Tungusic Studies

This paper provides background information about the shamanism of the Tungus-speaking peoples in northeast China, particularly the Oroqen. It describes in detail the life, initiatory illnesses, training and healing practices of the last living Oroqen shaman who practiced this craft prior to the communist Chinese abolishment of such "superstitions" in the region just south of the Amur River in June or July 1952. Over three anguishing nights, hundreds of Oroqen participated in dusk to dawn rituals and begged the spirits to go away. Public, overt shamanistic healing rituals ended at that point.

Данная статья, основанная на архивных и печатных материалах, задается целью введения в научный оборот информации об этнографическом фильме «Тунгусы» (1927) режиссера Е.И. Свиловой - об эволюции этнического сообщества тунгусов Восточной Сибири в период культурных и экономических преобразований в СССР в середине 1920-х гг.

The article examines the multicomponent phenomenon of Soviet ethnographic cinema on the example of the ethnographic documentary film Tungusa (1927) by Elizaveta Svilova.

Many world traditions cast medicine women as the greatest healers, so powerful that they are even capable of bringing the dead back to life. This article looks at narratives about Isis of  Egypt; Pa Sini Jobu of Mali; Medea of Colchis; Ilmatar of Finland; the Manchu epic of Nishan Shaman; Bari Gongju of Korea; Lakota medicin woman Lucille Kills Enemy; Yeshe Tsogyal of Tibet; Inanna of Sumer; the Cumaean Sibyl of Italy; and Teresa Urrea of Mexico. Themes include underworld descents, soul flight and soul retrievals, infusions of lifeforce from wings or cauldrons, and a couple instances of calling up the dead. (BTW I do know how to spell "retrieve", as you'll see in the article itself; error in title is an artifact of rushed upload.)

UNDER CONSTRUCTION - TOO MANY TYPOS - Please cite ONLY with permission


"This is the text of an oral presentation made at the symposium "Altaique ou pas?", organized by Guillaume Jacques and Anton Antonov on 10 Dec 2011 in Paris.Part of this symposium was an invited exchange of ideas on the "Altaic hypothesis" between the undersigned and Martine Robbeets. I left the text by and large as read at the symposium, with minor edits (nor of which reflects anything which was said at the venue), and, thus preserved its character as an oral presentation, including direct addresses to members of the audience ("Martine" and, in most cases, "you" refers to Martine Robbeets, whom I wish to thank again for agreeing to participate in this journée, as of course, again, to its organizers and all participants in the discussion.The first part, "Avant-propos", is a short text which I prepared for distribution before the event. Bibliographical references were kept to a minimum, and it is clear that some statements would require them.The paper is not thoroughly proofread, my apologies for the plethora of typos still contained."

Note, 13. July 2013:
In a recently published paper (Genealogically motivated grammaticalization, in: M. Robbeets/H. Cuyckens (edd.): Shared Grammaticalization, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins 2013), M. Robbeets, speaking about the morphological comparanda between he languages in question she presents in several publications of hers, claims (p. 148) that, in this paper, I (St. G.) "have attempted to explain these correspondences in terms of borrowing".
A careful reading of the relevant passages of this paper (towards the end) will reveal to the attentive reader that this is not the case, and that the wording and the line of thought I use here does not lend itself to such an interpretation.


Note 6 July 2020 (sigh)

As of today, the opening remarks on Pallas and Abel-Remusat as "precursors" of something which was *later* to develop into the critique of Altaic as a genealogical (and linguistic) concept came under heavy shelling in some draft on academia.edu. While each and every correction of factual errors contained in this passage (which was also used in a few other public lectures) is of course justified and welcome, but I should add that this *ornamental* introduction is fully aware of the fact (and says so!) that Pallas' early words predate any coherent formulation of the Altaic hypothesis (while I am accused of precisely *not* saying this or, possibly, not even understanding this - there is more which I'm accused of "not mentioning", while I actually *do* mention it). Any careful reading of my passage will quickly reveal that (while everything could still be made and said better and clearer) the recent "criticism" is null and void, since it (I have ample reason to assume, deliberately) misstates content and intent of my words. I am, furthermore, repatedly, not to say constantly, accused of perpetuating a false view on Abel-Rémusat's position  and, an unforgivable sin, not to cite some paper from 1996 in which the record allegedly was set straight on this one. The author of these allegations should still remeber that he, in 2016, received a quite verbose private message from me, which states my reasons for viewing his opinions on Abel-Rémusat as insufficient and *not* dictating to cease repeating what I repeat here, to which the only answer I ever received was a kind of grunt (I am still in the possession of this exchange).

