Ob-Ugric, IV

At around the same time as Europeans were colonising the Americas and decimating the native populations there, Russians were pushing eastward. Siberia was colonised during the reign of Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible, 1530-84) and, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Mansi had been pushed from ‘European Russia’ to the other side of the Urals. Incidentally, the word ‘Ural’ itself comes from Mansi: ur (mountain) + ala (roof).

While the Mansi religion is polytheistic and shamanistic, images of worldly deities (tsars, Lenin) were gradually added to sacred places in Mansi dwellings over the centuries. Leonid Trauberg and Grigori Kozintsev’s 1931 film Одна (Alone), for which Shostakovich wrote the score, was filmed in the Altai mountains. Although shamans were to be liquidated together with the kulaks under collectivisation, the film includes footage of a surviving shaman, and the entire crew were reportedly terrified of him. Their awe is almost tangible, if not contagious, in the scene in which he dances and sings by a fire.

A few notes on borrowed words in the northern dialect of Mansi we’ve been studying (Sygva).

Some words for ‘modern’ things come from Russian:

ārkeri (архиереи, bishop), aťēl (отдел, carriage), xōsax (казак, Cossack), konkrēs (конгресс, congress), rūt (род, kin), sāprańi (собрание, meeting), tēsis (тезис, thesis), and also pil(i), the word for car, which comes from автомобиль.

Others come from Komi (also known as Zyrian), another Uralic language, but one spoken on the western side of the Urals: nēpak (nipik - paper, letter, book, writing), and tujt (tūjt - horsedrawn sledge). The Sygva Mansi words for Russian, cross (as in crucifix), and bread (as in naan bread) also come from Komi. We can see how Russian, and western-ly items are imported via other Uralic languages that exist in closer proximity to Russian(s).

Oddly enough, however, the Sygva word for silk (japak), comes from Tatar, which means that it must have travelled a great distance. The word for cow, too, comes from the south, where livelihoods depend on herds, rather than on reindeer and fish.

Mansi is, as one would expect, particularly rich in river vocabulary. So far, we’ve come across words for the flat piece of land next to the riverbank (pōx), downriver (lui), and the part of a river between two bends (wōľ). There’s also reindeer vocabulary, such as kot, the skin on a reindeer’s leg; mańśək, a reindeer’s tail; and xār-ōjka, a reindeer bull, where xār is reindeer, and ōjka is the same as the Hungarian bácsi, which means uncle or older man.

We finished reading the Song of Conversion, and came across the onomatopoeia tārtalānt, to fire a gun, as well as the refreshing absence of ‘polite’ words for body parts and other Western taboos in Mansi. For instance, ponsite jakti kit χōsaχn refers to two Cossacks in trousers, and one English translation renders this as ‘two Cossacks with cleaved buttocks’. However, Mansi has no need for an idea such as ‘buttocks’ when arse will do. A literal translation might be ‘arse-split two Cossacks’. Peter suggested, then, that is is more like ‘two cloven-arsed Cossacks’. Of course, trousers came to the Mansi with European Russians inside them, and were not native to Mansi dress and culture.

Similarly, the ‘bastard bishop’ is the bishop-whore (ārkeri pōsar), while Mansi for clitoris translates into Hungarian as picsanyelv, that is, c*nt-tongue. I put a star there out of respect for our non-Mansi readers who might get upset at the sight of the C-word.

The song itself is in two parts. In the first part, our Mansi prince leads an army and routs the Russians’ attempts at invasion. To my mind, the dreamlike quality is such that there seems to be no real distinction between the Russians’ hen-beaked boat being turned back, and the passage of clouds in the sky. Of course, there need not be any distinction at all. In the second part, however, the narrator suffers a series of very real indignities unknown to his forefathers, and is subjected using passive constructions, to kidnap, shackling, and forced conversion. He is dressed in the Russians’ buttoned jacket, and the cross is forced upon him.

The principal feature of Ob-Ugric folk poetry is repetition. For the time being, I will only refer you, gentle reader, to the following text, although I promise that the next post will also deal with repetition in more depth: Robert Austerlitz, Ob-Ugric metrics: the metrical structure of Ostyak and Vogul folk-poetry, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1958.

Next time we shall look at Mansi grammar in more detail, and begin a bear poem. In the meantime, I am also reading about ‘World Surveyor Man’, and will report back next week.