The text was noted down in 1899 by Vasilii Yakovlevich from ‘two old folks’ in a village on the Irtysh, reproduced from E. Vértes (ed.), K. F. Karjalainens Südostjakische Textsammlungen I, Helsinki, Suomalais-Ugralainen Seura, MSFOu 157, pp. 113-5, and translated as ‘A medve égi származásárol’ in E. Vértes (ed.), Hadmenet, nászmenet. Irtisi osztják mesék és mondák, Budapest, Európa, 1975, pp. 5-6. The frequency of repetition and parallels would suggest that the text is particularly archaic. As in other dialects of Ostyak, the past tense is unmarked. The present is marked with -l or -t.

FlailingpawMan (jāwətta ketpe xuj) and TjaperwomanMother (ťăpərneŋ aŋkə) are the bear’s ancestors, he is lowered to the earth by his seven-times-indented father (Numi Torem, as seven is sacred) on a metal chain:

karsəɣər təjnə wǎx sēɣər təjnə

vaslánc végen fém lánc végen

which would also suggest that metal was available in prehistory, prior to the re-primitivisation process mentioned elsewhere in these posts. A hunter and his dog disturb the bear from hibernation, but with customary circumlocution, the hunter is referred to only as xǎr jǎxtə xuj (erdőjáró ember), and the bear is never named. Killing a bear is the most taboo expression of them all, and as such idioms will pose a translation problem:

nuŋət ītə pājəŋ xǎttəŋ tūrəm pāɣəttam

Vértes translates this into Hungarian as ‘leszállítalak a véres alsó világba’, into German as ’so töte ich Dich’.

The text was a relatively easy read. Not only because Tsingala uses a similar word order to Hungarian, or because a number of words are by now familiar from looking at other Ob-Ugric languages: jāŋx (to go, also found in Ómagyar Mária Siralom), jast (to say), amp (dog), kət kittət (two hands/két kezet), wərta (to make), tēwət (to eat), səmem (my heart).

When asked whether Hungarian and its distant relatives are similar, the answer has to be a boring ‘yes and no’. Although the split occurred thousands of years ago, studying these languages without a knowledge of Hungarian would probably be too demanding. It’s also a peculiar feeling to come across something and think, that’s a little bit just like Hungarian!

The classes were greatly rewarding, a rare insight into cultures so unfamiliar and fascinating, and, having also served as an introduction to historical and comparative linguistics for those of us relatively new to the field, allow one to refute any crackpot linguistic theory with confidence. On a broader cultural note, the origins of the Hungarian language will always be tied in with ideas of the origins (and therefore belonging) of the Hungarian people, to the extent that fantastic visions of the latter will inform the former. While the premises of the nineteenth-cenutry ugor-török háború may not have survived intact, the desire and search for anchorage most certainly have. It wouldn’t do university departments of Russian any harm, either, to acknowledge languages and cultures native to Russia.

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 Soviet seventies, when Estonian intellectuals became infatuated with Finno-Ugrian mythology and bonded with their faraway kin?

From ‘The continental unconscious‘, an articulate, accessible and thoroughly rewarding article by Anders Kreuger, originally published in A Prior Magazine (16, 2008), and reproduced at Eurozine.com. Anders subtly debunks fanciful linguistic theories, and explores Russia’s uneasy relationship to its aboriginal populations, by means of a topography of the unconscious. He combines his curator’s travelogue-cum-history of Mordvinia, Udmurtia, Mari El and Komi, synonymous for many Russians with Gulag territories but otherwise off the ‘mental map’, with a healthy critique of centralist ‘large-scale production of literature for small peoples’ (and its attendant violence), and of language revivalists’ tendency to be ‘populist and about nothing; carnivalesque, but hardly dialogical’, with an acute awareness of new and old forms of collectivism, occultism, territorial violation, and the long arm of Moscow. Highly recommended.

