Dolgan

The chapter describes the evolution of literary languages for four endangered indigenous languages. Different paths of language standardization and revitalization in the Soviet Russian minority context are illustrated with case studies from Dolgan (Turkic), Forest Enets (Uralic), and Kildin Sáami (Uralic). The three cases offer an excellent comparative view of the origin and progress of literacy creation for small indigenous languages in the Russian Federation. The fourth language Skolt Sámi (Uralic) provides a comparative view beyond the border into the European Union. The different geographical and political settings of language planning attempts for the four languages has resulted in chronologically and substantially different developments. For Dolgan, Forest Enets and Kildin Sámi, the effect standardization has upon language survival has been very similar. In these languages, neither standardization nor the evolving written culture seem to inhibit language shift to any considerable degree. On the other hand, Skolt Sámi in Finland has undergone a slightly more successful process of revitalization, even if the language remains critically endangered.

Hayırsever, Hasan. Derivation in Dolgan Language, Master Thesis, Ankara, 2016.

Dolgans are the northernmost Turkic-speaking peoples in the world. They are living in the Taimyr Peninsula. These people are most numerous group of indigenous people on the area. Together with Sakha (Yakut) languge it belongs to the northeastern branch of the Turkic language family. Once upon Dolgan language was a dialect of Sakha (Yakut) languge. It is a seperate language since 1978. There are not a lot of written works in Dolgan language. “Üörüüleek Hurak” (translation
of Gospel of Luke) is one of the text of Dolgan language. In this study, in which primarily, transcription of the work is exercised, the literary work is analysed in terms of its content derivation. Ultimately, this study at the end of which the grammatical sequence and glossary exist attempt to demonstrate the etymological characteristic of Dolgan language

В статье на основе полевых материалов и других источников рассматривается современное состояние оленеводства в Анабарском арктическом районе Республики Саха (Якутия). Оленеводство занимает важнейшее место в республиканской политике в отношении регионов проживания народов Севера. Целями этой политики являются поддержка и сохранение местной культуры, обеспечение продовольственной безопасности регионов. Ведется работа по созданию позитивного образа оленеводства на республиканском и региональном уровнях. Оленеводы Анабарского р-на выстраивают свои экономические стратегии с опорой на проводимую государством патерналистскую политику, а также активно задействуют более широкие социальные связи, предпринимательские навыки, проявившиеся в период ослабления государства в 1990-е годы. В различных контекстах в поведении оленеводов заметна амбивалентность: чередующиеся практики избегания государства, стремление к большей самостоятельности и одновременно обращение к ресурсам и авторитету государства. В статье показаны особенности хозяйственной адаптации к изменяющейся природной и социально-экономической среде. Ключевые слова: оленеводство, долганы, патернализм, Республика Саха (Якутия), рыночная экономика, предпринимательство, адаптация, свободные места.


Reindeer husbandry today occupies an important place in the policy of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in relation to the regions of residence of the peoples of the North and also in the local municipal policy considered in the work of the Anabarsky district. The goals of the policy are to support and preserve the local culture and ensure the food security of the regions associated with reindeer herding. The reindeer breeders of Yuryung-Khaya today are building their economic strategies relying on the paternalistic policies pursued by the state, on the one hand, and actively using broader ties and entrepreneurial skills that were first demonstrated during the decline of the 1990s, on the other. In various contexts, ambivalence is manifested in the behavior of reindeer herders: alternating avoidance practices with the desire for greater autonomy and appeal to the authority of the state. Modern reindeer herders of Yuryung-Khaya to a greater or lesser extent use part of the available resources, not only to meet their primary needs, but also to improve their well-being and strengthen their household.

Özet: Dolganlar, Asya’nın en kuzeyindeki Türk dilli halktır. Taymır yarımadasında, diğer Türk topluluklarından izole bir şekilde yaşamlarını sürdürmektedirler. Farklı dil ve kültür çevrelerine ait halkların birbirleri içerisinde erimesi ve ortak dil olarak Yakutçayı benimsemesi sonucu bir ulus olarak ortaya çıkan Dolganlar, kaynağını bu halklardan alan kimi uygulamaları günümüzde de devam ettirmektedirler. Bu yazıda Dolganlarda ölüm teması incelenmiş ve ölüm uygulamaları hakkında bilgi verilmiştir.
Anahtar Sözcükler: Dolganlar, Dolgan Kültürü, Ölüm, Cenaze Uygulamaları.
Death and Funeral Rituals in Culture of Dolgan
Abstract: Dolgans are the northernmost Turkic-speaking peoples in the world. They live in the Taymyr Peninsula, isolated from other Turkic communities. Dolgans, which emerged as a nation as a result of the composition of the nations belonging to different language and cultural circles who perceived the Yakut as a common language, still continuing the rituals left by those peoples. In this article, death theme in Dolgan culture was examined and information about funeral rituals were given.
Keywords: Dolgans, Dolgan Culture, Death, Funeral Rituals.

