East Mansi

• Main Author: Forsberg, Ulla-Maija
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2022
• Subjects: mansi; Mansi; Siberia
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767664.003.0030; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/47096478/oso-9780198767664-chapter-30.pdf

Abstract East Mansi, the easternmost Mansi variety, was spoken in the area of the river Konda, a tributary of the river Irtysh, in Western Siberia. After the end of the twentieth century, there are no fluent speakers alive, but the language is reasonably well documented, also thanks to a massive corpus of folklore texts collected before World War I. From the perspective of both phonology and morphology, East Mansi shows more complexity than North Mansi. East Mansi is rich in verbal morphology, showing several tenses in the Conditional/Conjunctive mood and both conditional and optative mood for the passive, as well as converbs for different functions. The use of the passive and the “dative shift” (both important from the point of view of information structuring) are closer to North Mansi. In fact, they represent morphosyntactic structures that are common to the whole Ob-Ugric linguistic area.