In a Nenets course this fall, I’ve used a lot the Comparative Nenets-Nganasan Multimedia Dictionary compiled by St. Petersburg scholars Marina Lublinskaya and Tatiana Sherstinova, with headwords in those two languages and in Russian and English. The Introduction presents the two languages and their history in a fashion accessible to readers who don’t necessary have [...]
I’m not really sure what to make of this passage in András Róna-Tas’ paper ‘Turkic influence on the Uralic languages’, found in The Uralic Languages ed. Denis Sinor (Amsterdam: Brill, 1988). Róna-Tás is describing borrowings between Ancient Turkic and Proto-Samoyed: PS kåptə̂- ‘to castrate’, kåptə̂ ‘a castrated reindeer ox’ (Ne, Ng, En, Sk: JJ 60) [...]
Over at his excellent weblog Rénhírek, László Fejes has written several concise introductions to the vowel harmony of various Uralic languages. I’ve translated below his Nganasan description. The Nganasan vowel inventory We the following vowels in Nganasan: i, y, ü, u, e, ə, o, a. The majority of these can be compared to the similarly [...]
This is a really cool resource of the kind I wish I saw more of: the St. Petersburg Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences offers a Comparative Nenets-Nganasan Multimedia Dictionary which has Russian and English headwords as well. Just reading the introduction is worthwhile, as one can immediately see how the two languages [...]