Por Georgeos Díaz-Montexano / Accepted Member of The Epigraphic Society.

“...con el santuario en el que está dando culto a su héroe, al héroe que abatiendo al lobo, al monstruo, ha permitido a la ciudad ocupar un terreno que antiguamente estaba solo ocupado por las fieras, […] Incluso, como hemos visto antes, cuando la ciudad pasa ya a época romana y acuña moneda, recuerda la historia del lobo del siglo IV (a. C.) y la ciudad se representa a si misma con -precisamente- un lobo. La ceca de Iltiŕaka, caracterizada por un lobo...” (Dra. María teresa Chapa Brunet, 2017).
Sumario
El nombre de Iltiŕaka 2
Hipótesis etimológica eurasiático/altaica I 3
Hipótesis etimológica eurasiático/altaica II 7
Hipótesis etimológica eurasiático/caucasiana 8
Anexos 8
Bibliografía 11

Fuente: http://atlantisng.com/blog/iltiraka-la-ciudad-del-lobo-el-legendario-nombre-eurasiatico-altaico-de-una-ciudad-ibera/

A comparison of the core reconstructed vocabulary of proto-Turkic, proto-Mongol and proto-Tungus was made. The number of matches falls within the false positives range. The three linguistic families do not have a common vocabulary.
A critical assessment of the Altaic Etymological Dictionary by Sergei Starostin is offered.

The article continues a series of research works on the ethnic composition of the Buryat population using a case study of the Steppe Dumas, national jurisdictions of the Russian empire in 19th century. The Balagansk steppe Duma was the largest in the Irkutsk province in terms of population. The ethnic composition and resettlement of the ethno-territorial group of the Balagansk Buryats is of great interest in connection with the study of Buryats ethnogenesis and the ethnic history of the Baikal region. The ethnic background of the population was composed of the Bulagat tribes, since the Duma was based on the indigenous lands of the Bulagats. A significant stratum of the population of the Duma was the Ikinat tribal group. The ethnic map of the Balagan Steppe Duma was formed in the context of large-scale migrations of the Buryats in Transbaikalia, Mongolia and back, local migrations linking the territory of the Duma with neighboring territories of Bratsk and Nizhneudinsk fortresses. The complex ethnic composition reflects the long stage of the formation of this territorial group, which included several tribal associations of Bulagats and Ikynats. Several differently-time layers that took part not only in the ethnogenesis of the Buryats, but also in the neighboring Turkic and Mongolian peoples, which indicates the inextricable link between the history of this subregion both with Central Asia and with Southern and Northern Siberia were identified after Researches of the ethnic composition of the Balagansk Buryats

This article surveys several Eskimo loanwords in Tungusic. Since they are found exclusively in Northern Tungusic languages, in all probability these loanwords represent a relatively late contact between Northern Tungusic and Eskimo speakers that was likely to take place no earlier than two thousand years ago, when speakers of proto-Northern Tungusic migrated to the North from the Tungusic Urheimat located around the mid-stream of Amur river. This fact is important not only for the Tungusic linguistic history, but also for Eskimo one, because it demonstrates that Eskimo languages were much more widely spread in North-East Asia outside of their historically attested locality on the Asiatic shore of Bering straight.

