Система именного склонения западных диалектов тундрового ненецкого языка в исторической перспективе: архивные материалы XIX века и современные полевые данные

Abstract

The data on the nominal non-possessive declension system in the Western dialects of Tundra Nenets, represented in “Samoyedic Grammar” (“Samojedische Grammatik”) by archimandrite Veniamin Smirnov, are considered in the present article. “Samoyedic Grammar” is a handwritten archival manuscript of the 1st half of the 19th century from the collections of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg branch). The article consists of four sections. The first section provides general information about Tundra Nenets, with special attention paid to the distinctive features of the Western Nenets dialects. The second section provides general information about the “Samoyedic Grammar” (“Samojedische Grammatik”) written by archimandrite Veniamin, the history of its creation during the “Samoyedic mission” and its orthographic system. The third section is devoted to features of the nominal declension system of the Tundra Nenets literary language, types of nominal systems and grammatical nominal categories (number, case, possessivity, predestinativity); this section presents tables with the case/number non-possessive affixes in Tundra Nenets. The fourth section is the main part of this article: it presents tables with nominal non-possessive declension forms from the archimandrite Veniamin’s “Samoyedic Grammar”. The author compares them with the current data and highlights the features of the nominal declension system recorded by archimandrite Veniamin.