Talk:Mansi languages

"Comparison with Hungarian"

The letter <ä> is not part of the official Hungarian alphabet and I don't know any phonemes that a native speaker would "intuitively" assign to this letter.

Also: This table obscures all the phonological differences btw. Hungarian and Mansi by approximating Mansi phonemes with "Hungarian" letters. Eg. Hungarian <h> (/h/; IPA [h] word-initially) and Mansi <х> (/x/; IPA [x]) are different phonemes in many languages and even if [x] is an allophone of the former in Hungarian and these phonemes stem from the same "Ugric" phoneme it would be nice if the reader of the article would be informed about this… --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 21:13, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I think the problem may be that the editor is sourcing from a Hungarian book that doesn't provide the right phonemes. I have a LINCOM grammar book on Mansi that has the right phonemes, but I was hoping to get the Mansi Cyrillic alphabet written instead. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:47, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually I don't recall what I was waiting for and the grammar book I have doesn't have the phonemes in IPA exactly... --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:58, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

	Stop	Fricative	Sibilant	Lateral	Tremulant	Nasal
Bilabial	p	w				m
Dento-Alveolar	t		s	l	r	n
Alveo-Palatal	tˈ		ś	lˈ		ń
Palatal		j
Velar	k	χ,γ				η
Labiovelar	kʷ	χʷ

	Front	Back
High	/ī/,i	ü,u
Mid	ē,/e/	ō,o
Low		ā,a

Here's the vowels and consonants from the book if someone wants to make sense of them and add them to the article... Riese, Timothy. Vogul: Languages of the World/Materials 158. Lincom Europa, 2001. ISBN 3895862312 --Stacey Doljack Borsody 23:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, that seems to be usable, thow some letters & diacritics @ the table doesn't seem to be "standard IPA symbols". Eg. instead of the apostrophe (') that indicates palatalization/palatal consonants here, standard IPA-usage is [ʲ] for palatalized consonants and dedicated symbols ([ʎ], [ɲ], [c]) for palatal consonants. The article in the Hungarian Wikipedia gives the (broad) IPA-values of the native phonemes as follows (based on one of the sources listed in the notes [jegyzetek] section of that article(?)):

Mansi Consonants	Stop	Continuant	Sibilant	Lateral	Rhotic	Nasal		Mansi Vowels	Unrounded	Rounded
Labial	p п	w в				m м		Close	i(ː) ы/и	u(ː) у/ю
Alveolar	t т		s с	l л	r р	n н		Mid	e(ː) э/е	o(ː) о/ё
Alveolo-palatal, Palatal	c ть	j й	ɕ сь	ʎ ль		ɲ нь		Mid	(ə)
Velar	k к	x ɣ х г				ŋ ң		Open	a(ː) а/я

Hungarian Consonants	Stop	Continuant	Sibilant	Lateral	Rhotic	Nasal		Hung. Vowels	Front unrounded	Front rounded	Back
Labial	p b p b	f v f v				m m		Close	i iː i í	y yː ü ű	u uː u ú
Alveolar	t d t d		s z sz z	l l	r r	n n		Close-mid	(e) eː (ë) é	ø øː ö ő	o oː o ó
Post-alveolar, Palatal	c ɟ ty gy	j j/ly	ʃ ʒ s zs	(ʎ) (ly)		ɲ ny		Open-mid	ɛ e
Velar, glottal	k g k g	h (x) h(/ch)				(ŋ) (nk/ng)		Open	ɒ a: a á

---

I'm not sure why the labiovelar stops and fricatives were omitted (possibly just because they don't have a dedicated letter in the Mansi alphabet) but otherwise the two inventories are quite similar (until you notice that I was cheating "a bit" ;]; btw. I still don't know how we could re-transcribe the examples in the "Comparison" section).

