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Attempt at an Ostyak Grammar Matthias Alexander Castrén Attempt at an Ostyak Grammar with a Short Word List Edited and commentary by Ulla-Maija Forsberg Ostiacica Attempt at an Ostyak Grammar with a Short Word List by Dr. M. Alexander Castrén St. Petersburg. Printed by the Imperial Academy of Sciences. 1849. ☙❧ Available through Eggers & Co., commissioner of the Academy. In Leipzig, by Leop. Voss. (Price 75 Silver Crowns – 25 [Ngr.]) ☙❧ Printed for the Imperial Academy of Sciences (and Letters). In December 1849. Permanent Secretary P.H. Fuss. 40 Attempt at an Ostyak Grammar 1. “Finnish” in this context is equivalent to the later term Finno-Ugric, which refers to both languages and peoples. One of Castrén’s main tar- gets was to show a kinship be- tween the Finn[o-Ugr]ic and Samoyedic languages. He was also studying the idea of a huge language family later referred to as Ural-Altaic (incl. addition- ally the Uralic, Turkic, Mongo- lian and Tungus languages). 2. This latitude must be errone- ous; 56 might be right. The southernmost parts of the modern Khanty-Mansi Auton- Preface omous Okrug lie approximate- ly on the 58th northern lati- tude. 3. Today’s Khanty-Mansi Auton- The Ugric Ostyaks form together with their kinsmen, omous Okrug stretches farther the Voguls, the most eastern and in the whole Asia to east to the border of Kras- the only branch of the widely spread and many times nojarsk Okrug. The Khanty- splintered Finnish1 family. They are still until this day Mansi (in the beginning called the main inhabitants in the old so-called Yugric Land Ostyak-Vogul) National Okrug that [A.C.] Lehrberg describes as follows: “it stretched was established in 1930 to cov- between the 36th2 and 67th northern latitude from the er approximately the same northernmost Ural mountains eastwards over the lower area. In 1977, it became an au- Obʹ all the way to the river Nadym, which flows into the tonomous okrug and from 2003, “Jugra” is also an official Gulf of Obʹ, and to Agan, which flows into Obʹ on the up- appendix of the name. per side of Surgut3; it also covered the areas by the low- er Irtyš and by [the rivers] Tavda, Tura and Čusovaja; in the south it bordered the Tartar parts [of land] and in the north the land of the former Samoyeds. It was thus a remarkable part of northwestern Asia, and covered large parts of the modern Governments of Tobolʹsk and Permʹ.” Today, in the Government of Permʹ, there are only 41 Ostiacica 4. According to the Census from 2010, the number of Ostyaks (Khanty) in the Khanty-Mansi ☙ VI ❧ Autonomous Okrug is 19,068 and Voguls (Mansi) 10,977. To- about 700 Voguls of male sex, in the Government gether they constitute only 2.1% of Tobolʹsk, the number of Voguls increases to 5025 of the Okrug’s population. The [according to Köppeni 5235] and of Ostyaks to 18,657 biggest ethnic groups today (according to Köppen 18,840) individuals of both sex- are Russians (973,978) and Ta- 4 tars (108,899). The whole popu- es . These Asiatic Finns still stay almost on the same lation of the Okrug in 2010 was low level of civilization as were the Europeans in Taci- 1,532,243. The number of speak- tus’ time. Even though many, especially Vogul, fami- ers of the Khanty and Mansi lies have recently settled down, most of them are still languages today is significant- wandering around from forest to forest, from one river ly lower than the ethnic num- to another. They live in miserable Yurts [huts] made ber. from timber, peat, birch bark or reindeer fell. Their 5. The exact area where the com- main source of livelihood is hunting in winter and mon ancestor of the Ugric lan- fishing in summer. Some keep cattle, only few live of guages was spoken is, of course, farming. Most of them are in name already Christians, not known. Lately, it has been but have still a lot of trust in their shamans. argued that the expansion cen- The idea that the Ostyaks and Voguls are closely tre would have been on the Eu- related to the Hungarians who originate from Ugria5, ropean side of the Ural moun- has been presented already since Herbertstein’s time. tains, from whence the speak- “This isJuharia (Juhra, Jugra), from where the Hun- ers of the Ob-Ugrian proto-lan- garians have occupied Pannonia, led by Attila, sub- guage would have moved east- dued many European provinces. The Yugras have still wards and merged with some today the same language as the Hungarians; whether aboriginal peoples of Siberia. this is right, I do not know” Herbertstein Rerum Mos- covit. commentar. Basil. 