On the Etymology of the Enets Presumptive Marker <i>-to</i>: Borrowing from Nganasan

Abstract

Purpose. The article considers etymology of the evidential marker -to of the Forest and Tundra Enets which expresses the presumptive meaning (the speaker did not witness the situation, and his judgment on it is an assumption based on general knowledge). Results. Enets suffix is compared to Nganasan clitic -BTA (used either as intraclitic or as enclitic), which is used primarily in interrogative sentences and also marks the assumption. The article gives an overview of semantics of the compared forms of Enets and Nganasan, as well as an overview of their morphosyntactic and morphophonological properties. However, historical phonetics does not allow to consider the Enets and Nganasan morphemes as going back to a common protoform. The Enets marker can rather be considered as borrowed from Nganasan. This conclusion can be supported by the fact that the same phonetic correspondence is observed in a number of undoubted lexical borrowings from Nganasan into Enets. The article provides a list of such words. Conclusion. It would be even more accurate to say that the Enets presumptive forms are a material-structural borrowing from Nganasan. Namely, not only a morpheme per se is borrowed from Nganasan into Enets: synthetic Enets presumptive forms are an exact structural analogue of the corresponding Nganasan forms.