Безѹмниѥ

Doing a search on Amazon.com will match not only book titles, but also the text of any book that has been digitized. Sometimes this means you get returns from books rather far removed from your studies which unexpectedly make reference to them.

One example is that in a search for ‘Cheremis’, the now obsolete English ethnonym for the Mari people, Amazon returns Braudy & Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Oxford University Press, 2004). Sure enough, on page 68 one finds:

The study of cinema as an art—the study of cinematographic expressiveness—can therefore be conducted according to methods derived from linguistics. For instance, there is no doubt that films are amenable to analyses comparable (mutatis mutandis) to those Thomas A. Sebeok has applied to Cheremis songs, or those Samuel R. Levin has proposed.

It’s not up anymore, but doing a search for Winfred Lehmann’s superlative Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics once returned a self-published romance novel, where the author had an eggheaded character relaxing in bed with the book.

The 24th International Finno-Ugrian Students Conference (IFUSCO) will be held in Helsinki, May 14–18. I got my hands on one of the tote bags to be given out to all attending the conference. This features the word ‘hello’ in a number of Uralic languages, missing only a handful such as Nganasan and Selkup.

It was fun to figure out which language each of the words from. I was stumped only by two.

Jeremy Bradley, a student at the University of Vienna has learnt Meadow Mari and is preparing some new Internet resources for the language.

What may be the most important new offering is the Meadow Mari Multilingual Dictionary, allowing queries in English, German, Russian, Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian. The more I have to work with online dictionaries when I’m on the road and away from my home library, the more frustrated I get with their limitations, but they are indeed better than nothing.

He has also created a Meadow Mari Morphology Generator and a Meadow Mari Transcription Tool for generating Cyrillic from one of five different Latin transcription tools.

In Historical and Linguistic Interaction Between Inner-Asia and Europe ed. Árpád Berta (Szeged, 1997), the Proceedings of the 39th Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) in Szeged, Hungary June 16–21, 1996, András Róna-Tas contributes the paper ‘The migration of the Hungarians and their settlement in the Carpathian Basin’. It sketches the stages by which the Hungarians went from being a minor Finno-Ugrian people somewhere near the Permians to masters of modern-day Hungary, with a few interesting linguistic bits.

Róna-Tas gives the etymology of the Hungarian people’s self-appellation magyar as a compound of the ethnonym *manš (cognate with the self-appelation of the Vogul/Mansi people) plus the word *er ‘man, creature’. Indeed, the form magyer lacking vowel harmony was recorded until the 13th century.

The Hungarians switched to a nomadic way of life in the 5th of 6th centuries AD in the southern part of the Urals near the Rivers Yayik or Ural. This is when all the Chuvash-type Turkic words came in, such as Hu. ökör ‘ox’ ~ Chuv. *văgăr but Old Turkic öküz.

Along with a host of other Turkic peoples, the Hungarians reached southern Russian near the border with modern-day Ukraine, inhabiting the area between the Kuban, the Don and the Sea of Azov. This was just north of the Alans, whose presence in the region is well-documented. Alan contacts gave loanwords such as Hungarian asszony ‘noblewoman’ ~ Old Osetian axsin ‘princess’. Old Turkic loanwords also came into Hungarian at the time, such as Hu. kőris ‘ash tree’ ~ West Old Turkic keürič and Hu. gyümölcs ‘fruit’ ~ OT yemiš. Their vicinity to the Black Sea facilitated the borrowing of words such as Hu. homok ‘sand’ ~ OT kumaki and Hu. hajó ‘boat’ ~ OT. kayik.

The final stage before the occupation of the Hungarian basin is one that I didn’t know about earlier, but seems to have gone on for nearly two hundred years before they eventually reached their current home in AD 895. Towards the end of the 7th century, the Hungarians moved down into the territory between the Dnieper and the Lower Danube. The early Hungarians called this region Etelküzü, where Etel is from the generic West Turkic name for ‘river’ and küzü is the same as the root of modern Hungarian postposition között ‘between’ which has a locative ending tacked on. The name of the region is equivalent to Greek ‘Mesopotamia’. This is when loanwords such as Hu. szőlő ‘wine grape’ ~ Turkic yedlig were borrowed.

I also thought it neat to learn that the Hungarian-speaking inhabitants of ‘Magna Hungaria’, the area around the Kama River visited by the Hungarian friar Julian in 1235 who was amazed to meet long separated kinsmen, had not stayed in the area the entire time, but in fact moved there from Etelküzü with some Bulgar tribes.

As recently announced on Finnish linguistic lists, the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland has published a new publicly accessible database. Evita contains references to linguistic literature dealing with the origins of Finnish words, from 1966 to the turn of the 21st century.

Jussi Ylikoski announces the birth of the electronic version of the Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne. I’m happy that I can not only read the field’s foremost journal, but I can also save PDFs to my notebook for later reference.

Another appalling bit of news out of Mari El, where yet another activist has been beaten.

An activist of the Mari people’s movement has fallen into a coma after he was beaten by unknown assailants.

On the night of April 18 Valery Mochaev, an activist of the Mari people’s movement was beaten with unusual cruelty, our correspondent Собкор®ru reports.

The unknown assailants fractured his skull at the entrance to his home. Valery Mochaev has fallen into a coma and was operated on. He is now in serious condition.