ěj kimλem räp-räp-räp, pä kimλem räp-räp-räp

egyik ruhaalj-am, rep-rep-rep, másik ruhaalj-am rep-rep-rep

They are noticed by a man:

ěj-λätnə måńť-konə ťě wär ŏjəγti

egy-kor-ban férfi-tól ez dolog észrevétetett

As in the story of the mouse, the object becomes seen to the viewer. The women return home to cook, and put death-cap mushrooms in the pot. The man watches as they become inebriated from eating the poisoned fish. The largest woman (ěnəλ păr-ne), a shoe-mender, sings:

pįkəm ńįrət jånttə ne, jånttə ne, jånttə ne
čăkəm ńįrət jånttə ne, jånttə ne, jånttə ne

szétrohadt cipő-k foltoz-ő nő,
tönkrement cipő-k foltoz-ó nő

The middle woman (kötəp păr-ne), a wood gatherer, sings:

jukəŋ äwi, jukəŋ ne,
jukəŋ äwi, jukəŋ ne

fá=s [= fából való] lány, fá=s nő

The third woman (koλəmət păr-ne), a roofer, sings:

jom-juγ tŏjnə λåjəγtam wuλəm,
pěťar-juγ tŏjnə λåjəγtam wuλəm

zelnice-fa tető-n lóg-vá-m lát-om [sc. magamat],
berkenye-fa tető-n lóg-vá-m lát-om

Kemence, raktárak

(Photo of Khanty houses in the Finnugor Néprajzi Park, Göcsej Falumúzeum, Zalaegerszeg, by Eszter Tarsoly.)

The present tense marker is λ, whereas the past is unmarked, e.g.:

wĕ(j) (to take):

or wu (to see, find): wu-λ-λ-el (HU: látja); wu-λ-ø-əm (HU: látok).

The passive marks s3 forms with -į/-i word-finally (i.e. without any further person suffix), while the agent takes the loactive -nə.

Similarly:

Further reading: an article on the sacrificial rituals of the Pim, by Anzori Barkalaja, is here.

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.

[...]

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.

A Tavda folyó alvidékén csekély számban fönmaradt vogulok nyelve a vogul nyelvterület lenönállóbb s legsajátosabb része, mely első tekintetre olyan benyomással hat a figyelőre, mintha benne nem is egy tájbeszédnek, hanem az uráli ugor nyelvek egyik külön tagjának őriződött volna meg végső maradványa.

Bernát Munkácsi, A vogul nyelvjárások szóragozásukban ismertetve, Budapest, MTA, 1894, p. 244.

A mere forty pages of Tavda exist: texts collected by Munkácsi from the late 1880s onwards and, later, by Artturi Kannisto in the early 1900s (see Kannisto, ed. Matti Liimola, Wogulische Volksdichtung, 6 vols., Helsinki, 1951-63), which are collated (and treated as one dialect) by László Honti in System der paradigmatischen Suffixmorpheme des Wogulischen Dialektes an der Tawda, Budapest, 1975.

Although stress nearly always fell on the second syllable, Tavda had an accusative marker (-mee/-mii), and vowel harmony where front and back vowels largely corresponded with those in Hungarian:

Tavda	N. Vogul	Hungarian	English
äämp	āmp	eb	dog
käät	kāt	kéz/keze-	hand

Its other cases are: lative, locative, ablative, instrumental, comitative, and translative. Tavda is paratactic, which means that there is no subordination in sentence formation, where words can be placed in any order. Some relics of parataxis (in other words, where there is no accusativity) still exist in Hungarian, such as háztűznézni, könyvolvasás, kézmosás. In terms of the text we studied, the verb system has a passive marker inserted before the durative or the past marker; an indicative and imperative mood (the latter only in the second person); and momentaneous and durative present tenses and one past tense. Like Hungarian, there is no definite/indefinite disctinction in the past tense. There are no definite forms in the passive, or in intransitive verb forms. Personal possessive suffixes may be familiar to speakers of Hungarian:

s1	-(ə)m/-aam	p1	-(ə)w
s2	-(ə)n	p2	-((ə))n)ää/-((ə)n)aa
s3	-iit’ii/-eet’ii	p3	-ään/-aan

Some examples, in which the sequence of morphemes is the same in Tavda and Hungarian: niim (HU: nőm); käätəmən (kezembe); torəm (torkom). Of course, Hungarian has long since developed European features on top of the Uralic characteristics, such as the definite article, and agreement between definite noun phrases and verb forms.

