The Friday Circle

First of all, here’s the ending to last week’s mouse story:

ań ta śuńēɣt, ań ta χūleɣt. ta ojipas.

In other (Hungarian) words, ma is élnek, ha meg nem haltak. Vége. The English would be ‘and they all lived happily ever after’, although it’s more like ‘they are still alive, if they did not die. The end’.

Second, some links: a UNESCO page on the endangered languages of the indigenous peoples of Siberia, and an outline of Ural-Altaic languages by Robert Austerlitz.

*

Before languages die out, they go mad. Which means that agreements fail, phonologic differences may fade away, there is syntactic loss: the language’s systems fall apart. We need to bear in mind this kind of craziness (perhaps advanced senile dementia?!) when looking at the dialects of Mansi that have died out, because samples collected from Tavda in the late 1800s, for instance, a southern dialect that was probably the closest to Hungarian, may well contradict each other.

Mansi belongs to the Ob-Ugrian sub-group of the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic languages, and its speakers mostly live along tributaries of the river Ob, while a few live along the river Konda. There are, or were, three distinct Mansi branches. The Northern Mansi speakers live(d) along the banks of the rivers Sosva, Sygva and Upper Lozva. Speakers of Eastern Mansi lived along the Konda valley, while Southern (including Tavda) and Western Mansi no longer speak Mansi. This photo was taken by Janno Simm.

At the beginning of the class, we looked a sheet on Tavda grammar. Tavda had vowel harmony, and displayed some fascinating Ugric ideas that speakers of Hungarian will be familiar with. In Hungarian, definiteness might be expressed in one of four ways. Here are the ways in which distinctions between conjugations are made:

1. látok / látom - I see something, vs. I see it. Here, the difference is in the consonant used.
2. -unk, -ünk / -juk, -jük: these are first person plural endings, in which the sequence of letters is jumbled up, the ‘n‘ disappears and a ‘j‘ appears at the beginning.
3. -t-ak / -t-ák: here, the vowel is lengthened to denote definiteness in the third person plural.
4. néz-tek / néz-i-tek where something (here, ‘i‘) is inserted for the second conjugation (you [informal plural] look vs. you look at it).

Tavda used the fourth principle here, in which a slot for a definite marker appears before personal endings. However, all pronouns are definite in Mansi and Khanty, not just the 3rd person. To give an other example, let’s take the plural possessive. In Hungarian,

Tavda had an accusative marker, and two sorts of instrumental, for when an instrument is used (e.g. I hit him with an axe) and a comitative (I hit him [together] with my friend), as well as an equivalent to the tranlative -vá / -vé in Hungarian, which denotes something becoming something else, e.g. vérré vált ez a sör (I’ve just drunk this beer and it has become blood in my body).

Tavda died out in the 1920s, at around the same time a written form of Mansi and Khanty was introduced, using the Cyrillic alphabet.

Next, we moved on to a poem collected by Bernát Munkácsi (1860-1937) in 1888, but which dates from the early 1700s, when the Russians took it upon themselves to convert the ‘heathens’ of Siberia to Christianity. Munkácsi’s original family name was Munk, and they were so poor he grew up in a cave in Nagyvárad (today Oradea in Romania). He travelled to the Urals in the 1880s, and his collections of Ugric song and verse, first published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1892, have sent not a few twentieth-century poets mildly bonkers with delight. Ferenc Juhász and László Nagy both borrowed shamanistic imagery from Khanty and Mansi verbal art forms, e.g. the poem entitled motif of the nyaklevágható álom, literally neck-cut-off-able dream. In other words, a sleep so deep your head could be severed and you wouldn’t wake up.

The poem we read has been translated as the Song of Conversion, and it is one of the most powerful, yet sparse poems I have ever read. To read more …

This poem is probably narrated by a Vogul prince. The reference to blackcurrants comes from the words the Mansi use for bear body parts: bears cannot be named, nor referred to, nor can their body parts be named. So the bear’s eyes are blackcurrants.

Male bears themselves are ‘the ones with five buttons’, female bears have four.

They have other taboo words for the fur, front and back paws, gall, heart, etc. Numi-Torem is the deity in the sky, who rules the heavens and the earth, the one who sends the bears to punish men. And the references to four-cornered things or four-angled things: Mansi dwellings did not have corners or joints; they were huts made out of reindeer skin. A four-sided box is also therefore itself a treasure by virtue of its angles; and four-angled crosses the most terrible of all.

This translation is from Ancient Cultures of the Ugrian Peoples, ed. Péter Hajdú, Budapest, 1976. It was translated via the Hungarian by Laura Schiff. It will knock your socks off.

Song of Conversion, c. 1715

I, the man, hear
in lands of the land-laden Earth
the four-angled, angular cross
is voiced all about.
I, the man, hear
in lands of the land-laden Earth
the four-angled, angular cross
is thrust on throats.
In this one-room cabin, carved
by my father, the man,
I am sitting. It starts.
The roaring uproar
startles the house.
I leave the house
toward the town’s wide square.
My black currant eyes search
Numi-Torem, towering Sky Father–
no sign of a cloud,
even the size of a minnow’s eye.
On the river at the town’s edge, I see
a proud boat standing,
its prow like the beak of a hen.
Guns of steel guts
thunder
cannons of steel guts
thunder.
Black Mother Earth, gutted shakes.
My quiver of steel arrows
I take
into my two hands, ten fingers.
I, the man, command
the army that now arms,
and I make the proud boat,
its prow like the beak of a hen, go back.

*

I, the man, carve a cabin
of two rooms.
In the cabin of two rooms
I stay.
It starts again–
the startling roaring uproar
starts.
In my homespun Russian shirt,
I leave the house again. I look at the river,
see on the river at the town’s edge
cannons of steel guts
firing.
I fall.
Two Cossacks with cleaved buttocks
somehow seize me,
like a newly-hatched summer duckling, too weak to move,
somehow they seize me.
My senses return; I see
the bastard bishop brought.
What my father never suffered
I suffer: shackles are put on my legs.
In a filthy dog-basket of a place
I’m placed, I’m carted,
I’m carried a short and long time.
I clutch the seventh of the seven treasure boxes
of my father, the man.
Suddenly I, the man, arrive
in the middle of the city of Tobolsk,
much blazoned, blazing like the morning star,
like something my father never saw.
I, the man, am hurled
into a louse-ridden hut.
For a full week of a full moon
the lice live well.
I pour out what my father poured into
the four corners of the four-sided treasure box;
the grand, silk-buttoned man,
he comes to see me.
Like a creature with a split tongue
he warbles and honeys me, the man.
What my father, the man filled,
the inside of the four-sided treasure box,
I empty to him.
Now with silk buttons
like the bread-shaped silk buttons
that grace the neck of the grand silk-buttoned man,
I button myself.
The four-angled gold cross is hung on my neck.
What my father filled with colt fat: the sacrificial bowl,
is laid away forever, till the thousandth day of Torem.

Posted on January 29th, 2007 under Ob-Ugric • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback