Ob-Ugric, II
In the second Ob-Ugric class with Peter, and we read a folk tale in the northern dialect of Vogul, Sygva, about a mouse. Here are the first few lines of the text, and I’m using the Latin script here for ease of recognisability (Cyrillic was introduced in the late 1930s). There’s no upper case:
mātāpriś ōli. χottaľ minuŋk noməlmātas. āmpńēlum tūpsup wārəs, ponalťēr χāpsup wārəs, χāpťēte nāluw(*) nariɣtaste, tūpťēte wis(**), tāləs. ta towi, te ērɣi: āmpńēlum tūpsuptem, pol, pol, pol, ponalťēr χāpsuptem, χaľ, χaľ, χaľ … χosa minas, wāti minas, ēlaľ sunsi: ak pāweln nēɣləs …
The above can be translated into Hungarian with ease:
Egér van. Valahová menni gondolt. Ebnyelv evezőcskét csinált, kendermaghej hajócskát csinált, hajócskáját vízre(*) taszította, evezőcskéjét vette(**), beszállt. Evezett, énekelt: ebnyelv evezőcském, pól, pól, pól, kendermaghej hajócskám, sáv, sáv, sáv … Hosszú ment, rövid ment, előre lát: egy falutól látszott.
It’s really tricky in English. Here’s my best shot:
There is a mouse. He thought of going somewhere. He made dog-tongue oars, he made a hemp-husk boat, led his boat to the river bank, took his oars, sat down in the boat. He rowed, he sang: my little dog-tongue oars, pol, pol, pol, my little hemp-husk boat, shav, shav, shav … He went a long time, he went a short time, he looked ahead: the mouse appeared to a village.
Click on ‘more’ to read the full post.
Like Hungarian, Vogul has no grammatical gender so I could have chosen ‘it’ for the mouse, but that sounded wrong. Because mouse heroes in folk tales are going to be male unless specified otherwise.
Many of the derivational formatives, repetitions and formulae of the genre are instantly recognisable to Hungarian speakers. ‘He went a long time, he went a short time’ is wonderfully familiar (c.f. HU ment, mendegélt).
Unlike Hungarian, they don’t have an accusative case, but use other means to keep subjects from objects. So, in Vogul, the mouse does not see a village, but becomes visible from/to a village: ak pāweln nēɣləs (a village+Lative appears, HU egy falutól látszott).
The other Mansi word for mouse is šiŋire. In Finnish, š > h, and the ŋ disappears = hiiri. (Mickey Mouse in Finnish is Mikki Hiiri.) Hungarian drops the h, so mouse was egere, which becomes egér. Etymology of ‘mouse’ used in the text, mātāpriś: mā is (the) earth, tā the bear’s gallbladder, priś a diminutive. The bear gallbladder is used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat fever, liver and heart disease, convulsions and diabetes, and the Mansi regard it as one of the most important sources of the bear’s strength. In this folk tale, the mouse represents the soul of the bear. Because speakers of Ob-Ugric languages live along rivers, river vocabulary is particularly rich. The mouse takes his boat to the flat strip of land next to the river bank.
(*) Further, nāluw, meaning ‘in the direction of (down to) the river/downriver’ can also mean ‘towards the fire’, which is in the centre of the hut.
(**) when the mouse takes his boat to the river, the 3rd person definite conjugation is used, but when he he takes up his oars, the indefinite is used, as in ‘he took up oars’, although it is clear that he is picking up HIS oars. It seems unlikely that this def+indef pattern could be inverted.
Summary of the rest of the story: the mouse is offered food by children in the village, but refuses the perch because the bones will stick in his throat. At the third village he is offered roe broth, the favourite dish of his father and grandfather. The mouse eats and drinks so much his stomach bursts. The children sew it back up with a needle and some roots. The mouse gets in the boat and rows off. He meets a reindeer, and they play hide and seek in the forest. The reindeer accidentally swallows the mouse. The reindeer suggests that the mouse come out through his eyes, but his eyes are full of sleep. The mouse cannot come out through the reindeer’s mouth, because it is too sputum-y. And the reindeer’s ears are full of wax. So the mouse goes into the stomach, gets out his little knife, and cuts a hole in the reindeer’s belly. The reindeer dies, and the mouse strips the meat and fur, runs home and summons his wife and their daughters and sons. The mouse family collect the reindeer flesh and meat, and take it home, where they ate and lived well for a long time. And they all lived happily ever after.