The text is the story of a hunter who, having killed and skinned a reindeer and put it in the pot, is astonished when a wind blows up, the pot tips over and the reindeer jumps out and flees. He goes to the nearest village and tells a man there he has seen a miracle, and recounts the tale. The listener, a ploughman, invites him to stand with him on the plough, while he relates an even more fantastic story: he once came home to find his wife in bed with another man, and when the woman hit him and commanded him to turn into a black dog, he turned into a black dog. The dog came across some ploughmen who, believing Torem had sent them a guard dog, gave him food while he guarded their dwellings for a week. The dog then guarded the dwelling of the landowner, whose wife bore him a son. The baby was stolen. She had another son, who was also stolen. When the third son was born, the dog stopped the thief by biting his leg, and was rewarded with bread and sugar, even a ribbon around his neck. One day, he set off hunting for rabbits with the landowner, but instead returned home to find his wife in bed with another man. She beat him, and commanded him to turn into a sparrow, which he did. He flew off and started eating oats with horses in a field, where he was caught by two children and taken to their home. Their father, the baby thief, whips him and commands him to become a man. He becomes a man. They feed him and, when he leaves, the old man presses a whip into his hand and tells him to go home, whip his wife and turn her into a mare, and to whip her lover and turn him into a stallion. He does just this. The narrator harnesses the mare and stallion to his plough, on which narrator and hunter are standing. The hunter says, now that is a miracle!

Lexical items of interest: the words for black dog (śarnəšk), sugar (sääkäär), bed (krawāť) and miracle (t’iwa) are from Russian (чорнышка, сахр, кровать, диво), while Tatar borrowings include tüs (hunting), pajtəl (mare), and sol (oats).

Although it would be misleading to say that Tavda is ‘easy’ or even remotely intelligible for Hungarian speakers, the text provided numerous ‘whoah!’ moments – for want of a more articulate expression. Having studied Mansi now for a few months, this was plain sailing. The Hungarian morpheme-by-morpheme crib sheet that Peter provided could by read by any Hungarian speaker and instantly understood. The following original and Hungarian crib, in which the ploughman begins his story, will illustrate the beauties of Tavda. (Transcription has been simplified in the hope that the web browser displays something legible, rather than a row of funny boxes. NB: If you are having trouble with browser fonts, please consider NOT using Internet Explorer! Firefox, Opera, Safari etc. will work perfectly)

tü kom länt: “tiťi ńokor ťiwa?! äm ťiwa wāsəm. āləs äm niim,” länt. “äšnäl jisəm, niim māt kom jōrtəl krawāť ašt šänəwtäktiim koji. nii noƞläkətəs, ńärəmtəs tupiinək, šäwräpəwsəm päntä, läws: “ālsən näw kom, iń sown šiiməl ämp!” äm sowsəm šiiməl ämpəw, künpāšəwsəm. äm kajtsəm.

Ez ember mond: “Emez milyen csoda?! ÉN csoda láttam. Volt én nőm,” mond, “munkából haza jöttem, nőm más férfival együtt ágyon ölelkezve fekszik. Nő felugrott, vett dorong, vágott féjjen, mondott: “Voltál most(ig) férfi, most válj fekete eb!” Én váltam fekete ebbé, kiűzettem. én futkároztam.

Archaica, Russians, animals in folklore

Bear narrators frequently recount their deaths by knife, lance or bow and arrow, while heroic songs feature warriors in armour using swords, despite the fact that automatic weapons have been commonplace in the region for centuries. It seems that rifles have some taboo attached to them, described perhaps as a firing ‘noisy, loud-noised thing’, but in any case the animal’s death will be quickly passed over, and only referred to in an exceedingly circumlocutory way.

I say that the animal’s death is glossed over using ornate language because the bear describes ‘losing consciousness’ or falling into a deep sleep, and goes on to narrate the ensuing bear feast and performances, the ‘hand-turning, leg-turning’ plays. A bear feast for a male bear lasts five days, corresponding to the number of buttons the animals is said to have, four for a female bear, and three for a bear cub. The technology (tools) with which the bear was killed is sometimes blamed on the Russians, who provided tips for the spears and suchlike, but at any rate, the hunters go to great lengths to absolve themselves of guilt, for killing a bear is not something taken lightly. The supernatural abilities of the bear include an imputed ability to conceal its scent from men and dogs; performers of the plays often disguise their faces, bodies and voices so that the dead bear being entertained will not recognise them. Taboo words were discussed earlier here, and in Marianne Bakró-Nagy, Die Sprache des Bärenkultes im Obugrischen, Budapest, Akadémiai, 1979.