This paper discusses my efforts in analyzing the important linguistic data on Khentii-Dornod Khamnigan Ewenki, a probably now extinct Tungusic language of Mongolia documented by the Mongolian scholar Academician B. Rinchen in the 1960s and published in his book, Mongol Ard Ulsîn Xamnigan Ayalguu [The Tungusic Dialects of the Mongolian People’s Republic]. Rinchen’s book is essentially the only source of linguistic data on Khamnigan Ewenki as once spoken in the provinces of Khentii and Dornod in northeastern Mongolia; however, the data in Rinchen’s book is largely unanalyzed and much progress has been made in the field of language description since the publication of Rinchen’s book.
In this paper, I present some findings of my work toward a revised analysis of Rinchen’s notes, including an interpretation of the phonological inventory, morphological analyses, notes on the lexicon, and my efforts toward a sketch grammar of Khentii-Dornod Khamnigan Ewenki based on Rinchen’s data. My reanalyses of Rinchen’s data currently consist of an interpretation of the phonological values intended by Rinchen’s practical Cyrillic transcriptions of Khamnigan Ewenki data, reanalyses of morphemes and lexical items transcribed by Rinchen but not fully analyzed, a revised analysis of several short Khamnigan Ewenki texts documented by Rinchen, sentential data, and notes on the lexicon.

J.M. Tronson believed that the language of the word-list which he collected in 1856 on the Lower Amur, and published twice in 1859, was Nivkh. Among contemporary scholars, only Roman Jakobson noted that the language of Tronson’s word-list is not Nivkh, but Tungusic. Unfortunately, neither Jakobson nor other specialists have specified what language that might be. We confirm E.G. Ravenstein’s unnoticed assertion of 1861 that the language is Oroch and, from this new perspective, we offer a critical edition of Tronson’s pseudo-Nivkh word-list.

ÖZET Bu çalışmanın amacı geleneksel Evenk toplumunun geçirmiş olduğu sosyal ve siyasi süreç içerisinde ne gibi toplumsal değişiklikler geçirdiğini ortaya koymak ve bu değişim süreci içerisinde geleneksel Evenk sosyal kurum ve yapılarının modern kurum ve yapılar ile karşılaştırılması konularını ele almaktır.

Essays in the History of Languages and Linguistics. Dedicated to Marek Stachowski on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Edited by M. Németh, B. Podolak, M. Urban. Kraków 2017. Pages 57–80.

This contribution focuses on the synchronic description and etymology of the Written Manchu word nofi ‘person (used after numbers higher than one)’. We conclude that nofi continues an analytic construction expressing collective numbers plus a converb and therefore historically should be better seen as a derivational suffix rather than as an autonomous lexical word, in spite of its synchronic status as measure word (numeral classifier) which is a result of Chinese influence.

Languages of the Tungusic family are historically spoken all over Northeast Asia, including Siberia, Manchuria, and Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang). Most importantly, the Tungusic family includes Manchu, the official administrative language of China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Due to the impact of Chinese and Russian, Tungusic languages have been rapidly losing ground, and there are today only two potentially viable groups speaking Tungusic: the Manchu-speaking Sibe (Xibo) in Xinjiang and the Ewenki-speaking Solon (Ewenke) in Northern Inner Mongolia (Western Manchuria). In both cases, the language could only be saved by drastic positive measures at the national and international levels.

The main goal of this paper is to put forward the hypothesis that (Dynastic) Manchu depreciating names may be relics of a well-known Tungusic(-Eurasian) naming custom. It is a common practice among many Eurasian societies to name children with derogatory terms aiming at averting evil influences or bad luck on them.

(in German): This paper was meant, and submitted, for the second volume of a Festschrift for Michael Weiers, which was expected to be published  not much later than 2003 (!). While the first volume of this FS did see the light, the second volume, for which this contribution was intended, never did. I have no information whatsoever about the intention, if any, of the editor to eventually publish this volume, nor do I know anything concrete about his whereabouts, so I publish this piece here. It makes use of some contents I published elsewhere in the meantime, so it might seem to be somewhat repetitive.

