Tapani Salminen
figierten definiten Elemente in Eurasien
bedürfen noch weiterer Untersuchungen.
Was die Aufsätze von Mikhail Kopotev (“The Case of X TAK X: Typological
and Historical Context”) und Merja Salo
(“The Derivational Passive and Reflexive in Mari Grammars”) mit der Slawisierung Nordrußlands zu tun haben,
bleibt ein Rätsel.
Zum Schluß
Der Herausgeber hat mit diesem höchst
interessanten Band einen wichtigen Beitrag zu aktuellen und wichtigen wissenschaftlichen Debatten gegeben. Bei der
Erforschung von Substrat- und Kontakterscheinungen in der Finnougristik gibt
es sowohl spannende neue Forschungs-
ergebnisse als auch Dauerdebatten, die
vielleicht auch von chronischen Problemen in der Argumentation und vom Fehlen einer tieferen meta-methodologischen Diskussion zeugen. Hoffentlich
helfen Beiträge wie dieser Tagungsband,
wo auf eine erfrischende Weise auch alte
Gegner und Parteien in sehr scharfen
Debatten (Koivulehto, Helimski und
Ritter!) in einem Band zu finden sind,
die prinzipiellen Fragen der Sprachkontakte und des kontakt- und substratbedingten Sprachwandels in Zukunft
ruhig und nüchtern zu betrachten.
Besonders lobenswert ist auch, daß das
Werk im PDF-Format übers Internet
(http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/slav/
nwrussia/eng/Conference/papers.htm)
zu beziehen ist.
Johanna Laakso
Genuine and confused information about
Central Siberian languages
Languages and prehistory of Central
Siberia. Edited by E d w a r d J .
Vajda . (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 262.) Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004.
x, 275 pp.
The structure of Languages and prehistory of Central Siberia is curious. One
half consists of a single article by
Gregory D. S. Anderson called “The languages of Central Siberia: introduction
and overview”, and the other half is divided among fourteen articles, some of
them quite short, in four sections dedicated to Yeniseian linguistics, Selkup linguistics, and Siberian Turkic linguistics
and archeology. The raison d’être of the
book is not revealed on its title page, but
from its foreword we learn that it is a
memorial volume published on the centenary of the birth of Andreas Dulson,
the eminent language scholar and
founder of the Tomsk school of field linguistics. Since Dulson was born in 1900
and the book was published in 2004, it
would appear that there was no great
hurry with its publication. On the very
first page of the foreword (p. vii), however, we can see a sign of haste. It is
claimed that “the geographically dominant” language groups in Central Siberia are Samoyed (“Samoyedic”),
Yeniseian (“Yeniseic”) and Tungusic,
142
Genuine and confused information about Central Siberian languages
while it is both generally known and
obvious from preceding and following
statements in the foreword and the rest
of the book that Turkic should have been
listed there instead of Tungusic. Small
oversights are apparent in other parts of
the book but, with a couple of exceptions,
they do not seriously undermine its general legibility and, should I say, curiosity value. Anderson’s “introduction and
overview” is a bit too superficial to provide any profound insights into the languages in the area, while the other articles are often so detailed and specialized
that they do not open up to a casual
reader. The exact target group of the volume is therefore hard to define, but it is
undoubtedly worth more than a quick
glimpse for anyone interested in Central
Siberian languages.
Anderson’s introduction suffers from
a number of shortcomings, at least when
it comes to Samoyed languages. He begins with rather odd statements about the
overall classification of the languages in
the area when he first claims that the
Uralic language family “is debated by
specialists”, then refers to “the still more
controversial Altaic family”, concluding
that these issues are “presently unresolvable” (pp. 2–3). It is well known to the
readers of this journal that no one who
has grasped the basics of the comparative method and of historical linguistics
in general has ever doubted the validity
of the Uralic family; on the contrary,
there is now less reason to assume that
Samoyed constitutes a markedly different genetic unit from the other branches
of the family, of which only Khanty
(rather than “Ob-Ugric”) is subsumed
under Central Siberian languages by
Anderson. At the same time, the Altaic
question has been firmly resolved in favour of the areal explanation, emphasizing the accuracy and reliability of the
comparative method when applied properly (cf. Georg 1999–2000; Schönig
2003; Vovin 2005).
