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Counting Bases in the Samoyedic Languages: the Present and the Past

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UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM Graduate School for Humanities MA Program in General Linguistics MA Thesis Counting bases in the Samoyedic Languages: the present and the past Amsterdam 2016 Contents Preface 3 Acknowledgements 4 1. Introduction 5 2. Theoretical framework 7 2.1. Numeral systems and counting bases 7 2.2. Historical typology of numeral systems 8 2.3. Structural typology of numeral systems 9 3. Overview of characteristics of the Samoyedic languages 15 3.1 Samoyedic languages' ancestry and modern taxonomy 15 3.2 Sociolinguistic situation and documentation 18 3.3 Overview of linguistic characteristics of the Samoyedic languages 21 4. Samoyedic numerals 22 4.1 Proto-Uralic, proto-Finno-Ugric and proto-Samoyedic numerals 22 4.2. Samoyedic numerals: present state 28 4.3 Counting bases in the Samoyedic languages 31 4.3.1 Quaternary system 31 4.3.2 Septimal system 34 4.3.3 Nonary system 36 4.3.4 Decimal system 37 4.3.5 Vigesimal system 39 5. Discussion 40 6. Conclusion 42 References 43 !2 Preface Numeral systems seem to be one of the most captivating linguistic topics I have ever come across. I have started studying numerals just recently; however, I found this subject extremely interesting from the very beginning. People always had to count: the days, the food, each other, so numerals represent the material for both comparative and historical linguistics. I have chosen to work with the Uralic, more specifically Samoyedic numerals, as 3 years ago I took part in an expedition to the Yamal Nenets Autonomous District, where I studied Selkup and since then I have been working mostly on the Uralic languages and have never regretted this: the Uralic language family is for now my main linguistic interest. Numerals in the Samoyedic languages, namely counting bases, represent a very interesting linguistic phenomenon as there is so much to be discovered, so many questions to be asked and so many answers to be found. I consider this thesis «Counting bases in the Samoyedic Languages: the present and the past» as a journey to the mysterious world of the Samoyeds. So let the adventure begin! !3 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor prof. dr. Kees Hengeveld for his useful guidance, comments and considerable encouragement to complete this thesis. Furthermore, I would like to thank my second reader dr. Cecilia odé for her support and for introducing me to my supervisor. I would also like to thank those who sparked my interest in Uralic languages and numeral systems studies, in particular my Yamal fieldwork supervisor olga Kazakevich and my internship supervisor Liza Bylinina. I wish to express my special thanks to all my lecturers at the University of Amsterdam for their precious assistance, scholarly knowledge and enthusiasm. I would also like thank Eugenia Uskova from Mari State University, Valentin Gusev from Hamburg University and Halgar Fenririsson from Moscow for helping me to find some books and articles I needed for this research. Last but not least, I would like to express my indebtedness to all those who have given me constant support and love during the completion of this thesis: my love, my precious friends and my beloved family, especially my talented sister Anna for being there for me any time of day or night. !4 1. Introduction In this research numeral systems of the Samoyedic languages are under investigation. The Samoyedic languages form a branch of the Uralic languages, which is believed to have a common ancestral language called proto-Samoyedic, that has developed into 4 groups: North- Samoyedic (including Nenets, Nganasan, Enets languages), Selkup, Mator and Kamas (Bykonya 1998). Ethnologue1 doesn't include any information about Mator; however, Russian sources do (e.g., Bykonya 1998). All of the present-day Samoyedic languages have a decimal (10-based) numeral system. The main question raised in this research is whether this has always been the case. Scholars have attempted to answer the same question about all the Uralic languages taken together (Honti 1993, Napolskih 2012); however, the results sometimes contradict each other. Scholars make remarks about the fact that Samoyedic numerals have specific features that distinguish them among other Uralic languages. A research concerning counting bases in the Samoyedic languages in particular, to my knowledge, has never been conducted before. The current thesis contains studies of numeral systems of all Samoyedic languages. I will search for answers through cultural-historical analysis: such an approach will provide information about what techniques the Samoyedic peoples used to count and how these techniques are reflected in the formation of numerals. The material of the research includes previous studies on the topic and their analysis. The scientific literature on the numerals of Selkup, Enets, Nganasan and Nenets is broad enough for such an analysis. However, finding