Paradigmatic morphology is a central and crucial concept for several branches of comparative linguistics. The observation of shared paradigms in languages which were not suspected of having a common ancestry stands at the cradle of modern ge-nealogical linguistics and dominates the discussion(s) about not firmly established or merely putative language families or phyla to this day, the very different morphological techniques different languages use for the formation of paradigms mark the beginning of language typology, now a major pillar of the language sciences, and the question, to which degree languages—closely, distantly, or not at all related with each other— may borrow morphological paradigms (part or whole) from each other or might have done so in the past (which, if true and not properly detected, might lead to superficially persuasive, but factually erroneous, claims and hypotheses of genealogical relatedness) continues to be an important theoretical and practical issue in comparative linguistics. The contributions to this volume address, i. a., all of these questions and areas and offer much food for thought about historical morphology, areal linguistics and, above all, language classification—going far beyond the " Altaic hypothesis " , which figures prominently in some of them.

The Barguzin County of the 19th century was a territory to the northeast of Lake Baikal. From the viewpoint of ethnic history it was a specific historical-ethnographic area. In the raiddle ages this region’s territory witnessed active contacts of Turks, Mongols and Tungus people resulting in the foirnation of various ethnic substrata, such as Buryat-Mongolian clans in the Tungus and Yakut tribes and vice versa. In the 19th century population coraposition of the Barguzin County got significantly шоге diverse due to the arrival of newcoraers, raostly Russian and Jewish exiled convicts, who added up to the indigenous Buryat and Tungus population. The foirnation of one of the largest Jewish diasporas in Siberia, collectively known as Barguzin Jews, Ьесаше a characteristic feature of this region. The Russians foirned a special ethno-local group of“Barguzin Russian hunters”.
Баргузинский округ в XIX в. - это территория, находящаяся к северо-востоку от оз. Байкал, представляющая с позиций этнической истории особую историко-этнографи¬ческую область. В средневековье была зоной интенсивных контактов тюрков, монголов и тунгусов, благодаря которым в регионе активно протекали этноконсолидационные эт¬нические процессы, результатом которых стало сложение различных этнических под¬разделений, например, бурят-монгольских родовых единиц в составе тунгусских, якут¬ских племен - и наоборот. В XIX в. состав населения Баргузинского округа значительно усложняется: к коренному населению - бурятам и тунгусам прибавляется значитель¬ный пласт новоприбывших, основу которого составили поселенцы-каторжане, преиму¬щественно русские и евреи. Характерной особенностью региона стало формирование одной из крупнейших еврейских диаспор в Сибири, за которой закрепилось название «баргузинские евреи». Русские образовали особую этнолокальную группу «баргузинских русских промысловиков».

In Georg C. Brückmann, Andrea Tietz, Florian Deichl, Andreas Fischnaller & Anna Lena Deeg (eds.). 2015. Cultural Contacts and Cultural Identity. Proceedings from the Munich Interdisciplinary Conference for Doctoral Students, October 9th-11th, 2013 (Münchner Nordistische Studien 19), 183-191. München: Herbert Utz Verlag.

The descendants of the Tungus group, which was known as the Nerchinsk Tungus in the Tsarist Russia after the 17th century and was called the Equestrian Tungus by other Tungus groups, live in three different countries, namely the Russian Federation (RF), Mongolia and the People‟s Republic of China (PRC), under the name Khamnigan. The Khamnigan are not officially recognized in any of these three countries. They are classified as Buryats in RF, as Mongols in Mongolia and as Evenks in PRC. This is a result of the ethno-linguistic sate of the Khamnigan society. The name Khamnigan itself means „Evenk‟ in Mongolian. On the other hand Khamnigans speak a variety of Mongolian in all three countries. In PRC they additionally speak a variety of Evenk. There is evidence that until recently they spoke Evenk in Mongolia as well. It is thought that the Khamnigans have almost completely switched over to Buryat and Russian in RF. Additionally Khamnigan Mongol is greatly influenced by Buryat and Khalk...