I think it'd be better to check that in another textbook before anyone adds that to the article cause Hungarian grammar books tend to use the symbols dedicated to true palatal consonants (like Hungarian c ɟ ɲ) for palatalized consonants that are normally indicated with a superscript j (ʲ). :--Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 20:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

The vowels are a bit strange. I need to read my grammar book further, but the /i/ being spelled with both и and ы in cyrillic confirms a mention that it is "backed" in some words. I supposed the ы is used during this condition. "When followed by the fricative ɣ it is backed (-īɣ)" (the ī has an extended character beneath it, like a u, but I'm not sure how to write it here). --Stacey Doljack Borsody 21:34, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I've heard it before that some Ugric languages/dialects have a central or back illabial close vowel (IPA ɨ or ɯ) [some scholars claim that it was present in Proto-Finno-Ugric; others think it's likely a more recent innovation/borrowing in these languages], so that would'nt a big surprise for me (and they might have these vowels in the words they borrowed from Turkic languages or Russian, too). --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 15:07, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It’s most likely that the vowels ы and и are the same: IPA [i]. и would be used except when following non-palatal л н с т, in these cases, the vowel ы would be used. So ти = [ci] and ты = [ti]. This is how other some other Uralic languages write in Cyrillic. languagegeek (talk) 10:13, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Comparison table

Interesting to finally see the phonemes matched up with the cyrillic. Using this I can figure out how some of the words are supposed to be written in IPA and cyrillic. For now I'll stick with the convention used in my grammar book, which isn't really IPA as you pointed out. That is one of the things that always annoyed me about this book :) Table copied here for fixing...with some corrections in bold. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 21:26, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Mansi	Hungarian	English
χūrəm nē vituel huligel χus χūl pugi.	Három nő a vízből hálóval húsz halat fog.	Three women are catching twenty fish with a net from the water.
χūrəmsātχus hulachsam āmpəm witen ōli.	Háromszázhúsz hollószemű ebem vízen él.	The three hundred and twenty dogs of mine with raven eyes live on water.
Pegte luw lasinen manl tūr szilna.	Fekete ló lassan megy a tó szélén.	A black horse is slowly walking on the shore of the lake.

On second thought, should that "comparison with Hungarian" section even be present? Sentences like these are highly constructed and can be misleading in their implication. For example, one could make similar sentences with a Turkic language and Hungarian. Doing this kind of comparison doesn't say much about Mansi. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:08, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I think this table should be used only if the phonemic/phonetic qualities and/or the Cyrillic text can be reliably reconstructed (it is dubious in many cases if we don't have the word in your grammar book or in a dictionary). But if anyone manages to do that, it may stay despite that the sentences are indeed constructed as they might give the reader a clue about ("insight into") the phonological history of the Ugric languages as the words in them are part of the basic vocabulary of these languages (kinship terms, names of animals, colours) and are likely real cognates.

Eg. they might find out that in many cases PU *-mp (→ -mb) → -b in Hungarian (as in "eb" [dog]), PFU *k- became x- in Mansi and (→ x-(?)) → h- in Hungarian (as in három [three]), P(F)U *-t → -z in Hungarian (as in víz [water]) etc. --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 15:07, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I guess we can leave it in the article for now. I think this kind of comparison information might be more useful in the Ugric languages article. PFU *k- became x- in only some of the dialects of Mansi. The Northern Mansi dialect is focus in my grammar book and it uses x-, but some of the other Southern, Western, and Eastern dialects retain a k-. I was thinking of adding dialect information later after fleshing out some of the other sections. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 16:42, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, some dialect information would be useful of course; I haven't even heard about that other Mansi dialects handled word-initial *k -s differently (but of course I knew that this *k → x/h change didn't happen unconditionally [in every environment] in standard Hungarian and [northern] Mansi, many words (like "китыг/kettő" [two], or Hungarian "kéz" [hand]) have retained their original values, was just too lazy to note that).