This paper is the third and concluding part in a series where further new etymologies of the Turkic Dolgan language are discussed. Of ten given etymologies in this third part, eight are derived from Proto-Turkic (PT)(through Yakut) and two are derived from Proto-Tungusic (through Ewenki). Dolgan etymologies with semantic and phonological considerations are given for the words (from Turkic:) kīn ‘navel; centre, central’, kȳn ‘sheath’, hilī- ‘bone marrow’, hirgän- ‘to feel disgusted, to find abhorrent’, mȳn- ‘to be dissatisfied (with a number, quantity, etc. of smth)’, bus- ‘to cook, to boil (INTR); to cook, to boil (TR); to bake; ripe, to mellow; to burn oneself (of finger, etc.)’, tanȳ ‘bridge of the nose’, and ulluŋ ‘sole’, and (from Tungusic:) majagas ‘whitefish’ and hirit/in- ‘to branch off; to split [INTR]’. The Pre-Yakut forms, from where some Dolgan forms have arisen, are also given wherever applicable.

[Draft paper version]

A rare Karelian lexical borrowing in the Turkic Dolgan language of the Taimyr Peninsula is presented. Karelian maksu~maksa 'liver' is demonstrably a donor of dialectal Russian maksa~maksy 'fish liver (of cod, burbot, salmon); liver of bigger fish; fish guts, milt' (previously known), as well as Dolgan maksu 'liver of a burbot used in (reindeer) leather processing' (previously non-etymologized). It is suggested that dialectal Russian may have acted as an intermediary language for the borrowing into Dolgan. Alternatively, the borrowing could have taken place independently into dialectal Russian and Dolgan sometime after the year 1617 from Olonets Karelian. The borrowing scenario presented herein is demonstrated through phonological, semantical and historical viewpoints.

[DRAFT PAPER VERSION - NON-SUBMITTED]
NOTE: The Karelian word, in one form or another, has been compared to the Dolgan word, and while the historical details presented here may be considered new, the Dolgan word should not be considered previously non-etymologized.

The article presents a – to the best of the author’s knowledge – new method of preparing data for quantification of loanword adaptation, together with two of its possible uses. The method is particularly fit for poorly investigated languages where a great deal of data, especially socio-linguistic, are missing. It is illustrated with the example of Russian loanwords in Dolgan. The result is an attempt to measure the commonness and meaningfulness of adaptations, and an index of loanword nativization

Öz: Dolganlar Asya kıtasının en kuzeyindeki Türk dilli halktır. Yaşamlarını Taymır yarımadasında, diğer Türk topluluklarından izole bir şekilde sürdürmektedirler. Dolganca taşıdığı eskicil özellikler nedeniyle Türkoloji açısından önemli bir dildir. İncil çevirileri, çok az yazılı kaynağı bulunan bu Türk dilinin belgelenmesinde mühim bir rol üstlenmektedir. Bu makalede, Dolganca İncil çevirileri tanıtılacak ve bu çevirilerin Dolgan yazılı kültürü açısından önemi tartışılacaktır. Anahtar Sözcükler: Dolganlar, Dolganca, Dolgan yazılı kültürü, Dolgan edebiyatı, İncil çevirileri. A Few Words About Dolgan Gospel Translations Abstract: Dolgans are the northernmost Turkic-speaking peoples in Asia. They live in the Taymyr Peninsula, isolated from other Turkic communities. Dolgan is an important language for Turcology owing to its archaic pecularities. Gospel translations play an important role in the documentation of this Turkic language, which has very few written resources. In this study Gospel translations to the Dolgan language will be introduced and importance of these translations for the Dolgan written culture will be discussed.

The article describes the evolution of literary languages for four endangered indigenous languages. Different paths of language standardization and revitalization in the Soviet Russian minority context are illustrated with case studies from Dolgan (Turkic), Forest Enets (Uralic), and Kildin Sámi (Uralic). The three cases offer an excellent comparative view of the origin and progress of literacy creation for small indigenous languages in the Russian Federation. The fourth language Skolt Sámi (Uralic) provides a comparative view beyond the border into the European Union. The different geographical and political settings of language planning attempts for the four languages has resulted in chronologically and substantially different developments. For Dolgan, Forest Enets and Kildin Sámi, the effect standardization has upon language survival has been very similar. In these languages, neither standardization nor the evolving written culture seem to inhibit language shift to any considerable degree. On the other hand, Skolt Sámi in Finland has undergone a slightly more successful process of revitalization, even though the language remains critically endangered.