Anderson further discusses the classification and development of the
Samoyed languages in some detail. He
correctly identifies the traditional view
of a north-south division and the alternative proposal by Janhunen (1998: 459)
but ventures a modified version of
Janhunen’s classification by including
relative time depths for the alleged splits,
absent in the original figure. Anderson
gives no basis for his assumptions, in
particular that there was a “long undifferentiated” Nenets-Enets group, and he
does not grasp the consequences of
Janhunen’s later remark about a continuum of languages yielding a third,
non-binary model for classifying the
Samoyed languages, according to which
Nganasan, Enets, Nenets, Selkup, Kamas
and Mator represent direct descendants
of Proto-Samoyed. Anderson also makes
three mistakes in quoting Janhunen’s
views about vowel harmony (p. 4). First,
Janhunen does not link the Nganasan
vowel harmony with classification, and
would not make such a connection because the feature is a retention. Second,
he is not saying that “only Nganasan
shows any kind of” palatovelar vowel
harmony but rather that only in Nganasan
is it “a productive process” [emphases
mine] (Janhunen 1998: 465; Anderson
refers to the wrong page 462), and traces
of vowel harmony are certainly numerous and well-known in Nenets. Third,
Janhunen does not subsume the
Nganasan development sirü > sürü
‘snow’ under vowel harmony, regarding
it simply a matter of a sporadic assimilation.
Since Anderson’s material consists
essentially of examples collected from
handbooks and grammatical sketches,
143
Tapani Salminen
the level of source criticism should have
been high, but this has not always been
the case. For example, in (3) on page 5,
illustrating the differences between Tundra Enets and Forest Enets, the forms
derive from two sources whose incompatible notations would have required
adaptation and unification for them to
make full sense, and in (74) on page 54
exactly the same Kamas form is given
twice following the (obviously problematic) phonemizations of Künnap (1999b)
and Simoncsics (1998). At the same
time, the data should have been copied
carefully enough to avoid such misprints
as “abun” instead of the correct aburi
for Tundra Enets ‘head’. Sloppy proofreading is evident in many places, not
least in the names of our colleagues, such
as “Khelimksij” pro Khelimskij (when
Helimski would have been more appropriate throughout the text) on pages 6 and
7 and “Klumpf” pro Klumpp on page 18,
and on page 16 Gulya goes by the name
“Janos” and Honti by “Lázló”. And if
we were to believe Anderson, Kirill
Reshetnikov was seven years old when
he wrote an article on Ket verbal morphology – the correct year of publication is, however, 1995, not 1982 (p. 110).
Small errors are also found in transliterations; for instance, “Bykon’ja” appears instead of Bykonja (which could
well be rendered as Bykonya in an English text), and “Ozyornoe” may better be
simply Ozernoe as long as Tereshkin has
no “yo” (or “ë”) either. On a more positive note, Anderson corrects an incorrect
translation in Künnap (1999a) in (81) on
page 56 (but does not report this) and
uses the correct spelling for Kamas
(while there are problems with some
other language names and ethnonyms).
Anderson’s account of the Nganasan,
Enets and Selkup vowel systems (pp. 24–
26) is confused, to put it mildly. The
original sources are to be blamed for this
to an extent, but Anderson also misrepresents them considerably. According to
him, Nganasan, Enets and Selkup all
have a “phonemic schwa” (in the sense
of a neutral, central, indeterminate, reduced vowel), while in reality none of
them have. It is true that Helimski (1998)
and other Nganasan specialists customarily use q for the illabial back mid
vowel, but it is synchronically no less a
full vowel than the other vowels in the
paradigm, which is shown among other
things by the fact that it can occur long.
The traditional FUT symbol for this
vowel is 8e, and it would be fine to replace it with ë (cf. Janhunen 1987).
