Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Aikakauskirja

A life split in two: (Re)discovering the story of the Ob-Ugrist László Knöpfler-Gombos

2022-12-18T20:59:00+02:00

This paper aims to collect the available information about László Knöpfler-Gombos’ life, with special attention to his role in assisting Bernát Munkácsi’s study of the Mansi language. The main finding of the paper is the identification of the linguist László Knöpfler with the correspondent László Gombos, as well as bringing to light available archival materials and family memories concerning him and his linguistic career.

A response to the article “Olaus Sirman runojen vertailevaa luentaa” [The comparative interpretation of Olaus Sirma’s poems] (SUSA 97, 2019)

2022-11-15T12:57:32+02:00

The article communicates a possible interpretation of Olaus Sirma's pastoral poem / love song Morse faurog as a part of the European baroque literature. The folklore features of the poem--the so called rhyme anticipation and the irregularity of the metre and the rhythm--may be attributed to the literature of the baroque period as well, and the poem doesn't diverge from the baroque literary conventions. The generic inconsistency, expressed by a hesitation of the lyrical subject, was perhaps intended as a signal for the reader to understand the pastoral as an anagoge.

Olaus Sirma, poetic irregularity, and the question of authorship

2023-08-01T11:09:35+03:00

Suomalais-ugrilaisesta kielentutkimuksesta ja sen keskeisistä tehtävistä

2023-05-24T15:54:51+03:00

Turun yliopistossa 26. huhtikuuta 2023 pidetty professoriluento

Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran vuosikertomus ja tilinpäätös 2021

2023-09-30T07:20:20+03:00

Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran vuosikertomus ja tilinpäätös 2022

2023-02-22T14:03:55+02:00

Etymology of the Udmurt enimitive uk and grammaticalization of discourse particles

2022-12-13T21:46:24+02:00

This paper deals with the etymology of the Udmurt enimitive marker uk. Contrary to the existing etymologies, which claim uk to be either a Chuvash or a Tatar borrowing, I claim that it was in fact grammaticalized from a tag question construction, which involves a negative verb and a question particle. This is supported by early written sources and dialectal data. Casting the net in a diachronically and geographically diverse variety of sources allows one to find traces of earlier grammaticalization stages that support my claim. Given that there are conceptually very similar enimitive constructions in the Samoyedic languages, negative interrogatives may prove to be an important grammaticalization source for the enimitive markers. Apart from uk, I examine several other cognate particles, which apparently were formed in a similar way.

Saamische Schatzsagen

2022-12-05T15:31:29+02:00

This article deals with the Sámi treasure legends, which are part of the corresponding Nordic tradition. The corpus of the present study consists of approximately one hundred written sources, both published and unpublished, collected at different times, as well as about the same amount of taped interviews. The latter mostly date from the late 1960s and were collected as part of the Talvadas project, archived at the University of Turku. A great part of the material deals with the more theoretical conditions of how to lay hands on the treasure buried in the ground. Narratives about concrete efforts to dig up the silver, often old coins or other valuables the person burying them in the ground wanted to secure, are in the minority.

The place where a treasure has been buried may reveal itself by optical or even acoustical signs, above all by a light. This light is visible especially on Midsummer Eve. For different reasons, success in the endeavour to dig up a treasure is very rare: Challenges were constituted by facing the frightening apparitions, breaking the silence during digging up a buried treasure, forgetting to give an offering, etc. One prerequisite for success mentioned is to throw a knife or some other metal object over the fire, which is one of the bonds with the earth spirits. Especially in more recent sources, they are mentioned as owners of buried treasures. The legends also cite other guardians.

Non-canonical structures in locative and existential predication in the Ob-Ugric languages

2022-11-27T08:31:19+02:00

The study at hand deals with different structures applied for expressing locative and existential predication in Khanty and Mansi, analysing a comparably large amount of data from various databases. Apart from the “expected” and traditionally described pattern “figure (theme) + ground (location) + copula”, the paper also accounts for posture verbs and transitive habeo-verbs playing a role in the named functional domain. Additionally, it is shown that a significant number of relevant clauses are structurally ambiguous between a locative and an existential reading. Finally, the paper underlines that the Ob-Ugric languages show a clear polarity split in the expression of locative and existential predication since the observed variation mainly touches affirmative clauses. In contrast, negative clauses are, as a rule, formed with negative existential particles.

