UNIVERSITY OF TARTU UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN MINOR URALIC LANGUAGES: GRAMMAR AND LEXIS Edited by Ago Künnap T artu-Groningen 1995 UNIVERSITY OF TARTU UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN MINOR URALIC LANGUAGES: GRAMMAR AND LEXIS Edited by Ago Künnap Tartu-Groningen 1995 This book is supported by the EC TEMPUS Office ISBN 9985-60-206-4 © University of Tartu, 1995 Paul Ariste 3.2.1905-2.2.1990 PREFACE Minor Languages and Cultures in Contact was a three-year TEMPUS project that ended on 1 September 1995. Partners were the philology departments of the Universities of Tartu, Groningen, Bochum and Leuven. Initiator of the project was Ass. Prof. Tjeerd de Graaf (Groningen). In the three years of the project staff and student mobility has been financed between Tartu and Groningen/Bochum/Leuven in the following fields: Uralics, Dutch, English, Low German, Literature theory, History, Computer linguistics and Phonetics. Dutch 11 students from Tartu studied 1 or 2 trimesters in Groningen or Leuven. Some teachers from Groningen taught for a short period in Tartu. Anne Tamm worked on a bilingual Dutch-Estonian dictionary. A lot of books are bought for the Dutch library in Tartu. Finno-Ugrics 3 students from Groningen studied 1 semester in Tartu. Some teachers have been exchanged for shorter periods. 2 teachers from Tartu were in Groningen for 2 trimesters to deliver a course on Estonian. English/Low German Some students from Tartu studied 1 semester in Groningen or Leuven. Teacher exchange for shorter periods between Tartu and Groningen/ Leuven/Bochum. Literature theory Teacher exchange for shorter periods between Tartu and Groningen/ Bochum. History 5 students from Tartu studied 1 semester in Groningen or Leuven, 1 student from Groningen studied I semester in Tartu, some teachers/researchers from Tartu worked in Groningen/Leuven for some weeks in libraries and archives. Computer linguistics/Phonetics A staff member from Tartu was able to finish her dissertation in Phonetics after a stay in Groningen. A student from Tartu studied computer linguistics for a year in Groningen. Cooperation is established between computer linguists of Groningen and Tartu, and lead, among others, to a COPERNICUS project. Equipment With TEMPUS money there have been purchased 9 computers, 2 copy machines, 400 books, and other study material for Tartu University. Conferences In May 1994 a conference has been organized in Groningen on Minor Languages and Cultures in Contact. In May/June 1995 a similar conference took place in Tartu. AS examples of the joint work between the Uralists three books were published (edited by Prof. Ago Künnap): "Minor Uralic Languages and Their 5 Contacts" (1993), "Minor Uralic Languages: Structure and Development" (1994) and "Minor Uralic Languages: Grammar and Lexis" (1995). Coordinators of the project 6 ON THE OCCASION OF PAUL ARISTE'S 90TH ANNIVERSARY On 3 February this year merited Estonian scientist, academic, professor, doctor of philosophy (spec, in philology) Paul Ariste would have been 90. He was one of the best known and distinguished specialists in Finno-Ugrics of his time in the whole world. Paul Ariste's scientific activity was very productive and varied. The total capacity of his scientific publications amounts to at least 8,500 pages. Among over a thousand articles and scores of monographs there are, to a great extent, fundamental works which have a longlasting value. Paul Ariste formed his own Finno-Ugristic school. Together with his students he participated in more than 30 linguistic expeditions and in the postwar years he educated national scientists for almost all Finno-Ugric peoples. P. Ariste built a bridge between Uralic linguistics and neighbouring sciences, making an essential contribution also to Indo-European philology and Interlinguistics. Reading his works, one cannot but admire the scientist's rare creative ability, his ability of finding and discovering new ideas. Paul Ariste was born on 3 February 1905 in the North Tartu County, the Torma parish as a son of the smith of the Rääbise estate. His road to education began in the local village school and continued in Tallinn. In 1925 P. Ariste finished the Tallinn Classical Gymnasium for Boys and continued his studies in Tartu University (1925-1929) in the field of the Estonian, Finnic languages, Uralic linguistics, folklore and German philology. In 1931 he completed his M. A. thesis "Estonian-Swedish Loanwords in Estonian". After that the young researcher was awarded a scholarship by Tartu University for continuing his studies in the universities of Helsinki and Hamburg. While abroad, he mainly concentrated on experimental phonetics but he also dealt with Finno-Ugric languages, general phonetics, Swedish, German and Low German. P. Ariste began his career as an assistant at Tartu University in 1933. He delivered lectures on phonetics and supervised a laboratory course in experimental phonetics. In 1939 P. Ariste defended his