Furred animals provided a form of currency, as well as a unit of measurement. G. F. Cushing’s article on the bear in Ob-Ugrian folklore cites a poem in which squirrel furs represent kopecks: the cunning Vogul offers to repay the Russian his 100-squirrel-fur debt with ‘hidden treasure’, a buried corpse. As they dig, the corpse moves and the Russian collapses in terror. The narrator declares to the corpse, ‘whether you come to life or not, it’s all the same to me’. (See G. F. Cushing, ‘The Bear in Ob-Ugrian Folklore’, Folklore, 88, 1977, 2, pp. 146-59.)

In the Mūnkēsiŋ uj-ēriɣ the bear, while preparing his hibernation place, fills five pine marten skins with soil with his right paw, and then six with his left (here, in Munkácsi’s transcription):

jḁmes-pāl ḁlnė kātläp-pālėm
pinėmtilėm:
at ńoɣs ḁsmäń ɣuri’
kwon ti patilāli;
vorti-pāl ḁlnė kātläp-pālėm
āmėrmatilėm:
ɣḁt ḁsmäń ɣuri’
kwon ti patilāli.

Gyula Illyés translates this as:

Jobb felőli fél kezecském
belevájom,
öt nyusztbőrből varrt cihába
férő föld omol ki,
bal oldali fél kezecském
belenyújtom,
hat nyusztbőrből varrt cihába
férő föld bomol ki.

Illyés, ‘Medveének’, in Péter Domokos (ed.), Medveének. A keleti finnugor népek irodalmának kistükre, Budapest, Európa, 1975, pp. 39-46 (41).

One of the tasks of the translator is to render the repetition and parallelism (R&P) of the original. To the Western reader, R&P may seem cumbersome: no new information is given, but synonyms are employed to vary the repetition (see above, lines 1 & 5, and 2 & 6). It is crucial that the reader recognise the forms and role of R&P, not least because repetition aids reading! Illyés makes full use of his skills as a poet, and exploits the resources of Hungarian, balancing the literal with the creative. He recreates participial phrases (which participate in both noun and verb systems) immediately recognisable to the reader, thus kinsəlėnėm xaltə, during the course of my search, lit. ‘in my seeking’, becomes keresgéltemben, and ūnlėnėm xaltə, while sitting, ‘in my sitting’, is rendered ültömben.

Last, but not least, the raw materials for comparative Finno-Ugric morphology are contained within the poem: āmp/eb (dog); at/öt (five); ɣḁt/hat (six); xōs/húgy (star, here taboo for the bear’s eyes); xåsä/hosszú (long); ūləm/álom (dream); jåməs/jó (good); ńēlm/nyelv (tongue); lowint/(meg)olvas (to read), an instance of metathesis where, here, consonant and vowel exchange places. The past marker here is -m- (c.f.: HU -t-) Such correspondences are central to the comparative method in historical linguistics, in which internal reconstruction is based on evidence found within a language.

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 the rights of tribal peoples worldwide. Their site includes a page of information on the Khanty, where and how they live, and threats to their survival from the 1930s until today; and a page of pictures with a short film of Khanty life in winter, in which Russian is spoken, except when the woman filleting fish addresses her daughter, at about 4.45 minutes in.

Khanty children

Khanty children at Numto lake, a picture taken in March 2006 by Ugraland, whose photographs of the Ob region are here.

An article at the Trade Environment Database on the impact of oil industry expansion on the Khanty-Mansisk region and its peoples.

A note on the instruments used, from a manuscript by the late G. F. Cushing, Professor of Hungarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London:

The instruments used to accompany the songs are interesting in themselves; two stringed instruments, otherwise unknown in Western Siberia. One is a five-stringed, fish-shaped ‘music-making wood’; the other a small harp of nine or thirteen strings, shaped like a swan. Both are believed to come originally from the Near East and to have been passed on to the Ob-Ugrians by Iranian intermediaries.

There are a couple of Khanty songs performed by Liubov Yendyreva on Janno Simm’s website: a song about a fisherman who buys a Moskva-10 outboard motor for his boat and then earns enough to buy his fiancée a gold ring; and a song about a reindeer hunter who goes off to fetch his bride on a sledge led by four reindeer.