Anderson, however, has consistently, yet
incorrectly and misleadingly, replaced 8e
with q (and {i with “barred i”) and started
calling it a schwa in Enets and Selkup,
where no one has ever suggested the
presence of a “phonemic schwa” in
Anderson’s sense. Furthermore, Künnap
is mistaken about the phonemic status
of 8e and {i in his description of Enets
(1999a: 9), following the obsolete ideas
of Tereshchenko based on the alleged
“central” position of Russian y, since
they are not phonemes but allophones of
e and i respectively. More confusion
arises from Anderson’s treatment of consonants, and his inconsistent transcription system makes things complicated;
for instance, he uses FUT for voiceless
affricates and IPA for voiced. He has
managed to get most facts about palatal
consonants in Samoyed languages (pp.
29–30) wrong: Nganasan has five of
them instead of one (he also fails to mention the source of his muddled Nganasan
data), Enets has the same five, which
means that palatal lateral is included but
the last two consonants in the line for
Enets in (21) are actually allophones, as
are all of the four consonants with a
144
Genuine and confused information about Central Siberian languages
hávcek in Künnap (1999a: 10). Since
the palatal lateral has been mistakenly
omitted from Künnap’s table (and the
error perpetuated by Anderson), the
number of consonant phonemes in
Enets is not 25 but 22; see Janhunen
(1987: 162) and Salminen (1997: 215)
for explicit inventories, implicitly acknowledged by Katzschmann & Pusztay
(1978) and Mikola (1995) as well.
Anderson further reveals his ignorance
of Samoyed historical phonology by suggesting that “a process of deaffrication
may have caused the appearance of the
palatalized stops sounds [sic]” (p. 30) in
Samoyed and, judging from his claim
that the Samoyed languages permit “only
[consonant] clusters with glottal stop finally”, his grasp of the synchrony does
not seem too strong either. In the
morphophonology section, a misprint in
(28) on page 24 makes the allomorphy
of the Nganasan renarrative suffix even
more complicated than it is, on page 39
Anderson claims that vowel harmony in
Eastern and Southern Mansi could
equally well be a retention or an innovation, and in (42) on pages 39–40 the Eastern Khanty data from Filtchenko does
not seem fully reliable when it comes to
the crucial contrasts between vowels.
The bulk of Anderson’s article consists of brief surveys of particular grammatical categories and structures. Some
of them are at least terminologically unusual, for instance, the nominative is not
a case (and Enets locative is called “instrumental-locative” although its functions are just the same as those of the
Nganasan locative, which is not so
called; pp. 40–41); the lack of an accusative case in Khanty is due to the
ergativity in Eastern Khanty (p. 42),
Nganasan either has no comitative (p. 41)
or has a comitative (p. 47), the presence
of a comitative case in Saami, Estonian
and Mari, known in each case to be historically secondary, is nevertheless
somehow relevant to a discussion about
Samoyed comitatives (p. 47); postpositions are renamed “relational nouns”
although they are both morphologically
and syntactically quite distinct from
nouns (pp. 51–52), and auxiliaries include verbs such as ‘be absent’ and ‘begin’ (p. 85). On page 48, Anderson realizes that ‘eight’ is based on ‘two’ in
Nganasan and Enets but fails to recognize that it is actually an opaque compound of ‘two’ and ‘four’. A totally confused claim by Anderson is that
Samoyed languages “show plural (or
dual) forms of nouns after numerals” (p.
50), and it turns out that he has misanalyzed two of his examples and misunderstood the status of the third in (61):
in the Nganasan example, not only is the
main word ‘hunter’ in the plural but also
the attribute ‘three’, in Enets the analysis of a dual form appearing after ‘two’
is correct but, as Künnap (1999a: 36)
explains, the structure is optional (and, I
might add, strongly marked), and in
Kamas, remarkably, Anderson has decided that the singular possessive form,
correctly glossed by Simoncsics (1998:
594; Anderson gives the wrong page
number 589), is a plural form instead. In
(106) Anderson has labelled the Kamas
gerundive (subordinative) a past participle, obviously confusing it with another
form with a superficially similar suffix,
although Künnap (1999b) and Simoncsics (1998) are clear about the matter.