As for the trancription convention you try to stick with: I think it'd be better to note in the article that pronunciation information is given here using the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (of course experts of the subject would know that, but they don't really need to get their information from Wikipedia); and you/we/everyone should use that notational system more consistently (eg. in your first wikitable on this talk page you had used γ for the voiced velar fricative but you use IPA ɣ in the article), cause I don't think that it's a good idea to mix the two phonetic transcription systems (unless we have to, eg. because UPA donesn't have an appropriate symbol [diacritic] for a particular sound/phonetic quality). --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 19:39, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Allow me to note that for me, as a Hungarian user it was a delight to read these sentences in this form. A first time to use Hungarian to understand a sentence in another language. It is true though that these comparisons would be more appropriate on the Ugric languages page. Koczy 14:59, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I've added the correct IPA and changed the Mansi to standard northern Mansi -- I have the feeling that the original was either a non-northern dialect, such as Tavda, or else had some errors in it. I have used forms which are in general cited either in Kálmán 1965 (see revised references) or in Munkácsi-Kálmán (large dictionary). As for tou ‘lake’, there is a rare Mansi word tō meaning ‘lake’, which is normally only the first member of a compound. But it is just like the Hungarian word, so I have preserved this, rather than substituting the more common word for lake, tūr. As for "black" (written "Pegte") in the earlier table: I am not sure what is being referred to. I can't find this word in Munkácsi-Kálmán -- which is a huge dictionary -- but if someone could explain the source of this, maybe the proper form could be included...? I just eliminated "black" from the sentence, since I don't think there is a Northern Mansi cognate of Hungarian fekete that would be helpful.

As far as I know, the segment often written χ in romanizations of Mansi is in fact a velar fricative (IPA /x/) and not a uvular (IPA /χ/). But the use of the /χ/ symbol is very well established in Uralic studies for Mansi, reflecting most likely the Uralic phonetic transcription system, so I am not quite sure what to do; ditto for using macron for a long vowel and other issues raised above. In order to comply with strict Wikipedia guidelines for IPA, I've used the points [ː] for length, at least in the comparison table. This whole article needs work and expansion, clearly, but I think the comparison to Hungarian table may be helpful for some Hungarian speakers. When I have shown Hungarian speakers comparisons like this they always find it very interesting, so I am in favor of keeping the table. Another point: in the "fake" Hungarian spelling version of the equivalents I have used "e" in place of "a" because the short "a" in Hungarian is clearly round /ɒ/, and this would give a false impression of the phonetic quality of Mansi. However, I have indicated the long-short difference in Mansi as the same as the long-short difference in vowels in Hungarian, even though the phonetic expression of the length distinction may be a bit different. In any case, it's meant to be an approximation; the IPA is now there for anyone who needs the correct forms.

The Cyrillic writing system of Mansi, unfortunately, fails to encode length, which is contrastive in Mansi. It is also, like most Cyrillic orthographies of non-Slavic language, a clumsy one. Thus, the true qualities of Mansi words cannot be discerned from their Cyrillic written form. For the proper transcription one must consult academic works. Rilkas (talk) 18:47, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Tracking it down, I think these comparison sentences originated with Illyes Gyula [1] and [2]. Not sure where he got them from. Maybe something Munkacsi wrote. --Stacey Doljack Borsody (talk) 06:17, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank you so much for finding those sources! I think the mystery of why the third sentence (beginning with "Pegte") is so incomprehensible is now solved. Gyula actually says that it is a sentence of Ostyak, i.e. Khanty, not of Mansi!! But since Mansi and Khanty are genetically related, the words are close enough to have made it seem like it could have been some dialect of Mansi. Well, now I am in favor of removing this line from the comparison table, because the syntax, in which the verb is not final, and also the use of tō, which is a rare Mansi word, and may not even be present in Northern Mansi, make it unrepresentative of the language. I could give a list of Mansi-Hungarian cognates, but I am not sure (given discussion above) if that is appropriate here, or would best be placed in a comparative Finno-Ugric article. Rilkas (talk) 15:40, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

Ah! Good catch! I didn't even notice. Mansi-Hungarians cognates might be better in the Ugric languages article (as long as the cognates are Ugric and not FU or Uralic). I think comparisons there are more appropriate. As I wrote above, we need more about Mansi itself in this article, not about relatedness with Hungarian. The comparisons are more a curiosity than anything. I was thumbing through my Vogul grammar book by Riese earlier today and thinking that example Mansi sentences here might be more illustrative of the grammar than made-up comparison sentences. --Stacey Doljack Borsody (talk) 04:24, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

"Core Mansi"

Term coined by me. My source literature does not seem to have a name for this grouping. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 15:55, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Split proposal

Much like with Khanty, Mansi is not a language: it is a dialect continuum of related languages. All sources discussing Mansi from a synchronic perspective focus on a particular dialect (perhaps most typically a Northern variety). Mansi as a whole is only ever treated as a historical entity.

