UniLang

But it is never referred to as a language in literature but a Hungarian dialect.

Loiks wrote:But it is never referred to as a language in literature but a Hungarian dialect.

Well, the distinction between dialect and language is always a politically fraught one. It is not appropriate for linguists to tell language communities what is a language and what is a dialect, so in linguistics one usually distinguishes between the political definition (e.g. "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy"), and a linguistic one, which usually rests on mutual intelligibility. I.e. if you had two speakers of variety A and variety B and each of them spoke a pure form of their varities, how well would they be able to understand each other. 50% is often taken as cut-off point, but a) it is sometimes hard to quantify that and b) it is not the most urgent linguistics to determine what is a dialect and what is a language (especially since it has political bearing).

As for Csángó, linguists nowadays try to respect the wishes of the community, and it so happens that the speakers of Csángó nowadays identify as Romanians and do not want to be referred to as Csángó. (I am not judging anything here, just observing the situation.) It is out of the question that Standard Hungarian and Csángó are closely related members of Ugric, but whether you call Csángó a dialect or something else depends on a variety of factors, or in this case even if you call it Csángó at all..

It just reminded me that Khanty dialects can be so different from each other that they are not mutually intelligible. But, well, in that case we can't speak about any political self awareness any more, I guess.

krix wrote:Another Ugric language that is dying is Csángó. One subgroup has already completed the shift to Romanian, while the remaining one is almost there. Hungarians have described it to me as a "weird dialect". It is quite apart from the dialects in Hungary proper, it takes some time for them to get into...
Because of the political sensitivity of the issue, some people call it "Northern Moldavian" (I hope I got it right, and it wasn't Southern or Western )...

Since I don't know what it's like having a language quite similar to my own I can't tell properly if Csángó is a separate language or a dialect, like a German can tell that Dutch is a separate language, but Bayern is only a dialect of German.
All I can tell is I've listened to Csángó once or twice for a normally long time, and exactly how krix wrote, it takes some time to get into, but it is sure that I can understand them. Maybe it comes from my cultural heritage, but for me Csángó is definitely a dialect of Hungarian.

Especially since Hungarian has been exposed to so much Turkish, and Finno-estonian to so much russian/North Germanic

There are groups who want to class Uralic as a sub-group of Altaic, but I like to think we picked up a bunch of altaic when we came in from the East and then during the ottoman empire.

Found some fragments of a Khanty (Kazymian dialect) textbook on another forum:
http://depositfiles.com/files/7286331
http://depositfiles.com/files/7311294
Alas, it is in Russian.
And some old issues of a Khanty newspaper:
http://www.library.finugor.ru/books.php ... =viewHanti

and here is the rest of that textbook:

http://depositfiles.com/en/files/hc1zamr9t
http://depositfiles.com/files/7kww2gxv2

Levo wrote:

0stsee wrote:Do you think the Ugric languages (besides Hungarian, of course) are going to survive at all?

Are they still being passed on to younger generations who use them actively?

It doubt it. It seems we're gonna left behind without any real language-relatives.

Actually Khanti-Mansi is rich in oil and the Russians have given then various rights, so the populations are staying strong. It's mainly their culture which has been wiped off the face of the earth, but the languages stay strong...but small. One day I shall learn them...along with Yukaghir.

Thank you for posting the textbook, zhiguli.

I am interested in Khanty, stemming from my love for Hungarian.

I've studied Mansy for one semester during my Erasmus studies in Szeged, Hungary and I totally fell in love with this language. It was pity that there wasn't any Khanty course led but I have some resources about both of the languages but of course only in Russian.

Do you have any PDFs or links (in Russian)? I'm thinking about learning Russian, mainly to gain access to these and other languages, so that wouldn't be a problem.

You'd think there'd be at least some stuff for them in Hungarian, but it seems not.

Вӱша!
Yes, I have. I have three great teach-yourself books in Russian but nothing in English. I can post some of them but not in the moment since my net connection is awful.
Well, it would be really difficult for you to study Khanty through Russian since you don't know the language.

Did you get them from UZ? I have three books in Russian too.

Not at all. I can handle it.

Do you have anything regarding pronunciation of Khanty?

Here's a video in what I assume is Khanty.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwaGymP8Hn4

Love it!

3 textbooks for Khanty seems to be a good number. Do they come with audio? What about authentic native material and a dictionary?

Lowena wrote:Do you have any PDFs or links (in Russian)? I'm thinking about learning Russian, mainly to gain access to these and other languages, so that wouldn't be a problem.

You'd think there'd be at least some stuff for them in Hungarian, but it seems not.

To be fair, Hungary in Western Eastern Europe is pretty physically distant from most of those other languages, which are in Eastern Eastern Europe or Asia. It's why (at least as far as I can tell) there isn't much Mongolian material in Turkish, but there's plenty of it in Chinese.

All I have:
A Grammar of Eastern Khanty by Andrey Yury Filchenko (in English) - the words are written phonetically
Уроки хантийского языка (Khanty lessons) - a nice book in Russan
Поговорим по-хантийски (Кошкарева, Соловар) - Let's speak Khanty (by Koshkareva, Solovar) - pretty nice teach-yourself book
Самоучител хантийского языка (Ю.Н. Русская) - Teach yourself Khanty (Yu. N. Russkaya) - another great teach-yourself book
Книга для чтения (часть первая) - первый класс (Reading book - I. part) - written stories for children learning Khany in first grade (again everything is in Phonetic)
Русско-хантийски разговорник (Немысова) - Russian-Khanty phrasebook (by Nemysova)
Хантийско-русский и русско-хантийский словарь (Скамейко, Сязи) - A Khany-Russian and Russian-Khanty dictionary (by Skameyko, Syazi)
Русско-хантийски тематический словарь (казымский диалект) (Кононова) - Russian-Khanty tematic dictionary (Kazymski dialect)

I think all books are downloaded from UZ but not sure.

But unfortunately I don't have any audio files provided -there's nothing on Internet.

There's a tiny bit of audio available for Khanty (Vasyugan) but unfortunately it's not tied to a textbook and not in Cyrillic.

Glossed text
Audio for the text
Video of someone narrating the text's story

Dusting off an old thread but:

Can anyone confirm that the Khanty word мӱг means hill?

I know that it's a cognate to Finnish mäki.

Maybe in a different dialect, but the Russian-Khanty thematic dictionary I have says "холм" is "керас, пай". I don't see "мӱг" anywhere, unfortunately.