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 for dual, and for three or more subjects and objects. Case endings may be instrumental (e.g. I hit him with an axe) or comitative (e.g. I hit him together with my friend, i.e. my friend and I hit him); ablative; locative; lative; or translative (without plural or possessive endings). Where two full vowels (but NOT ə) appear next to each other, a -j- is inserted between them.

For instance, where sāli is reindeer, sālijanəl (sāli-j-anəl: reindeer-1-their (3 or more possessors)) means 1 reindeer belonging to 3 or more people; while sālijaɣamēn (sāli-j-aɣ-amēn: reindeer-2-our (2 possessors)) means 2 reindeer owned by two people.

Or, where kol is house:

Further examples can be found in Béla Kálmán, Wogulische Texte mit einem Glossar, Budapest, Akadémiai, 1976.

*

The bear song, Mūnkēsiŋ uj-ēriɣ (‘Song of the Creature of the Village of Munkes’, HU: ‘Múnkeszfalvi állat-ének’), was collected by Munkácsi on 8 March 1889 in Berjozovo, and was first printed in his Vogul Népköltési Gyűjtemény, III/2, pp. 260-5. This song was translated by Gyula Illyés (1902-83) as ‘Medveének’, a masterful translation that exploits those elements of rhythm, syntax and word formation shared by Hungarian and Vogul. Illyés produces a verbal art form that is unmistakably modern Hungarian, but which transcends the strictures of that language’s verse conventions to have the reader hear an echo of the Vogul language and pre-modern oral culture, transforming the basic structure of Uralic folk poetry, that of repetition and parallelism, into an exceptionally skillful translation. ‘Medveének’ is available in: Péter Domokos (ed.), Medveének. A keleti finnugor népek irodalmának kistükre, Budapest, Európa, 1975, pp. 39-46; and Béla Kálmán (ed.), Leszállt a medve az égből. Vogul népköltészet, Budapest, Európa, 1980, pp. 224-31.

Before a discussion of the poem and its translation, some notes on bear mythology.

Map of Siberia

[The bear] is the guardian of justice and takes note of the most solemn oaths. It appears as a higher power who may take revenge for broken promises and as such plays a central role in the thought-world of the Ob-Ugrians.

G. F. Cushing, ‘The Bear in Ob-Ugrian Folklore’, Folklore, 88, 1977, 2, pp. 146-59 (p. 147)

Taboo words are used to refer to the bear: a male is the one with five buttons, a female bear has four, while a bearcub has three buttons. Bears may also be referred to as ‘the old one of the forest’, ‘the little idol’, ‘the holy beast’ and ‘the strong beast’. Its eyes are ’stars’ (xōs) or ‘currants’, while its front paws are ‘hands’ (kāt), its back paws ‘boots’, and it skin a ‘cloak’. When a bear is killed and skinned, the skinning process is referred to as āŋxwəlawət: ‘undressing’, removal of the cloak (HU: kibont, levetkőztet). Words for the bear’s stomach include xurəɣ (sack), såut (birch-bark basket, a word of Tatar origin), and pajp (birch-bark butt, HU: puttony), while its back is pūtjiw, the two struts from which a cooking pot is suspended over the fire. The name for the sledge on which the bear’s corpse is transported, ťāťä, also comes from Tatar. Where the word for an object comes from is not particularly important, then, what matters is that the object is not referred to by its name.

Cited in Cushing’s article (on p. 147) is a beautiful piece of colonialist prose, an excerpt from Grigoriy Novitsky’s Short Description of the Ostyak People, written in 1715, and an account of a trip taken accompanying the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan of Tobolsk. Novitsky does not distinguish between Voguls (Mansi) and Ostyaks (Khanty):

Apart from their worship of various idols, the Ostyaks have a great respect for wild animals, and particularly the bear. Their respect for the bear is based on the erroneous belief that if they kill this animal they are committing sin, so that if they have slain one with their own hands they must propitiate it with strange ceremonies of worship, for otherwise it will have revenge upon them as murderers.

So the Ostyaks, when they have succeeded in killing a bear, remove its skin and place it before the shrine in which the idols are kept, laying it out as if it were the living animal. Then the people assemble and hold a great feast and dance around it, declaring in their songs that it was not they who were to blame for its murder – after all, they were not responsible for the iron tip and feathers of the arrows: it was Russians who had forged the iron and the eagle who had provided the feathers. Shouting such songs, they draw nearer and nearer, then kiss the extended bearskin. When they have had their fill of such devilish pranks, the owner sells the skin without any more ado to anyone who will buy it. Their extraordinary respect for this animal, which is to some degree idol-worship, is also shown by the fact that they swear their most solemn oaths on its skin and take particular care by oaths thus administered.