In this paper, some new etymologies of the Turkic Dolgan language are discussed. Up to seven Dolgan etymologies are suggested or corrected with discussed phonologies and semantics. Six of these etymologies are unsurprisingly derived from the Tungusic languages, but the seventh is fairly obviously from the Yukaghiric languages further east. These analyses add to the already fairly well researched field of Dolgan etymology. Additionally, a semi-related Ewen (Tungusic) etymology could be suggested.

[Draft paper version]

One of the distinctive features of the market economy as it currently functions in the Anabar district (also known as the Dolgan-Evenki district) of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) is the intertwinement — in fact, quite often, interdependence — of the market exchange practices and the share-out practices (deliozh), the latter having long been a common form of traditional economy among various peoples of the North. Charitable activities, which are mixed or combined with trading by some entrepreneurs in the region, may be seen as a new emergent form of share-out. There are other aspects of the market relations that may also be considered specific to the region, such as the reliance on informal connections and networks in conducting business and interest-free commodity credits.

This Excel file provides a searchable list of Proto-Turkic most stable basic lexicon (as defined in https://www.academia.edu/23425060/Basic_lexicon_and_its_diachronic_stability_-_A_comparison_of_several_ranked_lists).
It includes all extant reflexes of each proto-form.
Its key sources are Starostin+Dybo+Mudrak's EDAL and a dictionary by A. Dybo (see dedicated sheet for details).
This database is intended as a stepping stone for researchers who want to try and understand the origin of Turkic languages by comparing their basic lexicon against other languages and language families.

The use of the third person singular possessive suffix as a marker of definiteness is quite common in Turkic languages. In North Dolgan, however, this function is performed by the second person possessive suffix. This phenomenon is probably a result of Nganasan influence and is a distinguishing feature of the North and South Dolgan dialects.

segmental vowel pharyngalisation seemed to be historically isolated, lacking any obvious predicessing entity. comparision of Yakut 110-word lists with their Proto-Turkic and Proto-Altaic etymons shows, that any first syllable vowel of the inherited vocabulary will be obligatory pharyngealised, if it descends from a Proto-Altaic root, containing initial *p- and *ŋ-. Such consistence is by now unic. While only a few languages possess segmental reflexes of  Proto-Turkic *h- < Proto-Altaic *p- )mainly Eastern Halaj, partially Azeri and Uzbek), only Yakut data are numerous and can be experementally re-analysed.

Der dolg. g ~h-Wechsel ist aus zwei Gründen ein besonders interessantes Lautphänomen. Zum einen ist er im (Schrift-)Jakutischen und in den jakutischen Dialekten so gut
wie unbekannt; zum anderen handelt es sich hier nicht um
zwei positionsbedingte Alternanten, sondern um zwei gleichzeitig in demselben Gebiet vorkommende und gleich übliche Lautvarianten von ein und demselben Wort, so daß hier die Positionsbedingtheit keine Rolle spielt.

This is a scanned copy of Péter Hajdú's very rare paper published in the journal Fenno-Ugrica Suecana, 1979, volume 2, pages 19-31. This reprint at Academia is presented with permission given by the current editorial board of the journal (of which I am part). The work deals in the broad language contacts in north-west Siberia between, at least, Russian, Komi-Zyrian, Khanty, Mansi, Nenets, Enets, Selkup, Nganasan, Dolgan, the Tungusic languages, Ket, and the Turkic languages. Sorry for the poor scan, but this should suffice as a reading copy until a better scan will materialize. Enjoy!

Morphological categories of Siberian Turkic numerals are particularly complex and therefore deemed to be especially advantageous to areal investigations. The aim of this paper is to see whether (at least some of) the suffixes of collective numerals can readily be used as isogloss connecting Yakut and Dolgan with Tuvinian and Tofalar or, maybe, also some other Turkic languages.