On page 47, Anderson quotes Becker
claiming that “Nenets has a postposition/
adverb n5obt ‘together’”, but in fact,
nobt°h, which only means ‘together’
when used with particular verbs, is the
dative singular of nob ‘one’, with no
function as a postposition. In (159) onatD
p8ebi ‘he began to eat’ (p. 85; in the origi-
145
Tapani Salminen
nal transcription of Künnap 1999a: 29)
he refers to p8ebi as a form of ‘eat’, although it means ‘he began’, and analyzes
the form of the main verb as an auxiliary. It also happens that onatD is anomalous in that sentence, because the modal
gerund of the imperfective verb meaning ‘eat’ in Forest Enets is ood', and onatD
looks like a finite form instead, but this
problem, of course, already exists in
Künnap (1999a) and, presumably, his
original sources.
Such examples necessarily raise the
question of the responsibility of the
writer of a typological overview for the
raw data. Since it is not unlikely that
other linguists are also going to quote
these examples, a high level of precision
must be required. This means essentially
that typologists must double-check their
material to provide solid scholarship,
which, however, need not be as strenuous and time-consuming a task as it
might sound, because brief cooperative
sessions with knowledgeable colleagues
would do the trick in most instances. As
an excursus, it may noted with regret that
the Lincom Europa series of grammatical sketches is very uneven, which must
be largely because of its lack of peerreviewing. The two books by Künnap in
particular (1999a, 1999b), used extensively as sources by Anderson, stand out
as very sketchy indeed, and would better be used as elementary-level student
workbooks. At the same time, several
other volumes in the series are excellent
reading, among those devoted to Siberian languages Gruzdeva (1998) on
Nivkh, Janhunen (2005) on Khamnigan
Mongol and Nikolaeva (1999) on Northern Khanty, of which the last mentioned
employs the format creatively in combining a digested form of a grammar
with a selection of case studies in intricate and typologically relevant structural
issues. But none of this can be known
without a critical evaluation of the
sources.
From my samoyedological viewpoint, I have little to say about the four
articles concerning Yeniseian languages
in particular, but one detail in Werner’s
account of counting systems is related,
although very incorrectly. Following
Bouda’s (doomed) suggestion, he proposes that Yeniseian ‘seven’ is borrowed
from Samoyed on the basis of the Khanty
and Mansi words for ‘large’, which is
simply beyond my comprehension.
While the Ket and other data in Werner’s
article is undoubtedly of high quality, the
same is perhaps not true of the etymological analysis. The other articles in this
section deal with Kott plural formation,
old (mainly Turkic) loanwords in
Yeniseian, and incorporation and word
formation in Ket.
Turning to the four articles on
Selkup, Nadezhda G. Kuznetsova’s contribution is entitled “Morphological
reanalysis in the Selkup verb”, and while
I do not find her arguments for Selkup
personal suffixes having attached the
preceding vowel entirely compelling, the
article provides good ground for an
analysis that is more detailed and freer
from a narrow Item-and-Arrangement
strait-jacket; her table of Selkup verbforms on pages 152–154 is, however,
plagued by a mixture of inconsistencies
and misprints in transcription. E. V.
Zyrjanova focuses on the unusual and
historically complex relations between
derivational suffixes that make transitive
verbs intransitive; parallels from other
Samoyed languages would add depth
and perspective to her potentially promising findings. As an aside, let it not be
forgotten that “Matthias Castrén” (p.
158) is not the correct way to refer to
the greatest field linguist of all times,
146
Genuine and confused information about Central Siberian languages
since he was called and signed his name
Alexander Castrén, recommended forms
of reference being M. Alexander Castrén
or M. A. Castrén (it was his uncle who
was actually known as Matthias Castrén). After a rather muddled introduction concerning “different ethnogenetic
components” in Samoyed (p. 169),
Alexandra Kim-Maloney makes an attempt to identify Ket loanwords in
Selkup religious terminology and, judging from the lack of etymologies of several of the words under scrutiny in
Donner & Sirelius & Alatalo (2004), she
may well be on the right track. I have
meanwhile noted (Salminen 2005: 70)
that the tentative internal reconstruction
of Selkup pïnkqr ‘musical instrument’ by
Janhunen (1977: 119) must be firmly
rejected, and the connection of its initial
segments to Ket (p. 176) is therefore a
moot point.
