Talk:Mansi language

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[edit] "Comparison with Hungarian"

The letter <ä> is not part of the official Hungarian alphabet and I don't know any phonemes that a native speaker would "intuitively" assign to this letter.

Also: This table obscures all the phonological differences btw. Hungarian and Mansi by approximating Mansi phonemes with "Hungarian" letters. Eg. Hungarian <h> (/h/; IPA [h] word-initially) and Mansi <х> (/x/; IPA [x]) are different phonemes in many languages and even if [x] is an allophone of the former in Hungarian and these phonemes stem from the same "Ugric" phoneme it would be nice if the reader of the article would be informed about this… --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 21:13, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

I think the problem may be that the editor is sourcing from a Hungarian book that doesn't provide the right phonemes. I have a LINCOM grammar book on Mansi that has the right phonemes, but I was hoping to get the Mansi Cyrillic alphabet written instead. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:47, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually I don't recall what I was waiting for and the grammar book I have doesn't have the phonemes in IPA exactly... --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:58, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

	Stop	Fricative	Sibilant	Lateral	Tremulant	Nasal
Bilabial	p	w				m
Dento-Alveolar	t		s	l	r	n
Alveo-Palatal	tˈ		ś	lˈ		ń
Palatal		j
Velar	k	χ,γ				η
Labiovelar	kʷ	χʷ

	Front	Back
High	/ī/,i	ü,u
Mid	ē,/e/	ō,o
Low		ā,a

Here's the vowels and consonants from the book if someone wants to make sense of them and add them to the article... Riese, Timothy. Vogul: Languages of the World/Materials 158. Lincom Europa, 2001. ISBN 3895862312 --Stacey Doljack Borsody 23:17, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, that seems to be usable, thow some letters & diacritics @ the table doesn't seem to be "standard IPA symbols". Eg. instead of the apostrophe (') that indicates palatalization/palatal consonants here, standard IPA-usage is [ʲ] for palatalized consonants and dedicated symbols ([ʎ], [ɲ], [c]) for palatal consonants. The article in the Hungarian Wikipedia gives the (broad) IPA-values of the native phonemes as follows (based on one of the sources listed in the notes [jegyzetek] section of that article(?)):

Mansi Consonants	Stop	Continuant	Sibilant	Lateral	Rhotic	Nasal		Mansi Vowels	Unrounded	Rounded
Labial	p п	w[1] в				m м		Close	i(ː) ы/и	u(ː) у/ю
Alveolar	t т		s с	l л	r р	n н		Mid	e(ː) э/е	o(ː) о/ё
Alveolo-palatal, Palatal	c ть	j й	ɕ сь	ʎ ль		ɲ нь		Mid	(ə)
Velar	k к	x ɣ х г				ŋ ң		Open	a(ː) а/я

Hungarian Consonants[2]	Stop	Continuant	Sibilant	Lateral	Rhotic	Nasal		Hung. Vowels	Front unrounded	Front rounded	Back
Labial	p b p b	f v f v				m m		Close	i iː i í	y yː ü ű	u uː u ú
Alveolar	t d t d		s z sz z	l l	r r	n n		Close-mid	(e)[3] eː (ë) é	ø øː ö ő	o oː o ó
Post-alveolar, Palatal	c ɟ ty gy	j j/ly	ʃ ʒ s zs	(ʎ[3]) (ly)		ɲ ny		Open-mid	ɛ e
Velar, glottal	k g k g	h (x[4]) h(/ch)				(ŋ) (nk/ng)		Open	ɒ a: a á

1. ^ This is actually labiovelar
2. ^ affricates ʦ tʃ ʣ ʤ (c cs dz dzs) are not indicated here
3. ^ ^{a b} dialectical/obsolete
4. ^ word-final allophone of the former; other allophones ɦ ç are not indicated here

---

I'm not sure why the labiovelar stops and fricatives were omitted (possibly just because they don't have a dedicated letter in the Mansi alphabet) but otherwise the two inventories are quite similar (until you notice that I was cheating "a bit" ;]; btw. I still don't know how we could re-transcribe the examples in the "Comparison" section).

