Dictionary of Chusovaya Mansi from G. F. Müller’s Archives: Its Features and Significance for Mansi Dialect Classification

Abstract

Introduction. The article examines a dictionary of Mansi compiled from lexemes recorded along the Chusovaya River in the early-to-mid eighteenth century. The dictionary was discovered in G. F. Müller’s archives. Other available archives (e.g., those of A. J. Sjögren and P. S. Pallas) contain no mention of the dictionary. So, the only source referring to the latter is a 1958 article by Hungarian linguist J. Gulya that analyzes several Mansi words recorded in the eighteenth century across the Lower Tagil, Lower Tura, and Chusovaya river basins to determine a total of three distinct features inherent to the local Mansi dialects. A comparison of lexemes contained in G. F. Müller’s dictionary of Chusovaya Mansi against the ones published in J. Gulya’s work has yielded a number of discrepancies with the scholar’s conclusions. Goals. So, the paper compares Chusovaya Mansi against other Mansi dialects — Berezovo, Solikamsk, Cherdyn, Kungur, Upper Tura, and Karpinsky ones — recorded during the same period and in the same area. The most extensive description and analysis of the latter sources based on L. Honti’s classification are to be found in J. Normanskaya’s article titled ‘How the Classification of Mansi Dialects Was Changed (On the Material of the First Cyrillic Books and Dictionaries of the 18th and 19th Centuries)’ (2022). Materials and methods. The work employs the comparative and comparative historical methods to examine a variety of Mansi-language archival sources. Results. The paper reconsiders the data contained in J. Normanskaya’s publication for a comparative analysis, and shows that the Chusovaya Mansi dictionary does confirm the Russian researcher’s conclusions: Northern and Western Mansi dialect differences developed by L. Honti were non-existent or had only just appeared in the eighteenth century. However, the proto-Mansi *k>χ transition before back vowels identified by J. Normanskaya as the one and only feature exclusively characteristic of Northern Mansi dialects has not been confirmed in the Chusovaya dialect traditionally clustered within Western Mansi: it happens to contain the traditional Northern transition (chot ‘шесть’, chórom ‘три’).

Keywords

• mansi language
• dialect classification
• archival data
• müllers’s archives
• chusovaya river
• eighteenth-century dialects