It seems to me splitting the information into separate articles on 1) Mansi languages, 2) Northern Mansi, 3) Eastern Mansi, 4) Western Mansi, 5) Southern Mansi would be beneficial organizationally.

Compare the splitting of Nenets languages into separate bottom-level articles: Tundra Nenets language and Forest Nenets language. We also have split Komi language into Komi-Zyrian language, Komi-Permyak language and Komi-Yazva language despite that these three are still considered to be in only a dialectal relationship to each other.

Scholarly consensus on if the Mansi varieties comprise dialects or languages regardless does not seem to exist though. I'm aware of a very small number of papers explicitly arguing for a separate languages analysis, as well as a large implicit near-consensus (purely by inertia, without explicit arguments!) in favor of a multi-dialect analysis. We might need to pull a Chinese and describe each subgroup as simply a "variety" and leave discussion on the lang/'lect issues into the main article?

--Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 14:58, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

@Tropylium I know this is 11 years old post (my goodness how time flies) but I think with the revival of the Mansi Category on the English Wiktionary, and proposal for splitting on there, it is time we tyr and revive this proposal. We might be better of putting this into the Wikipedia:Proposed article splits section so it can grab more eyes. Ewithu (talk) 11:10, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

 DoneEwithu (talk) 13:25, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

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"Old" and "Modern" Mansi

I have a hard time tracking the legitimacy of these names, on one hand I can't acces Hontis work, and any other source says otherwise. It was added by an IP number back in 3rd of june 2022.

I'll be removing these terms until I am prooven otherwise, and maybe that IP number could say more then "Нормально" as in "Fine". Ewithu (talk) 18:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Smells of someone being confused about regular Northern Mansi as the one living dialect group vs. Southern Mansi as an extinct one. The extant documentation on the Vagilsk varieties is all roughly synchronous (from Kannisto's expeditions in the 1900s). --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 22:27, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

3 Maps

Is it possible to add three maps to the sidebar? I ask because Mansi will not be split for a while, and I wt to include Eastern Mansi as well, since that's the other still extant Mansi language beside the Northern. Ewithu (talk) 19:25, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Can't answer the question, but I uploaded some maps from https://sites.utu.fi/urhia/language-maps/ (with CC4.0 Attribution license) to WP which you might or might not find useful here:

File:6-Ob Ugric-languages.png

File:6.2-East-Mansi.png

File:6.1-North-Mansi.png

Cheers, Jähmefyysikko (talk) 17:08, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you @Jähmefyysikko! I had a plan to upload these maps here too, but I see you were faster than me haha

I wonder why Southern and Western Mansi still have "current settlements", since they were declared extinct in and around 1950s on the UNESCO map. Ewithu (talk) 18:02, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

There are no South Mansi villages in the maps, but West Mansi is a mystery indeed. Abondolo & Valijärvi (2023) p.666 say that West Mansi became extinct on 1960s or 1970s. Based on sources listed at https://bedlan.net/uralic/, it seems like the map data for Mansi might be from the 70s (or earlier), but I'm not sure about this. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 20:26, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

West Mansi as a language is extinct by now, but the people may retain their ethnic Mansi identity still. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:30, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Number of Speakers of the Mansi languages

Hi @ValtteriLahti12, I can see you added the newest speaker number for Mansi (which is most likely the Northern) so I would say we should keep the speaker number at the appropriate page as in Northern Mansi language page. Or I'm opened to conversation about this :] Ewithu (talk) 18:13, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

I made a typo with the numbers, however the census merely said "mansijskij" (Mansi), without giving more specific on which form it is. --ValtteriLahti12 (talk) 18:48, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

That's true. I'll use this number in the other article as well, since the Northern is the only Mansi language still in use as of the latest data, approximatly the last Konda speaker died in 2018 too. Let's hope the next census brings in the distinction between the languages, if there are any more Eastern speakers. Ewithu (talk) 19:54, 8 March 2024 (UTC)