This book is a collection of fairy tales in Udeghe (Udihe), an endangered Tungus language spoken by approximately 100 people in the southern part of the Russian Far East. It provides the first fairly representative sample of folklore in the Southern dialect of Udeghe. The twenty-five texts were recorded from Udeghe speakers in the Primorje region of Russia between 1984 and 1997. They are published in phonological transcription and supplied with morpheme-by-morpheme glosses and English translations. The footnotes clarify certain Udeghe words, expressions, objects and customs, and provide information on when and how the texts were recorded, as well as about similar motifs that appear in other published sources on the folklore of the Udeghe, and other Tungus people. The book also contains a preface which explains the conventions used in rendering the texts, and gives a brief introduction to Udeghe language and culture.
What shapes and magnitude can language loss have in East Asian endangered languages? How does it differ with regards to the languages' historical development and sociolinguistic environment? This book surveys a number of minority and, in most cases, endangered languages spoken in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Russia which all face, or have faced in their recent history, loss of language features. The contributions in this publication present you with different cases of obsolescence attested throughout East Asia and highlight how this process, though often leading back to common causes, is in fact a multifaceted reality with diverse repercussions on grammar and linguistic vitality.
The Tungusic Languages is a survey of Tungusic, a language family which is seriously endangered today, but which at the time of its maximum spread was present all over Northeast Asia. This volume offers a systematic succession of separate chapters on all the individual Tungusic languages, as well as a number of additional chapters containing contextual information on the language family as a whole, its background and current state, as well as its history of research and documentation. Manchu and its mediaeval ancestor Jurchen are important historical literary languages discussed in this volume, while the other Tungusic languages, around a dozen altogether, have always been spoken by small, local, though in some cases territorially widespread, populations engaged in traditional subsistence activities of the Eurasian taiga and steppe zones and the North Pacific coast. All contributors to this volume are well-known specialists on their specific topics, and, importantly, all the authors of the chapters dealing with modern languages have personal experience of linguistic field work among Tungusic speakers. This volume will be informative for scholars and students specialising in the languages and peoples of Northeast Asia, and will also be of interest to those engaged with linguistic typology, cultural anthropology, and ethnic history who wish to obtain information on the Tungusic languages.
This volume is the first book-length presentation of the grammatical category of Associated Motion. It provides a framework for understanding a grammatical phenomenon which, though present in many languages, has gone unrecognized until recently. Previously known primarily from languages of Australia and South America, grammatical AM marking has now been identified in languages from most parts of the world (except Europe) and is becoming an important topic in linguistic typology. The chapters provide a thorough introduction to the subject, discussion of the relation between AM and related grammatical concepts, detailed descriptions of AM in a wide range of the world’s languages, and surveys of AM in particular language families and areas.
Volume 4 includes unique records of Orok (Uilta), a Tungusic language (dictionaries, texts, grammatical comments) noted down by Pilsudski directly from native informants at the beginning of the 20th century on Sakhalin. The original source material is identified with the help of - and confronted against - all the existing contemporary dictionaries with the assistance of leading specialists in the field (the Novosibirsk Avrorin group, also called the school of Manchu-Tungusologists). Abundant comparative data are quoted. All necessary introductory information and commentaries of ethnographic, historical, and linguistic nature are provided. Archival photos taken by Pilsudski are juxtaposed with related contemporary photos especially taken for this purpose. In addition, samples of original manuscript pages are reproduced. Bibliographical data and indices are provided in conformity with the previous volumes.
It's December 1997 and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russia's Far East. The tiger isn't just killing people, it's annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. To their horrified astonishment it emerges that the attacks are not random: the tiger is engaged in a vendetta. Injured and starving, it must be found before it strikes again, and the story becomes a battle for survival between the two main characters: Yuri Trush, the lead tracker, and the tiger itself. As John Vaillant vividly recreates the extraordinary events of that winter, he also gives us an unforgettable portrait of a spectacularly beautiful region where plants and animals exist that are found nowhere else on earth, and where the once great Siberian Tiger - the largest of its species, which can weigh over 600 lbs at more than 10 feet long - ranges daily over vast territories of forest and mountain, its numbers diminished to a fraction of what they once were. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers - even sharing their kills with them - in a natural balance. We witness the first arrival of settlers, soldiers and hunters in the tiger's territory in the 19th century and 20th century, many fleeing Stalinism. And we come to know the Russians of today - such as the poacher Vladimir Markov - who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching for the corrupt, high-paying Chinese markets. Throughout we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters and how early Homo sapiens may have once fit seamlessly into the tiger's ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator, and the grave threat it faces as logging and poaching reduce its habitat and numbers - and force it to turn at bay. Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger is a gripping tale of man and nature in collision, that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the Siberian forest.
Expressions from the semasiological domain of phasal polarity (ʻstillʼ, ʻalreadyʼ, etc.) tend to be highly polyfunctional, with their various uses often extending into a wide range of other linguistic domains, both time-related and non-temporal. Yet these patterns have hitherto been investigated mostly for individual languages or smaller groups. This volume presents the first ever larger-scale survey of the numerous functions of expressions whose meanings include the notion of ʻstill’, making use of a global sample of 76 varieties from 45 distinct phyla. It is aimed at semanticists, typologists and descriptive grammarians alike.