1571. Gyarmathi is of almost the same opinion, and Klaproth argues in his Asia Polygl[otta] p. 190 that the Ostyaks and the Voguls speak a language “which of all the Finnish languages resembles most the roots of the modern, largely mixed Hungarian”. This view is also confirmed through i. the total population in Russia in 1838. 42 Attempt at an Ostyak Grammar 6. Rather: millennia. According to Honti (1979: 23), the split of ☙ VII ❧ the Ugric branch of the Finno- Ugric family took place around my own investigations. Even though the Ugric lan- approx. 1000 BC. The ances- guages today have a great deal of differences from tors of today’s Hungarians Hungarian, these differences are, anyhow, a natural left their area in the modern Baškortostan, so-called Magna consequence of a separation, in which the peoples 6 Hungaria, and began to travel have lived already for centuries . During this time, the southwest around 500 AD. Hungarian language has adopted many foreign ele- 7. The number of root mor- ments, and the Ugric languages, on the other hand, phemes common to Hungari- have changed their original character as a conse- an and the Ob-Ugric languag- quence of diverse influences from outsidei. However, es (existing in either Khanty or we can see in the Ugric languages and in Hungarian Mansi or both) but unattested many root words7 and even some grammatical ele- in other related languages is, ments8, which do not appear at all in the other related according to UEW, ca. 100. languages, or if they do, very seldom. 8. E.g. a set of postposition-based The academic community may probably look local cases (*-nä), instrumental forward to a more detailed description of the affinity (*-l), locative (*-t(tA)), and the of the languages mentioned by a native Hungarian, verbal ending of 1 person plural who has recently arrived from his philological-ethno- *-k°. (Liimola 1963, Honti 1985, graphic journey to the Ostyaks and Voguls. What con- 1998, Kulonen 1993.) cerns my studies in the Ugric languages, I have only been able to look at them as a side issue, as during my many years’ stay in Siberia I was able to stay by the Ostyaks only for a few weeks. During this short pe- riod of time, I gathered not only various ethnographic and topographic data but also a small amount of ma- terial from the very little knownii Ostyak languageiii. i. See my travelogue in Bulletin historico-phil- ol. de l’Acad. Impér. des sciences de St-Péters- burg, Part III. No. 19, 20 ii. I know the Vogul language only from a hand written catechism. I have, however, not used this material in the present study because it contains too many mistakes. iii. What is found in the works of Gyarmathi, Pallas, Klaproth and others, consists only of in- significant and erroneous word lists. 43 Ostiacica 9. Etymology is today mainly used to refer to the study of the origins of words. Here it refers ☙ VIII ❧ to knowledge about the lan- guage (its structure and origin). I wanted to publish this material soon after that, but 10. This is the relatively uniform discovered then various deficiencies in my notes, and group of dialects also known because of these I thought I would postpone the pub- as the southern Khanty dialect. lication of this work as I was hoping to be able to visit It has been extinct since the second half or middle of the the Ostyaks again and supplement my notes on my 20th century, but is preserved way back from Eastern Siberia. Unfortunately, I could for the academic community not fulfil this plan, because I was already at that mo- thanks to the abundant mate- ment in such bad health that I had to forget all my rials collected by Antal Reguly, scientific tasks. That is why I nevertheless find it nec- Heikki Paasonen and especial- essary to publish my original notes and hope that in ly K.F. Karjalainen. Based on spite of all the shortcomings and errors in them, they the exact phonetic notes and will not be completely unwelcome and worthless for a thorough description by the the experts of the Finnish and Tartar languages. latter, the phonology and mor- My present work on the Ostyak etymology9 is phology of the dialect(s) is well mainly based on the dialect spoken in the Irtyš area10. known. In addition to this, there are still two main dialects spo- 11. The Surgut group of dialects ken by the river Obʹ: the dialect of Surgut11 on the upper comprises the western sub- and the dialect of Obdorsk12 on the lower Obʹi. Of these group of eastern Khanty dia- two, the latter is little known to me, and my notes from lects. There are still some hun- the Surgut dialect are also highly incomplete.
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