Hungarian Studies in London
The final class was spent looking at a text in a Southern dialect of Khanty, Tsingala, on the heavenly origins of the bear. Western dialects of Khanty divide into North and South; accordingly, Tsingala is related to Demjanka, Konda, and Krasnojarsk. These forms are probably extinct.
The text was noted down in 1899 by Vasilii Yakovlevich [...]
When I first suggested the idea of a contemporary art exhibition about the “Finno-Ugrian World” my Estonian colleagues were appalled. Why spend time in those remote places, which even specialists describe as “the periphery of the periphery”? Why stir up ethnocentric sentiments among the Estonians? Why revive an agenda of cultural cooperation from the dark [...]
The second Khanty dialect we studied was an Eastern variant, Pim; the text is available in László Honti, Chrestomathia Ostiacica, Budapest, 1984, pp. 166-7. It is the story of a wife-hunt, one of the favourite activities in Uralic folk tales. Three women sing while they fish:
ěj kimλem räp-räp-räp, pä kimλem räp-räp-räp
egyik ruhaalj-am, rep-rep-rep, másik ruhaalj-am [...]
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 [...]
Our last Mansi sessions were spent studying a folktale in Tavda, a southern dialect which, before it died out in the 1920s, was probably the closest to Hungarian. Reflecting on his visit to the lower Tavda river area in 1894, Munkácsi initially assumed that Tavda was a separate language:
A Tavda folyó alvidékén csekély számban fönmaradt [...]
The Mūnkēsiŋ uj-ēriɣ (‘Song of the Creature of the Village of Munkes’), collected by Munkácsi in 1889, recounts the foraging activities, capture and death of a bear, followed by a bear feast. The narrator is the bear, who frequently refers to himself in the third person, Vojle-ōnle, ‘animal-majestic’. During summer, he gathers pine cones and [...]
A few links until the next Ob-Ugric posts are ready:
Bear feast songs collected by Wolfgang Steinitz (1905-67), the German Ostyakologist.
A map of the geographic distribution of Uralic languages – please don’t ask me why Slovenian is included in the first place, let alone in a novel location!
Survival International is an international organisation that campaigns for [...]
In the last class, we took a look at the noun system in a northern dialect of Mansi (Vogul), and started on a bear poem.
The order of noun suffixes works as follows: number + possession + case. As we’ve already mentioned, Sygva Vogul is elaborate in marking number: it has separate sets of endings [...]
Our posts on the Ob-Ugric classes are a work in progress, based on notes taken during the lessons and tidied up into legible, readable form. Any errors are attributable solely to their anonymous authors!
Here’s a misunderstanding from a couple of posts ago. I mentioned that Munkácsi’s collections of Mansi song and verse (Bernát Munkácsi, [...]
Last session we looked at a table summarising the main features of Sygva Vogul verbs, including the order of various inflectional suffixes.
In Sygva, the order of these suffixes is not as fixed as in Hungarian, where mood and tense markers always precede personal suffixes. While Hungarian has an entirely different paradigm of personal suffixes to [...]