an explicit description of the numerals in Mator and Kamas appeared to be more problematic. During the course of writing this thesis, I have been writing to different institutions in order to ask for different pieces of work and after all I have succeeded, with the help of others, mentioned in the Acknowledgements. It should be understood that such a research project also includes studying cultural and even domestic features of the Samoyedic peoples in the past and partly in the present, their connections with other peoples, their migrations and even their trade history, as numeral systems are directly connected with the traditions and the way of life. The research will therefore present a unique collection of data concerning numeral systems of the Samoyedic languages, which has never been compiled before. An analysis of different materials and theories will then allow me to postulate my own hypothesis about the 1 https://www.ethnologue.com !5 counting bases of the Samoyedic languages throughout the course of the past ca. 6.000 years, around a period of time in which the history of these languages can be examined with the methods of comparative linguistics (Honti 1999: 243). Mator is extinct since the 1840s; the last native speaker of Kamas — Klavdiya Plotnikova2 — died in 1989, while the rest of the Samoyedic languages are endangered. As two of the languages which are being described here are already extinct and the rest are on the brink of extinction, this task can be justifiably called urgent. Now I have at least a theoretical possibility to refer to native speakers, perhaps in just a few years this will not be the case. The research will consist of a Theoretical Framework, where I will first go over some of the basic concepts and give an overview of the historical and structural typologies of numeral systems. I will then provide the reader with information on the Samoyedic languages, such as their ancestry, taxonomy, sociolinguistic situation and documentation, followed by linguistic characteristics. The main chapter will begin with an overview of scholars' attempts to reconstruct proto-Uralic, proto-Finno-Ugric and proto-Samoyedic numeral systems. I am not going to reconstruct the system myself — my task is to study existing reconstructions. I will then give an overview of the present numerals in each of the six Samoyedic languages examined in this study. The data is collected from different sources, acknowledged below. Then counting bases of the Samoyedic languages will be studied, different theories on the topic will be examined. I am going to study five existing hypotheses concerning this issue. I will provide theoretical framework for each of the hypotheses, including scholars' opinions on them and their pro and contra arguments, followed by my own opinion and reasoning. On the basis of the conducted research I will propose my own answer to the question whether the Samoyedic languages and their common ancestral language proto-Samoyedic have always had a decimal numeral system. 2 Klavdiya Plotnikova (ca. 1893-1989) was the last living speaker of Kamas. She did not have the opportunity to speak Kamas after 1950, because there was no one who could speak it to her. Despite that, her Kamas skills were quite good (Matveev 1965: 34). Linguists such as Kai Donner, Aleksandr Matveyev, Ago Künnap have worked with her. !6 2. Theoretical framework 2.1. Numeral systems and counting bases Since my study focuses on counting bases, I will start this section with a definition of numerals, numeral systems and the place of counting bases within them. Numerals are «frequent expressions used in daily communication to count objects, compare amounts, calculate, determine order, make measurements, encode information and transmit data» (Koşaner 2016: 131). A numeral system is a set of ways in which we, as humans, realize numerals. This broad definition includes ways to write numerals down or to represent them in speech. Furthermore, we need some sort of a counting base, which is the fundamental numeral that all other numerals of the specific system stand in relation to (Weibull 2004: 1). In a language that has X as a counting base, numerals are expressed via different calculations with this X. For example, the language used in this paper — English — has numeral 10 as a counting base (such a system is called a decimal system): numerals from 0 to 10 have unique names and symbols and all numerals higher than these are expressed using multiplication and addition applied to the base (with some exceptional irregularities such as 11 'eleven'). Numeral systems can be divided into positional systems, where the order of symbols is important for the meaning of the numeral as a whole, and non-positional systems, where the order doesn't play any role (Weibull 2004: 8). English obviously has a positional notation, as we distinguish the meanings of 64 and 46. Moreover, numerals are divided into cardinal, ordinal, fractional, collective, distributive, approximative, multiplicative, etcetera.
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