Issue 2, 2021

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New speakers are a key object of sociolinguistic analysis in minority language research and an important factor in language vitality. The present article, based on a sociolinguistic survey conducted by the author among the Mari diaspora in the Moscow region, deals with the problem of new Mari speakers. These are people who seek to become members of the Moscow Mari language community but face prevailing ideologies of legitimacy, authenticity, purism, and prescriptivism, which not many can overcome.

Keywords: Mari language, internal diaspora, Moscow region, new Mari speakers, minority languages, language ideologies, purism, prescriptivism

DOI: 10.37892/2313-5816-2021-2-5-34

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The article presents two texts documented by L. R. Dodykhudoeva and Sh. P. Yusufbekov during their fieldwork in Ishkashim in the autumn of 2011. The audio recording of these texts in the Ishkashimi language – a fairy tale and a dialogue – was completed in the village of Ryn, in the Mountainous-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan. These texts are of interest because they document the speech of the young generation of native Ishkashimi speakers (two children of 5 and 6 years old) in a domestic family context. In addition, these Ishkashimi texts (presented with a translation and interlinear glossing) are a contribution to the corpus of written texts in the Ishkashimi language, which, like other Pamir languages, still lacks a written tradition.

Keywords: Pamir languages, Ishkashimi, Mountainous-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, Tajikistan, ethnolinguistics, linguacultural studies, bilingualism, folk tale, kinship terms

DOI: 10.37892/2313-5816-2021-2-35-58

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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.

Keywords: Tundra Nenets, Samoyedic languages, archival data, dialectology, nominal morphology, category of case, category of number, non-possessive forms, noun, adjective, numeral

DOI: 10.37892/2313-5816-2021-2-59-131

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This article analysis various pre-20th century versions of the Lord's Prayer in the Yakut (Sakha) language. Translation variants of this prayer are interesting from the standpoint of comparative analysis. The transla- tions of this prayer are some of the earliest texts in the Yakut language that can be compared with each other. The article analyzes the spelling, morphological, lexical and syntactic features of the prayer’s versions.

Keywords: the Lord's Prayer, Bible translation, Yakut language, comparative analysis

DOI: 10.37892/2313-5816-2021-2-132-153

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This article presents a survey of sixteen translations of the Lord’s Prayer in Northern Kurdish published from 1787 until 2019. Attention is given to the development of different orthographies and literary standards for Northern Kurdish as well as to the evolution of certain vocabulary as illustrated by the use of ‘key terms’ in the Lord’s Prayer. Both lexical evolution and orthographic development are shown to reflect aspects of Kurdish identity. The discussion also touches on parts of the Prayer that tend to be opaque or misunderstood by Kurdish readers even when the vocabulary and orthography are otherwise described as “intelligible” or “standard”.

Keywords: The Lord’s Prayer, Northern Kurdish, language history and documentation, orthography, phonology, language and literary standardization, lexical evolution, Bible translation, holy, kingdom, father, Biblical metaphor

DOI: 10.37892/2313-5816-2021-2-154-218

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Olga Georgievna Klimova passed away on August 20, 2021. For more than twenty years she worked at the Institute for Bible Translation, in the Publishing Department as a typesetter.

Olga Georgievna was among the pioneers who stood at the origin of the Moscow branch. She was among those who laid down the principles of publishing Bible translations and fine-tuned the entire publishing process. We still follow these principles to this day. She was already a professional typesetter when she came to work at our Institute in the distant 90’s, but the layout of Bible translations in different languages is not an easy thing. Fonts, styles, new programs, new design standards, maps, illustrations – Olga mastered it all and taught it to others. Four Bibles in Chechen, Tuvan, Turkmen and Crimean Tatar became books thanks to her, and it is impossible to count the other editions – Bibles for children, complex bilingual editions – nothing was impossible for Olga.

When in 2013 the Institute of Linguistics at the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Bible Translation conceived the idea of publishing the journal “Rodnoy Yazyk”, there was no doubt about who would layout it. Olga’s vast experience, ability to work with different languages and different authors, and patience all came in handy when working on the journal.

But there was more than just work... Olga had a variety of talents and her passion for theater and Spanish culture fascinated us. With her literary gift, Olga was an excellent storyteller. We often remember her report on the Pamir people. Pamir languages were almost native to Olga thanks to her mother Joy Edelman, an outstanding Iranian scholar. And it is no coincidence that Olga’s last major work was the layout of the journal “Rodnoy Yazyk” dedicated to Joy Edelman’s 90th birthday. Now we know that it was difficult for Olga, but she did layout, made changes, reverted, struggled with fonts, pictures, hyphenation. Discreetly, without pathos, without fail...

Olga Georgievna's passing is a great grief for the editorial staff of the “Rodnoy Yazyk” journal. Blessed memory to her!