On some problems of Ugric etymology: loans and substrate words

2023-01-25T11:38:43+02:00

In this paper, the shared vocabulary of the Ugric languages (Hungarian and the Ob-Ugric languages Khanty and Mansi) is discussed. Words that have been considered loanwords from Iranian or Turkic languages into Proto-Ugric, the intermediary proto-language of Hungarian and Ob-Ugric in traditional models of Uralic taxonomy, are analyzed critically, and Proto-Ugric words that fulfill the criteria of substrate words are also analyzed. It is shown that a large part of the vocabulary traditionally reconstructed for Proto-Ugric in earlier etymological dictionaries like the UEW, consist of parallel loanwords (sometimes from unknown sources) rather than shared lexical innovations.

Permeating etymology – remarks on Permic etymology

2022-11-11T14:08:05+02:00

This article discusses five Permic words or group of words including *ki̮ri̮m ‘handful, bunch’, *kun ‘lye’, *li̮a ‘sand’, *mi̮r- ‘to take by force, exert effort’ and *vi̮ŋ ‘strength, might’. The words typically have an existing etymology, which in most cases is a Uralic comparison. This traditional proposition is rejected and a new etymological proposal is made.

Permic languages have only rarely been the starting point or the focus of etymological studies and have often been viewed with a certain anything goes approach towards their historical phonology. This article tries to remedy this by paying close attention to phonological regularity and by taking the latest advancements in historical Uralic phonology into consideration tries to breath new life into a field that has grown stale over the years. Methologically the most noteworthy aspect is the combining of historical phonology with derivational morphology to detect petrified derivatives. Given the eroding nature of sound changes affecting the Permic languages, this type of combination is not only etymologically fruitful but a methdological necessity.

Sekundäre depiktive und resultative Prädikation und der tschuktschische Designativ

2022-10-11T20:08:56+03:00

This study re-approaches the morphosyntax of the Chukchi designative case, a minor predicative case whose central function is the encoding of secondary depictive and resultative predicates. Although the designative case has been covered in Chukchi grammaticography (Bogoras 1922; Skorik 1961, 1977; Dunn 1999; Kämpfe & Volodin 1995), these accounts offer diverging and partly contradicting accounts concerning its compatibility with certain nominal parts of speech; of central relevance is the account of Inenlikej (1974) who went as far and denied the existence of a designative case altogether. A dedicated study of the syntax and semantics of the designative case has however, so far, not been attempted. Based on a manually glossed corpus of almost 13000 orthographic Chukchi words and additional electronically searchable Chukchi materials, this study covers the designative case from the perspective of participant-oriented adjuncts (Himmelmann & Schultze-Berndt 2005) and a recent questionnaire on secondary predication in Uralic Languages (Groot 2017). Since a number of Northern Eurasian languages have cases with a similar function e.g, Yukaghiric, Eskimo, several Uralic languages as well as Chukchi’s genetic relatives Koryak, Alutor and Itelmen, some cross-linguistic comparisons finalize this study.

Keywords: Chukchi, designative case, depictive secondary predication, resultative secondary predication, participant-oriented adjuncts, Chukotko-Kamchadal languages, Yukaghir languages, Siberian Yupik Eskimo, Uralic languages

Temporal perspective and its formal background: An explanation for aspectual synonymy between simple and analytic past tenses in Mari

2022-12-12T14:26:26+02:00

This paper examines and explains perspective-based temporal variation between simple and analytic past tenses in Mari narration. In current research, the analytic past tenses are presented as aspectually synonymous with the simple past tense 2, implicating that there is no functional distinction between these morphologically very dissimilar operators. To overcome the apparent shortages of the purely aspectual approach, this paper dismantles the tenses into their morphosemantic ingredients and explains their exact functions by their form, giving hence also new light to the development of the items. As will be shown, the reason for tense variation is the position of perspective time, a temporal vantage point from which an event is seen. The simple past tense 2 sets the perspective time outside of the story line, while the analytic tenses locate it inside the narrative world, which affects the temporal and non-temporal structure of the discourse. Crucially, the concept of perspective is inherently built in the structure of the tenses: I will argue, that the “auxiliary” of the analytic tenses is de facto a deictic particle developed for temporal manipulation of events, and its application in anaphoric narration creates internal complexity to the story. The “pastness” of the simple past tense 2, in contrast, is anaphoric by nature, which makes narrations structured with it temporally one-dimensional.