I think it'd be better to check that in another textbook before anyone adds that to the article cause Hungarian grammar books tend to use the symbols dedicated to true palatal consonants (like Hungarian c ɟ ɲ) for palatalized consonants that are normally indicated with a superscript j (ʲ). :--Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 20:45, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

The vowels are a bit strange. I need to read my grammar book further, but the /i/ being spelled with both и and ы in cyrillic confirms a mention that it is "backed" in some words. I supposed the ы is used during this condition. "When followed by the fricative ɣ it is backed (-īɣ)" (the ī has an extended character beneath it, like a u, but I'm not sure how to write it here). --Stacey Doljack Borsody 21:34, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I've heard it before that some Ugric languages/dialects have a central or back illabial close vowel (IPA ɨ or ɯ) [some scholars claim that it was present in Proto-Finno-Ugric; others think it's likely a more recent innovation/borrowing in these languages], so that would'nt a big surprise for me (and they might have these vowels in the words they borrowed from Turkic languages or Russian, too). --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 15:07, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Comparison table

Interesting to finally see the phonemes matched up with the cyrillic. Using this I can figure out how some of the words are supposed to be written in IPA and cyrillic. For now I'll stick with the convention used in my grammar book, which isn't really IPA as you pointed out. That is one of the things that always annoyed me about this book :) Table copied here for fixing...with some corrections in bold. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 21:26, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Mansi	Hungarian	English
χūrəm nē vituel huligel χus χūl pugi.	Három nő a vízből hálóval húsz halat fog.	Three women are catching twenty fish with a net from the water.
χūrəmsātχus hulachsam āmpəm witen ōli.	Háromszázhúsz hollószemű ebem vízen él.	The three hundred and twenty dogs of mine with raven eyes live on water.
Pegte luw lasinen manl tūr szilna.	Fekete ló lassan megy a tó szélén.	A black horse is slowly walking on the shore of the lake.

On second thought, should that "comparison with Hungarian" section even be present? Sentences like these are highly constructed and can be misleading in their implication. For example, one could make similar sentences with a Turkic language and Hungarian. Doing this kind of comparison doesn't say much about Mansi. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 22:08, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I think this table should be used only if the phonemic/phonetic qualities and/or the Cyrillic text can be reliably reconstructed (it is dubious in many cases if we don't have the word in your grammar book or in a dictionary). But if anyone manages to do that, it may stay despite that the sentences are indeed constructed as they might give the reader a clue about ("insight into") the phonological history of the Ugric languages as the words in them are part of the basic vocabulary of these languages (kinship terms, names of animals, colours) and are likely real cognates.

Eg. they might find out that in many cases PU *-mp (→ -mb) → -b in Hungarian (as in "eb" [dog]), PFU *k- became x- in Mansi and (→ x-(?)) → h- in Hungarian (as in három [three]), P(F)U *-t → -z in Hungarian (as in víz [water]) etc. --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 15:07, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I guess we can leave it in the article for now. I think this kind of comparison information might be more useful in the Ugric languages article. PFU *k- became x- in only some of the dialects of Mansi. The Northern Mansi dialect is focus in my grammar book and it uses x-, but some of the other Southern, Western, and Eastern dialects retain a k-. I was thinking of adding dialect information later after fleshing out some of the other sections. --Stacey Doljack Borsody 16:42, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, some dialect information would be useful of course; I haven't even heard about that other Mansi dialects handled word-initial *k -s differently (but of course I knew that this *k → x/h change didn't happen unconditionally [in every environment] in standard Hungarian and [northern] Mansi, many words (like "китыг/kettő" [two], or Hungarian "kéz" [hand]) have retained their original values, was just too lazy to note that).

As for the trancription convention you try to stick with: I think it'd be better to note in the article that pronunciation information is given here using the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (of course experts of the subject would know that, but they don't really need to get their information from Wikipedia); and you/we/everyone should use that notational system more consistently (eg. in your first wikitable on this talk page you had used γ for the voiced velar fricative but you use IPA ɣ in the article), cause I don't think that it's a good idea to mix the two phonetic transcription systems (unless we have to, eg. because UPA donesn't have an appropriate symbol [diacritic] for a particular sound/phonetic quality). --Adolar von Csobánka (Talk) 19:39, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Allow me to note that for me, as a Hungarian user it was a delight to read these sentences in this form. A first time to use Hungarian to understand a sentence in another language. It is true though that these comparisons would be more appropriate on the Ugric languages page. Koczy 14:59, 7 August 2007 (UTC)