From April 16 to 19 the 8th Congress of the Mari People was held in Yoshkar-Ola. Valery Mochaev attended the congress with delegates from Yoshar-Ola and chaired one of its committees.

Mochaev is regarded as one of the leaders of the ‘moderate wing’ of the Mari people’s movement.

This brief passage from the writings of Sergei Chavain, the founder of Mari letters, is a bit too romantic nationalist for me, but I suppose this would be a good mindset for me to adopt before I return to Mari and Chuvash villages, where I will probably have to help out some amount in local agriculture.

Now that I have one year remaining in my master’s studies, the time has come to choose a subject for thesis. Here is the proposal as approved by the department today.

For my master’s thesis, I would like to systematically describe the inventory of verbs of motion in Mari. Learners of Mari are confronted with a bewildering amount of verbs generally translated as ‘go’ or ‘leave’ in English, but which native Mari speakers perceive as appropriate for different contexts.

Little scholarly writing has been done on Mari verbs of motion, and the definitions of these verbs given in Mari learning materials are incomplete and directed mainly towards a native Russian-speaking audience. Therefore, a careful study of these verbs will be of value to more than a single audience. On one hand, it will contribute to the theoretical understanding of the Finno-
Ugrian languages. On the other hand, it will also benefit those working towards proficiency in practical spoken Mari, especially those who are not native Russian speakers.

A theoretical framework for the study of verbs of motion in Finno-Ugrian languages has already been developed by Torbjörn Söder in his doctoral thesis “Walk This Way”: Verbs of Motion in Three Finno-Ugric Languages, Studia Uralica Upsaliensa 33 (Uppsala, 2001). Söder’s work examines North Khanty, North Saami and Hungarian, but it offers a general method for categorizing verbs of motion and an example to follow in deriving useful information from written sources and informants. Extending this to Mari would be a feasible goal for the master’s thesis.

However, as my main interest is language contact between Mari and its neighbors, I would like to examine one further aspect of Mari verbs of motion, namely their origins. Besides its inventory of verbs of motion inherited from Proto-Uralic, Mari has borrowed some core verbs of motion from its southern neighbor Chuvash. It would be interesting to see what role these shared lexemes play in the Chuvash system of verbs of motion, and how they may have changed in being integrated into the Mari system.

In order to achieve as complete a view as possible of these verb systems, I intend on visiting Mari and Chuvash villages for the month of July 2008 to carry out interviews with local informants along Söder’s lines. The remainder of the Spring 2008 term and the whole of the Fall 2008 term will be dedicated to intensive theoretical reading in order to productively process and elaborate the material gained from fieldwork and written sources.

Mari’s relations with Tatar are nearly as significant as those with Chuvash. I would like to do fieldwork on the Tatar system of verbs of motion sometime in the 2008–2009 academic year. However, I am unsure if time and funding will permit.

I am busier than ever, but unfortunately my current activities don’t make for very interesting blogging. After reaching proficiency in Mari, I’ve had to go and start from scratch with Chuvash, and I can’t seem to write any entertaining posts from the very elementary level I am currently at. My theoretical reading has dropped because of the sheer burden of having to quickly learn to speak certain languages in a practical context. Nonetheless, I have a few things to report.

I am currently at work on an English translation of Ya. G. Grigoryev’s Mari textbook Марийский язык: пособие для начинающих изучать марийский язык (Yoshkar-Ola: Marijskoe Knizhnoe Izdatelstvo, 1953). It’s old and somewhat Stalinist, but it’s a remarkably well-organized book. I should be finished with the translation by the summer, and I’m happy that an English-language Mari textbook will soon be available for those many students whose Russian isn’t yet adequate. One Finno-Ugrianist recently reported that he is in negotiations to translate the Марийский язык для всех textbook into English, so 2007 and 2008 promise to make learning Mari much easier.

My travel plans this summer are Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan) in June, Russia (Mari El and Chuvasia) in July, and Moldova and Romania in August–September. My big goal for the summer is feeling as comfortable with the Turkic languages as I am with the Finno-Ugrian languages, preparing myself to professionally specialize on language contact between Mari and its Turkic neighbours, as well as to get by better in Kazakhstan where I foresee returning frequently.

The supposed lack of support for Mari Unicode Cyrillic on Windows has gotten wide media attention in Russia, and regrettably it’s a simple case of people not knowing how to work their computer. In one television report, a woman complains that her printouts of Mari materials from an Internet cafe are gibberish because they don’t have the non-standard font Mari Times New Roman, yet in the Internet cafes I’ve visited in Yoshkar-Ola it’s trivial to install your own fonts when you start your session.

There’s also numerous misunderstandings of the nature of Unicode. A recent article at MariUver brings attention to an obsolete Mari letter:

Until 1929 there was a sixth extra letter, yeru (ы) with a breve. This sign was used quite often in printed materials in the beginning of the 20th century.

In order to translate old Mari newspapers, magazines and books into modern electronic formats we need that letter. But it’s not to be found in the table of Unicode signs.

Well, it’s not to be found in the tables because it’s not a precomposed character, but it’s trivial to produce the letter from the combination of u+044b cyrillic small letter yeru and u+0306 combining breve. Here’s a screenshot from my computer.

Surely there are some Unicode-savvy native speakers of Mari out there. Would that they translate basic introductions to Unicode into Mari to give to their compatriots.