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ARCHIVAL PELYM DICTIONARIES OF MANSI LANGUAGE AND THEIR VALUE FOR VERIFICATION OF ACCURACY OF KANNISTO AND MUNKACHI DICTIONARIES

N. Kosheliuk

Abstract

This article deals with the material from two archival Pelym-Russian dictionaries of Mansi language. The dictionaries were disclosed quite recently: the first one, compiled by Father Konstantin Slovtsov in 1905, was found in 2015 in The National Library of Finland; the second one, recorded by Archpriest Simeon Cherkalov in 1783, was found in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg in 2017. Previously, none of these dictionaries was put into scientific usage. The Pelym dialect is one of the dialects of the Mansi language, forming the Ob-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. It was distributed over a vast area, which can be compared with the territory of modern Austria. The length from Solikamsk, where Cherkalov compiled his dictionary, to Yekaterinburg, near which Konstantin Slovtsov were lived, is about 550 km. Austria has almost the same length from the East to the Western border of the country. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Pelym dialect is considered to have disappeared. Until recently was thought that on the Pelym dialect of Mansi dialect there are only dictionaries of the Finnish linguist Arturi Kannisto and Hungarian scientist Bernat Munkachi. During his expeditions in the late nineteenth century they were collected a lot of material on phonetics, grammar and vocabulary of Mansi language. Unfortunately, their data often contradict each other. We used additional data from modern northern and eastern Mansi dialects, as well as Slovtsov’s and Cherkalov’s dictionaries, to establish which one is more accurate. The linguistic analysis showed that, despite the different form of writing words, all researchers clearly and consistently displayed the vowels of the Pelym dialect. However, the data in Slovtsov and Cherkalov dictionaries are more phonological, while the dictionaries Kannisto and Munkachi are more reflect the phonetic side. During the research we also found inaccuracies in communication of the meaning of some Proto-Mansi phonemes in the Munkachi, Slovtsov and Cherkalov dictionaries. Thus, we came to the conclusion that the Kannisto dictionary is closest to the Proto-Mansi reconstruction of vowels, made on the material of modern Mansi dialects, and therefore is more accurate. This assumption corresponds to the received opinion of specialists in Finno-Ugric studies about the highest accuracy of Kannisto dictionary compared to Munkachi. It’s important to stress, that introduction into scientific use of newly unearthed Slovtsov and Cherkalov dictionary allowed to verify the hypothesis of the Kannisto’s recordings’ highest accuracy.

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