Valentina V. Bykonja’s composition
must, unfortunately, be singled out
among the shorter articles. It is a sad and
bizarre exercise in internal reconstruction by which each syllable in Selkup
numerals holds some sort of esoteric significance. The author has zero knowledge of the history of Selkup, and the
result is, predictably, utter rubbish. It was
a grave error that the editor accepted this
“article” in the volume.
Siberian Turkic linguistics is represented by three articles. Gregory D. S.
Anderson and K. David Harrison analyze
two interesting texts in Chulym Turk
(which they insist on calling “Middle
Chulym”, an accurate geographic appellation which should only be used when
needed as a synonym of Chulym Turk,
in the full form “Middle Chulym language”). They also refer to the “Lower
Chulym, or Küärik-Käzik people” (p.
179), which seems odd, because I have
always understood that Küärik and Käzik
are names of extinct dialects of Chulym
Turk proper (on middle Chulym), which
is closely related to Khakas (“Xakas” is
the silly spelling used throughout the
book) and therefore belongs to Yenisey
Turkic, while a variety of Siberian Tatar
is spoken in lower Chulym. K. David
Harrison further discusses the rich system of sound symbolism in Tuvan and
Tofa and its parallels elsewhere in Siberia and beyond. Viktor Ja. Butanaev’s
article deals with etymological layers of
the Khakas lexicon, that is, Common
Turkic words and loanwords of various
origin. I was surprised by the extent of
inter-Turkic borrowings, but happily
leave their further analysis to specialists.
Butanaev makes a curious claim, without references – so it seems – to his own
idea that the origin of the ethnonym
Ostyak is in Turkic estek ‘aboriginal forest people’. It also appears that some of
the alleged Samoyed loanwords in
Khakas mentioned on pages 228–229
were borrowed either into Common
Turkic or in the opposite direction, so
there is a lot of work ahead in studying
the contacts in this interesting area.
The fifth and last section of the book
is entitled “Archeological perspectives
on Central Siberian language groups”,
which bespeaks a rather strained combination of archeology and linguistics. The
three articles might merit a number of
terminological remarks, but I would
rather leave them to more competent
people.
The contents of the book are, with
the exception of Bykonja’s contribution,
basically informative and interesting,
even if in some instances controversial
or error-ridden. It is clear that Central
Siberia is, indeed, a treasure trove for
contact linguists and, since many topical issues are dealt with in the book, I
hope it finds a large and invariably criti-
147
Tapani Salminen
cal readership (at Benjamins’ homepage,
the book is curiously listed under Caucasian languages and Slavic linguistics,
but not under Uralic or Paleosiberian languages). I have for obvious reasons focused on Samoyed languages, and since
Vajda, the editor, and the principal author, Anderson, are specialists in
Yeniseian and Turkic respectively, we are
justified in expecting less problems in
those fields, but this remains, of course,
to be confirmed by other reviewers.
Tapani Salminen
Donner & Sirelius & Alatalo
2004 = Sölkupisches Wörterbuch aus
Aufzeichnungen von Kai Donner, U.
T. Sirelius und Jarmo Alatalo. Zusammengestellt und herausgegeben
von Jarmo Alatalo. (Lexica Societatis Fenno-Ugricae 30.) Helsinki.
G e o r g , S t e f a n 1999–2000: Haupt
und Glieder der Altaischen
Hypothese: die Körperteilbezeichnungen im Türkischen, Mongolischen und Tungusischen. – UralAltaische Jahrbücher, Neue Folge
16: 143–182.
G r u z d e v a , E k a t e r i n a 1998:
Nivkh. (Languages of the World:
Materials 111.) München: Lincom
Europa.
Helimski, Eugene 1998: Nganasan.
– The Uralic languages. Edited by
Daniel Abondolo. London & New
York: Routledge. 480–515.
J a n h u n e n , J u h a 1977: Samojedischer Wortschatz: gemeinsamojedische Etymologien. (Castrenianumin toimitteita 17.) Helsinki.
–– 1987: Towards a unified phonological transcription of the Siberian languages. – Journal de la Société
Finno-Ougrienne 81: 151–174.
–– 1998: Samoyedic. – The Uralic languages. Edited by Daniel Abondolo.
London & New York: Routledge.
457–479.
–– 2005: Khamnigan Mongol. (Languages of the World: Materials 173.)