This paper is the second part in a series on Dolgan where further new etymologies of the Turkic Dolgan language are discussed. Of fifteen given etymologies in this second part, ten are derived from Proto-Turkic (through Yakut), four are derived from Proto-Tungusic (through Ewenki) and one is derived as a Turkic borrowing into Ewenki. Dolgan etymologies with semantic and phonological considerations are given for the words (from Turkic:) bil 'a species of fish: hucho taimen', hurbuk 'wooden peg', čok 'coal' (by way of Mongolic), köp 'dense fluffy-soft (of fur)', ügäk 'storeroom', ynak 'cow', īr-'to become crazy', käŋärī 'bridge of nose', künǖ 'envy, jealousy', kyrat-'to be a nemesis' and (from Tungusic:) torgon 'mager', boloho 'heavy wind, whirlwind; strong short rain, bodorus-'to tie a friendship, to make acquaintance', muncūka 'glass pearls', sagdōkū '5-6 years old reindeer cow'. The Pre-Yakut forms, from where some Dolgan forms have arisen, are also given wherever applicable.

[Draft paper version]

Ten years ago I published a short article (Stachowski 1998) showing that the
Px2Sg (= possessive suffix of the second person singular) can be used with
the function of the definite article in the Northern dialect of Dolgan. Since the
construction is completely untypical of a Turkic language, I suggested that it
was developed under the influence of Nganasan.

This article is on the recognition of the Dolgans as an official nationality in the USSR. Sometimes, scholars consider that the Dolgan people appear between the second half of the 19th century and the 1960’s. What does it mean? How can a people appear? Are the Dolgan people a creation of Soviet administration? Or were they a forgotten people?

The field material collected by the author during July–September 2015 in the Anabar ulus (district) of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) became the basis for writing this article. The Anabar ulus consist of 2 villages – Saskylakh and Uurung-Khaya-inhabitated mostly by Yakuts, Dolgans, Evenki and Evens. The article analyzes current state of reindeer herding, hunting and fishing in the Anabar ulus. With regard to considered activities are applicable the terms “traditional economy” and “traditional nature management” discussed in the scientific community. The author believes that talking about the tradition is possible only due to historical roots of the considered activities, so that article made some analogies its current state with a description of traditional economy in the region in Soviet ethnography. More important task of the article is description of the considered activities in the context of its involvement in market relations and administrative policies in the region. In this case, we can consider reindeer herding, hunting and fishing taking into account the coherence of different spheres of activities, abstracted from dichotomy of traditional / modern in the context of market interaction. The article also describes the interaction of market exchange and sharing, historically an important practice in Peoples of the North economy, in the activities of hunters and fishermen.

The article describes the main stages of studying of the Dolgans oral folk-song creativity, starting from the 1930s and up to the present time. The author considers publications of folklore in the works by ethnographer A.A. Popov, poetess E.E. Aksenova, as well as musicological studies by G.G. Alekseeva, Yu.I. Sheikin, V.S. Nikiforova, O.E. Dobzhanskaya and modern researchers. ИСТОРИЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ МУЗЫКАЛЬНОГО ФОЛЬКЛОРА ДОЛГАН Изложены основные этапы изучения устного народно-песенного творчества долган, начиная с 1930-х гг. и до настоящего времени. Рассмотрены публикации фольклорных произведений в трудах этнографа А.А. Попова, поэтессы Е.Е. Аксеновой, а также музыковедческие исследования Г.Г. Алексеевой, Ю.И. Шейкина, В.С. Никифоровой, современные публикации. Ключевые слова: коренные малочисленные народы Севера, долганы, музыкальный фольклор, традиционная музыка, песни, устное народное творчество.

Abstract: The comitative case is no standard case in modern Turkic morphology. In this paper, the main syntactic functions of the comitative in Yakut and Dolgan are established and, besides, its meaning in suffix compositions (Comit. + Acc.; Comit. + Dat.; Comit. + Abl. and Com. + Instr.) is analyzed. As to the origin of both phonetic variants of the comitative suffix, -lyyn is genetically Turkic, whereas -naan seems to have developed from an Evenki suffix changed due to the analogical influence of Turkic -lyyn.

Dolgan is a language, spoken around 5000 thousand speakers at Taimyr peninsula. This is second book by M. Stachowski on Dolgan language: Word Formation in Dolgan. Closest language to Dolgan is Yakut // Yakutçaya en yakın dil olan Dolgancada söz yapını ele alan kitap M. Stachowski'nin Dolganca üzerine ikinci çalışması.

This paper argues that automatic phonetic comparison will only return true results if the languages in question have similar and comparably lenient phonologies. In the situation where their phonologies are incompatible and / or restrictive, linguistic knowledge of both of them is necessary to obtain results matching human perception. Whilst the case is mainly exemplified by Levenshtein distance and Russian loanwords in Dolgan, the conclusion is also applicable to the approach as a whole.