Similarly, whenever it is necessary for an Ostyak to swear allegiance to the Tsar in public, they lay out the skin of this animal in accordance with their erroneous beliefs and place upon it an axe, a knife and other kinds of dangerous weapons. Then they offer a morsel of bread on the tip of a knife taken from the skin to the person they wish to take the oath, and the interpreter addresses them with these words: ‘If you swear a false oath and do not serve the Tsar honourably and do not see that you pay your taxes, may this animal have revenge upon you and may you suffer a painful death at its hands’.

I particularly enjoyed the contrast here between ‘erroneous’ beliefs in bear-deities and apparently sensible beliefs in Tsar-deities.

Bear songs have a number of parallels in heroic songs in tales, in that the bear narrates in the first person, and her adversaries are also heroic, often on horseback. This is curious, for horses are not native to this region. Along her travels, the bear may encounter superhuman adversaries on horseback, or teasing from a crow, while a wolverine acts as a messenger relaying orders from Numi-Torem to other animals, rather like a shaman, and a woodpecker acts as the watchman.

The song begins with an exclamation: kajajūjiń, kajajūjiń! This is to signal the transition from one genre or mode to another, from the ‘official’ real world to the fantastic.

The poetics of Vogul folklore is based on the use of repetition and parallels. Let’s take an example to illustrate these concepts. Here are the first few lines of the poem, in which the bear comes down from her father’s golden house in the heavens, to the sweltering hot summer on Earth He created, where she fills her hungry belly:

Kajajūjiń, kajajūjiń!
Numi-Sorńi āśkəm wārəlāləm
sāŋk åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū,
muńəm åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū,
taɣəntettal såut-sūntəm
taɣəntəpteɣim,
taɣəntettal pajp-sūntəm
taɣəntəpteɣim.

Following the opening cry, a very crude literal translation is as follows, and [T] indicates a taboo word:

Numi God-golden Father made/ hot pillowed joyous summer/ sweat pillowed joyous summer/ unfillable [T]stomach-mouth/ I filled,/ unfillable [T]gut-mouth/ I filled.

In the second and third lines (sāŋk åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū,/ muńəm åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū), three of the four words are repeated (åsməŋ kāsiŋ tū), and in the first slot in each line a synonym is used: sāŋk (hot) and muńəm (sweat). Here is the basic pattern: repetition and use of a parallel, which may be a pair of conceptual opposites, such as hot -and-cold, long-and-short, or a pair of synonyms. In fact, when ‘opposites’ are used, their conventional implications tend to fade away. For instance, when the protagonist does something for ‘a long time and for a short time’, the focus is on doing something for a period of time. In the bear poem, she collects back fat and belly fat in preparation for hibernation, and of course, the main thing is that she collects fat on her body.

What Illyés does is to find a balance between the literal and the creative. He replicates and recreates the patterns and, where taboo words are used in the Mansi, he uses a series of synonyms of accumulative effect (bendő, bödöny) to prepare the reader for the knock-out word (puttony):

Seje-haja, seje-haja!
Fönséges, aranyos atyácskám
teremtette forró földön
vigasságos, izzadságos nyáron át
tölthetetlen bendőm szádját
töltögetem,
tölthetetlen puttonyom szádját
töltögetem.

To be continued.

Munkácsi

Here’s a misunderstanding from a couple of posts ago. I mentioned that Munkácsi’s collections of Mansi song and verse (Bernát Munkácsi, Vogul Népköltési Gyűjtemény, 4 vols., Budapest, MTA, 1892-1963) had inspired a number of twentieth-century poets, and referred to a poem about a particular kind of deep sleep, the sort so deep that the sleeper would not wake up, even if the his or her head/torso were cut off. It was not a poem per se, but the rich imagery of sleep and dreams in Ob-Ugrian cultures.

This motif of the deep sleep might, for instance, refer to the shaman’s loss of consciousness after performing his/her rites.

