogs with raven eyes live on the water’, a sentence I’ve never yet had occasion to use. Perhaps more useful would be:
Pegte lau lasinen manl tou szilna.
Fekete ló lassan megy a tó szélén.
(A black horse walks slowly along the shore of the lake.) The relationship here consists of cognate words, word order and the order of morphemes within words.
In the text, some ‘modern’ words are borrowed from Russian: aťēl (одтел), konkrēs (конгресс), sāprańi (собрание); and others from Komi: nēpak (nipik - paper, letter, book, writing), tujt (tūjt - horsedrawn sledge). Other words reveal the Finno-Ugric family connection: mā (earth or country, is maa in Finnish), while ńēlm (language) resembles the Hungarian nyelv; and in mańśi lātiŋ (in Vogul), the mańśi resembles magyarul (Hungarian for ‘in Hungarian’). Incidentally, the Mansi for train, nājiŋ tujt, translates as ‘fiery sledge’. ‘To go by train’ uses the instrumental: nājiŋ tujtəl.
One thing’s for certain, Mansi is fascinating and mind-boggling, and certainly easier to grasp if one has knowledge of Hungarian. Verb formation, for instance:
xas=xat- (to draw, write) cf. HU irat=koz-
xōnt=xat- (to look, find) c.f. HU talál=koz-
śopit=axt- (to get oneself ready, prepare) c.f. HU készül=ő=dik
I’ll return to further distinguishing features of Mansi (that will be familiar to Hungarian-speakers), such as compounds using continuous participles, second conjugation markers, and use of the passive, in later posts.
In the meantime, here are some extraordinary paintings by the Khanty artist Gennady Raishev.