Ob-Ugric, IX – Khanty (Kazym)
A brief note on Khanty (Ostyak)
Khanty (older name: Ostyak) is a complex chain of dialects spoken by people who live in a vast, roughly L-shaped area along the Ob, the lower Irtysh, and tributaries. According to the most recent figures (1989 census), there are some 22,000 speakers of Khanty; of these, 62.9 per cent were native speakers (i.e. c. 14,000). Khanty speakers make up about 1 per cent of the population of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug.
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On both historic-phonological and syntactic-typological grounds, these may be broken into two major groupings, East v. West. The East group further subdivides into (1) the Far Eastern dialects Vach and Vasjugan, and (2) the Surgut group, which includes Jugan, Malij Jugan, Pim, Likrisovskoe, Tremjugan and Tromagan [...]. The West group subdivides into North and South subgroups. Clearly southern are the Demjanka dialects and Konda, Cingali, and Krasnojarsk. Clearly northern are the Obdorsk dialect and the Berjozov subgroup, consisting of the Synja, Muzhi, and Shurikshar dialects, and, to the South, Kazym.
For the purposes of the classes, Khanty was treated as consisting of three main dialects, Northern, Southern and Eastern. The northern dialects are closer to northern Mansi than to other dialects of Khanty. Khanty-speakers are spread over a considerably larger area than Mansi, whose dialects are largely mutually intelligible. Because the Khanty are also much greater in number, and their dialects so different from each other one could, as Wolfgang Steinitz (1905-67) did, dedicate oneself to Ostyakology; whereas the dearth of Mansi materials and speakers means that we cannot really speak of an -ology, although introducing oneself as a Vogulologist would be fun. Steinitz used Marij (earlier known as Cheremis, a Finno-Volgaic language spoken in today’s Mari Republic and along the Vjatka river basin as well as in Tatarstan, Udmurtia and Perm) and Khanty in order to reconstruct Proto-Ugric, while the Fennic school focussed, as one would expect, on the reconstruction of Proto-Finnish. Like Selkup and Estonian, Khanty is one of the most dialectically fragmented Uralic languages.
Classes
We studied Khanty texts from the three main dialects, each of which required their own grammar. Northern Khanty dialects have two or three cases, while Eastern variants can have up to sixteen, as well as some other unique linguistic features, such as ergativity. The voiceless lateral fricative λ, similar to the ll in Welsh, is found in northern and southern regions, but not in the central areas. Because the dialects are so disparate, no standardised version has ever emerged, and it seems that Russian is the lingua franca of Khanty speakers. Once again, transcription problems are myriad.
Kazym
Kazym is a northern dialect. We studied an aetiological tale, The Tomtit and the Mouse, in which Tomtit and Mouse eat fish and fish fat from the Ob, but the Tomtit sees that Mouse has snaffled all the fish fat for himself, whereupon Mouse beats Tomtit black and blue with a piece of wood. In folklore, mice frequently represent the soul of the bear. The text was recorded from Evdokiya Nikolaevna Randymova by lldikó Lehtinen in Leningrad in 1971, text available in Juha Janhunen (ed.), Etäsukukielet, Helsinki, 1975, pp. 68-70. The first two lines are:
wŭrśĭkle pa ajwɔjle
wŭrśĭkle pa ajwɔjle wɔsnəŋ
széncinke és egér [kis+állat=ka]
széncinke és egér volt [élt :dual]
Note that s is the past tense marker, and nəŋ marks the dual. Kazym had the verb tăjλ, habeo, to have, and marked short vowels, whereas Hungarian marks long vowels. The third person suffix is definite, as in vége, Hungarian for ‘the End’. The two cases are locative and lative; there is no accusative.
The chosen text was excellent: much was familiar, and new information could be slotted into patterns already familiar. The last two lines are:
wŭrśĭkleλ ajwɔjĭkĭeλ xătśəm tăxĭλ pĭta jĭs
ĭn pa śĭ xătśəm tăxĭλaλ pŭŋən pĭtĭ śĭ
A széncinke az egér+öreg üt-ött-e rész-e feketé-vé jö-tt.
Aztán és is üt-ött rész-ei oldal-a fekete is.
For Sir Norman Foster’s tumescent plans to put Khanty-Mansiysk, that ‘Russian city’, on the international architectural map, please see here.