folia uralica debreceniensia 19. - Finnugor Nyelvtudományi Tanszék

MATICSÁK SÁNDOR
Analysis of the first Mordvin written record
According to our present knowledge, the first written record of the Mordvin
language is from 1769. A. P. Feoktistov has discussed this text briefly, in
a monograph on the development of the Mordvin literary language, providing
the reader with a Cyrillic and a Roman letter transcription of the text, and
with some information about its language use. This paper aims to study the
same record in more detail.
First, I address problems of the transcriptions and issues of the orthography.
Then, a detailed, multiple-aspect analysis of the 36 words of the text
is provided. I took six aspects into consideration during the analysis: a) morphologic
segmentation of the given word with an exact definition of the suffixes;
b) occurrence in early records; c) occurrence in Paasonen’s large dialectal
dictionary; d) present form; e) derivation; f) Moksha equivalent.
In the last section of the essay, I summarize the etymological characteristics
of the lexemes appearing in the text (almost half of the words is of ancient
origin); and then, through a survey of the phonetic and morphological
features of the text, I prove that this record was written in Erzya, more exactly,
in a variant of the North-West dialect spoken along the affluents of the
Pjana river that are located north to Lukojanov.
SÁNDOR MATICSÁK
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