Нганасанский язык: особенности и угроза исчезновения.

Endangered Samoyedic language

The Nganasan language (formerly called тавгийский, tavgiysky, or тавгийско самоедский, tavgiysko samoyedsky in Russian; from the ethnonym тавги, tavgi) is a moribund Samoyedic language spoken by the Nganasan people.

Nganasan is the most divergent language of the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic language family (Janhunen 1998). There are two main dialects, Avam (авамский говор, ) and Vadeyev (Lang ru). A part of the vocabulary can be traced to elements of unknown substrate origin, which are roughly twice as common in Nganasan than in other Samoyedic languages like Nenets or Enets, and bear no apparent resemblance to the neighboring Tungusic and Yukaghir languages. The source of this substrate remains a mystery so far.

The dominating word order in Nganasan is SOV, similar to other Samoyedic languages. However, Nganasan is considered to exhibit more freedom in word order than other languages of its group. According to Tereščenko (1979), other types of word orders are used for shifting the sentence focus, especially in emphatic speech. The focused constituent usually immediately precedes the verb. Wagner Nagy (2010) suggests that Nganasan is similar to Hungarian in its behavior, in that its word order is determined by pragmatic factors rather than being fixed. On the phrase level, the attributes within the noun phrase usually precede the noun and become focused when placed after it. Numerals and adjectives agree with the heads in case, and adjectives also agree with the head in number. The case agreement is only complete in grammatical cases; in locative cases the attribute gets genitive form. There are no prepositions in Nganasan, postpositions are composite parts of words and also require the attributes in genitive cases. Possession is expressed with genitive construction or by a possessive suffix attached to the possessed (Helimski, 1998; Katzschmann, 2008). Nganasan is a pro drop language: pronominal subjects are often omitted when the verb conjugation type is subjective (Tereščenko, 1979).

Standard negation is expressed by negative auxiliary (ńi ) followed by the main verb in connegative form marked with ʔ, e. g. ńi ndɨ m konɨʔ "I do not go". All inflectional markers are taken by the negation auxiliary (Gusev, 2015). Objects in the form of personal, negative or demonstrative pronouns can be inserted between the negative auxiliary and the main verb (Wagner Nagy, 2011). There are a few negative verbs other than ni , such as kasa — "nearly", ləði — "vainly", əku — "maybe", and ŋuəli — "of course", but their functionality is restricted, with only ni having a full paradigm. Existential sentences are negated with the negative existential predicate d'aŋku or its derivative stem d'anguj D'aŋku can only be used in present indicative as it behaves like a noun: it takes nominal predicative endings. D'anguj (a composite of d'aŋku and ij "be") is used for all other tense/mood combinations.

Subordination is typically formed by constructions with non finite verbal forms. Such constructions are usually placed before the constituents they modify. The relative construction is always placed immediately before the modified constituent, whereas other types of constructions allow other constituents to interfere. The word order in such construction is the same as in simple sentences (Tereščenko, 1973).

Coordination is most often achieved by means of intonation. Sometimes pronominal and adverbial derivatives can be used as conjunctions. For example, adverb ŋonə 'also' can be used as conjunction. The category of conjunctions may be undergoing formation under the influence of Russian (Tereščenko, 1973).