Here’s an example of the Mansi neck-/head-/trunk-cut, firm/rooted sleep image:

Slot 4 is always occupied by the same word for ’sleep’, ūləm, which will be familiar to Hungarian speakers as álom, dream. The preceding slots may be filled as follows:

1. puŋk-ä (head-3rd person possessive), sip-ä (neck-3rd person possessive), or porx-ä (shoulder/trunk-3rd person possessive);
2. Slot 2 might contain jäktim (cuts/chops) or ńawlənə (pursues/chases);
3. Slot 3 might contain tār-iŋ (root-ed), vaɣ-in (strong, lit: strength-ed), porx-iŋ (shoulder-ed/ trunk-ed), sari (true/genuine), ńaŋrä (powerful/firm/hard), xosä (long, C.f. HU hosszú), or usi (powerful/strong)

Such forms were explicated by Munkácsi (as nyaklevágott álom, neck-cut-off dream), and read by, amongst others, the poets László Nagy (1925-78, below left) and Ferenc Juhász (b. 1928).

László Nagy

Nagy transforms the nyaklevágott álom in his poem ‘Medvezsoltár’ (Bear-psalm) into a fejlevágható, szív-kiszakítható álom, in which the dream becomes rather ‘head-cut-off-able’, and the new attribute is ‘heart-tear-out-able’ (szív-kiszakítható). Note that the -ható is not there in the original. Translated into English as ‘Bear Psalm’ in Tony Connor and Kenneth McRobbie (trans.), Love of the Scorching Wind: Selected Poems 1953-1971, Budapest, Corvina, 1973, pp. 61-3, this line is translated as ‘the dream can be beheaded, my sleeping heart torn out’.

See László Nagy, ‘Medvezsoltár’ in Versek és versfordítások, Vol. I, Budapest, Magvető, 1975, pp. 444-6, or downloadable from the Digitális Irodalmi Akadémia.

Further reading: Robert Austerlitz, Ob-Ugric Metrics: the metrical structure of Ostyak and Vogul folk poetry, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1958; Peter Sherwood, ‘Ob-Ugrian Sleep’, in L. Jakab, L. Keresztes, A. Kiss and S. Maticsák (eds), Congressus Septimus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum. Sessiones Sectionum. Dissertationes Linguistica, Debrecen, Debrecen University Press, 1990, pp. 308-13.

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 indicate that the verb has a definite direct object, in Sygva we find a set of inflectional morphemes, inserted between the mood/tense/passive voice markers and the personal suffixes, to indicate the definite direct object.

The order of passive voice and mood/tense markers also varies. Sygva Vogul is more elaborate in marking number: it has a separate set of verb endings for singular, double, and for three or more subjects and objects. This is even more interesting if we take into account the fact that the Vogul noun system lacks an accusative case marker. As a result, definite direct objects are indicated only by means of a set of inflectional morphemes. As is often the case with languages lacking an accusative case marker, Vogul has a passive voice marker which can precede or follow the tense/mood markers.

In the second part of the session we discussed methods of internal reconstruction and systematic correspondences, the ‘sound laws’ of the Ugric languages. Peter drew our attention to the misunderstanding that gives rise to the popular belief about Hungarian according to which ‘Hungarian doesn’t like consonant clusters’. This statement might come as surprise if we consider that the Hungarian noun system abounds in derived or root words such as boncnok, stráfkocsi, krumplistészta, etc. The Hungarian verb system is more archaic than the noun system, which is why the above belief holds only in the case of verbs, which preserved more archaic elements of the Ugric phonotactic system. Nouns must be able to take any kind of ending, among them suffixes starting with a consonant without a linking vowel, unlike verbs, which do not allow a suffix added to the stem without vowel insertion if the verb ends in a consonant cluster and the first sound of the suffix is a consonant as well (e.g. parasztnak (NOUN: sz + t +n), akasztanak (VERB: sz + t + a + n).

We discussed changes affecting the sounds β and γ, which are the two extreme ends of the vocal tract, hence, they are more likely to disappear or to be replaced by a vowel if the extra syllable is needed.

After that we turned to the Zyrian and Tatar loanwords in Vogul and Ostyak dialects, and looked at charts showing the distribution of loans of various origin among the various dialects.

We also looked at etymological relations between the Hungarian, Ostyak and Vogul lexicon and explored arguments for and against the existence of a Ugric language branch within the Uralic languages.

The next couple of sessions will be spent looking at a bear poem, and a translation by Gyula Illyés.