Ph.D. dissertation "The Sounds of Hiiu Dialects". In 1940 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Estonian, in 1944 Professor, Head of the Chair of Finno-Ugric Languages. In 1954 P. Ariste was elected an academic of the Academy of Sciences of the ESSR. On his initiative the section of Finno-Ugric languages was founded at the Institute of Language and Literature in 1957. In the years 1957-1960 P. Ariste headed the section. In the years 1944-1977 P. Ariste worked at Tartu University as Professor, Head of the Chair of Finno-Ugric Languages. After 7 that he continued working there as a professor and professor-counsellor. P. Ariste died one day before his 85th birthday. However, P. Ariste took up Finno-Ugristics mainly in the postwar years. His earlier research concerned mostly Estonian, although the temporal line between different research areas is largely conditional. P. Ariste's wide sphere of interest involved Estonian phonetics, dialects, wordstock and its formation, the history of the written language and Estonian ethnogeny. As P. Ariste mastered all the languages spoken in Estonia, he could observe contacts between Estonian and other languages. In all these areas he has left a remarkable contribution to us. P. Ariste's works laid a foundation to the experimental phonetic research of Estonian. P. Ariste was the first Estonian phonetician who had received a special training. At the beginning of the 1930s he studied at the Hamburg University phonetics laboratory under the guidance of Prof. G. Panconcelli- Calzia, and also at the laboratory of Helsinki University where his adviser was Prof. F. Äimä. Later P. Ariste carried out measurements at the phonetics laboratory of Tartu University where he himself worked as a lecturer. In 1939 P. Ariste's most important work on phonetics was completed and published: his Ph.D. dissertation "The Sounds of Hiiu Dialects" (ACUT В 47 : 1, 294 pp.). It is a most extensive and best experimental phonetic investigation ever written about Estonian dialects. The Ph. D. dissertation was a long stride forward as in Estonian phonetic research as well as in dialectal research. A few years later the subject of the dissertation was continued in the work "On the Quantity of the Sounds in Hiiu Dialects" (ACUT В 49 : 1941, 79 pp.). In addition to this P. Ariste investigated experimentally several other phenomena about Estonian sounds, such as palatalisation, quantity, definite sounds, etc. As a result of the author's phonetic research the book "Estonian Phonetics" was published (Tartu 1946, 128 pp.), and its revised edition "Phonetics of the Estonian Language" followed (Tallinn 1953, 132 pp.). The later completed editions have successfully been used as textbooks for students. This work by P. Ariste is a significant achievement in Estonian phonetic research. P. Ariste was the founder of Estonian phonetics and the teacher of the phoneticians of younger generations. He also investigated Votic, Livonian, and Komi pronunciation, taught phonetics of Slavonic and German languages and supervised young Mordvins, Maris and Udmurts to experimentally investigate the phonetics of their mother tongues. Already in his student years P. Ariste began to take interest in the problems of Estonian wordstock. He was fascinated by Swedish loanwords in Estonian. For his profound study "Estonian-Swedish Loanwords in Estonian" P. Ariste was awarded his M. A. degree in 1931 (Published : ACUT В 29 : 3, 1933, 148 pp.). The Estonian vocabulary research became enriched with a novel and methodically mature work. The work contains 253 loanwords. Some of them have even found their way into the Estonian literary language, as hiivama, iil ~ iiling, jampsi ma, jung, kepp, kratt, moor, nugima, näkk, räim, sump. taldrik, tont, vaar, umher, et ai. P. Ariste's work on investigating Low German loans was fundamental. In his paper "Some Low German Loanwords" (EK 1937, 5) he observed 25 8 words, among them well-known words jukerdama, jänni (jääma), kellu, klii, liigud, lähker, mats, matt, memm, neetima, pitser, pnigi, ääs, et ai. of everyday usage. German loans in older Estonian texts were particularly dealt with in the papers "Georg Müller's German Loanwords" (ACUT В 46 : 1, 1940) and "German Loanwords in Heinrich Stahl's Language" (ESA IX, 1963). As it appears, the majority of loans came from Low German, only a few originated from High German. The number of Low German loans in the Estonian literary language is very high even today, amounting to more than 1,000 words. P. Ariste was also interested in Russian-Estonian loans. In his article "On the Earliest Language Contacts Between the Slavs and Finnic Peoples" (Looming 1952, 6) he tried, on the basis of loanwords, to cast light on historical and cultural relationships between ancient Slavonic and Finnic tribes. The occurrence of Slavonic and Russian loans in the 17th and 18th century literary texts was observed in the article "On Russian Loanwords in the Early Estonian Literary Language" (KK 1958, 1).