(NB: I cheated and went by the Hungarian version in Béla Kálmán, Wogulische Texte mit einem Glossar, Budapest, 1976, pp. 180-2).
Note that the mouse brings his daughters and sons, not sons and daughters: āγ(i)+piγ, c.f. HU i[a]=fi[a].
Other familiar words include: fish (Mansi xūl, HU hal, FI kala); knife (Mansi kasaj, HU kés); soul (Mansi lili, HU lélek, FI löyly); ear (Mansi paľ, HU fül); village (Mansi pawəl, HU falu); long (Mansi xosa, HU hosszú), and so on.
Beyond lexical items, however, the real gems come from (1) the gerundive, and (2) participle forms. (1) Gerundive. While rowing, or in the course of his rowing: tōw=ant-ima-te, c.f. HU evez-té-ben, roughly ‘rowing-his-in’. (2) The more participle forms a language has, the less European it is. Because Mansi has no relative clauses, it uses participial forms to do lots of work. We’ll write more about this another time.
Finally, ‘and they all lived happily after’ is a real Western hepiend (happy ending). I’ll add the original Mansi next week, but for the time being: HU: Ma is élnek, ha meg nem haltak. (They are still alive today, if they did not die.)
I particularly enjoyed the fact that the mouse manages to convert his reindeer friend into a supply of food from within. Having been invited to leave by more ‘conventional’ ways, he sings another little song before cutting open the reindeer’s belly:
kasaj-supťem ťiwl-ťiwl, sāɣrap-supťem ťiwl-ťiwl, χār-ōjk puki jakteɣm!
Next week we’re reading an eighteenth-century poem entitled ‘The Song of Conversion’ about the forced conversion to Christianity, in the same dialect (northern) of Vogul.
Further reading:
Daniel Abondolo (ed.), The Uralic Languages, London, Routledge, 1998.
Peter Sherwood, ‘Definiteness in the Ugrian Languages’, in T. Seilenthal, Anu Nurk, Triinu Palo (eds), Congressus Nonus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum 7-13. 8. 2000 Tartu. Pars VI Dissertationes sectionum Linguistica III, Tartu, Trükk OU PAAR, 2001, pp. 185-187.
G. F. Cushing, ‘The Bear in Ob-Ugrian Folklore’, Folklore, 88, 1977, 2, pp. 146-59.
February 18th, 2007 at 11:57 am
[...] 29, 2007 Posted by fridaycircle in Ob-Ugric. trackback First of all, here’s the ending to last week’s mouse story: ań ta śuńēɣt, ań ta χūleɣt. ta [...]
March 22nd, 2008 at 5:34 pm
[...] in the story of the mouse, the object becomes seen to the viewer. The women return home to cook, and put death-cap mushrooms [...]
April 12th, 2008 at 10:05 am
šiŋire (more probably šiŋere) is not a Mansi word but the Proto-Finno-Ugric form of Modern Hungarian egér. In the 19-20th century Mansi dialects it had forms täŋkär / täŋkər etc. (see A magyar szókészlet finnugor elemeiI. A-Gy, Akadémiai, Budapest, 1967, 140).
The right segmentation of mātāpriś is mā+tāp+riś . Although tāp really means ‘bear’s gallbladder (or bile)’ (see Munkácsi–Kálmán: Wogulishes Wörterbuch, Akadémiai, Budapest, 1986, 627), I am not sure this can be the source of -tāp- in mātāpriś. (If I had to say something at this moment I would say that it probably comes from the täŋkär-forms and it originally means ‘earth mouse’ [or 'mole', which is the other meaning of mātāpriś]. However, this idea is a bit problematic from the phonetic point of view: ŋk > p is not a typical change in Mansi, as far as I know.) Do you have any etymological source that states that -tāp- in mātāpriś comes from tāp ‘bear bile’?
Anyhow, I am very happy to see that there are people who are interested in these things and at least a part of The Tale of the Mouse can be read on the internet in English.
Enjoy Your work, have fun!
April 22nd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
You’re absolutely right, apologies, my transcription of the class was inaccurate: šiŋire is not Mansi, and while we did segment mātāpriś as mā+tāp+riś, the -tāp- as bear bile had a couple of large question marks hanging overhead. All errors describing semantic analysis are my own, not those of the teacher!
Many thanks for your comment.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
[...] of all, here’s the ending to last week’s mouse story: ań ta śuńēɣt, ań ta χūleɣt. ta [...]