München: Lincom Europa.
Katzschmann, Michael –
P u s z t a y , J á n o s 1978: JenissejSamojedisches
(Enzisches)
Wörterverzeichnis. (Fenno-Ugrica
5.) Hamburg: Buske.
K ü n n a p , A g o 1999a: Enets. (Languages of the World: Materials 186.)
München: Lincom Europa.
–– 1999b: Kamass. (Languages of the
World: Materials 185.) München:
Lincom Europa.
M i k o l a , T i b o r 1995: Morphologisches Wörterbuch des Enzischen.
(Studia Uralo-Altaica 36.) Szeged.
N i k o l a e v a , I r i n a 1999: Ostyak.
(Languages of the World: Materials
305.) München: Lincom Europa.
S a l m i n e n , T a p a n i 1997: A key to
Enets morphology. [Review of
Morphologisches Wörterbuch des
Enzischen von Tibor Mikola.] –
Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen 54:
213–219.
–– 2005: Religious terminology in Forest Nenets and Tundra Nenets. –
Shamanhood: an endangered language. Edited by Juha Pentikäinen
and Péter Simoncsics. (Instituttet for
sammenlignende kulturforskning B:
117.) Oslo: Novus. 65–75.
S c h ö n i g , C l a u s 2003: TurkoMongolic relations. – The Mongolic
languages. Edited by Juha Janhunen.
London and New York: Routledge.
Simoncsics,
Péter
1998:
Kamassian. – The Uralic languages.
Edited by Daniel Abondolo. London
& New York: Routledge. 580–601.
V o v i n , A l e x a n d e r 2005: The end
148
Crisscross around the world
of the Altaic controversy: a review
article of Sergei Starostin, Anna
Dybo, and Oleg Mudrak’s Etymo-
logical dictionary of the Altaic languages, Leiden: E. J. Brill (2003). –
Central Asiatic Journal 49: 71–132.
Crisscross around the world
B e r n h a r d W ä l c h l i : Co-Compounds and Natural Coordination.
(Oxford Studies in Typology and
Linguistic Theory.) Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005. 334 pp.
This book treats the form, meaning and
use of co-compounds (henceforth CCs),
comparing them to phrase-like tight coordination. These, together with the
theoretical background, method and
material are presented in the first chapter. The second chapter is concerned with
markedness, the third with tight coordination. The fourth chapter describes CCs
as a lexical class type (Are they words?
Really?). The fifth chapter gives a semantic classification of CCs as additive,
generalizing, collective, synonymic, ornamental, imitative, figurative, alternative and approximate, and scalar, divided
into basic and non-basic CCs. The sixth
chapter deals with the areal distribution
of CCs. A section dedicated to CCs in
Erzya Mordvin is of particular interest
to Finno-Ugrists. The seventh and last
chapter introduces a hypothesis about the
diachronic evolution of the construction.
The book ends with indexes of subjects,
languages, and persons; references; appendixes of languages and their linguistic affiliation, and a map of languages.
The material is selected from original texts, mostly literary fiction and parallel translated texts such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(available on the Internet) and The Gospel according to St. Mark. While the
former provides good material for collectives and abstract concepts in the official genre, the latter texts are, according to BW, generally better translated.
They usually try to do without foreign
words, and resort to temporary lexicon
instead. Thus, the frequency of CCs may
be slightly higher than expected. BW
finds the original texts to be most reliable. Even questionnaires were used, but
apparently they did not yield much of
interest.
The recent rush to research coordination in typology has obviously resulted
in an increase in theoretical apparatus,
but not in anything new and ready-made
for CCs. The term co-compound refers
to such traditional designations as
dvandva compounds, pair words, and
copulative compounds, which express
natural as opposed to accidental coordination. The parts are semantically
closely associated concepts at the same
hierarchical level, and the whole meaning is normally a superordinate conceptual unit. The author discusses formal
markers of such units – word stress and
inflectional properties, which however
are not universally applicable. The difficulty in treating isolating languages like
Vietnamese, where all kinds of compounds are juxtapositional, is obvious.
Some languages have even discontinuous CCs. What are not CCs are such formations as southwest, poet-doctor,
149