Forest and Tundra Enets

Abstract

This chapter is an overview of Forest and Tundra Enets. These are two closely related highly endangered Northern Samoyedic lects spoken in the Taymyr Peninsula, Russia. In the domain of phonology, Enets is of interest with its vowel system distinguishing between mid-low and mid-high vowels (both front and back in Forest Enets, only back in Tundra Enets) and with its high degree of phonetic variation. In nominal morphology, Enets features only two morphologically distinct core cases, four local cases, three numbers, possessive forms, predestinative forms, and non-past and past copula complement forms. In verbal morphology, Enets distinguishes between basic, imperative, past, and contrastive cross-reference series and between subject, middle, and subject-object cross-reference series (the latter referring both to the subject and to the 3rd person direct object). A dozen of tense-modal meanings are expressed by inflectional affixes, as well as a dozen non-finite forms are available. A negative verb is used for negation, the lexical verb taking a special connegative form. Syntactically, Enets has the SOV basic constituent order but dislocated word orders are also widely attested. Other types of constituents are also left-branching, as modifiers precede the head noun in the noun phrase, and postpositions, not prepositions are used. Non-finite forms are the main strategy used in clause-combining but the sentence-like is also widely attested, as well as the use of conjunctions borrowed from Russian.