Khanty language

Infobox Language
name=Khanty
nativename=ханты ясанг
familycolor=Uralic
states=Russia
region=Khantia-Mansia
speakers=12,000
fam1=Uralic
fam2=Finno-Ugric
fam3=Ugric
fam4=Ob-Ugric
iso2=
iso3=kca

Khanty or Xanty language, also known as the Ostyak language, is a language of the Khant peoples. It is spoken in Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs, as well as in Aleksandrovsky and Kargosoksky Districts of Tomsk Oblast in Russia. According to the 1994 Salminen and 1994 Janhunen study, there were 12,000 Khanty-speaking people in Russia. The Khanty and Mansi languages are the Ob Ugric (Ob Ugrian) members of the Finno-Ugric languages.

The Khanty language is known to have a large number of dialects. The western group of dialects includes the Obdorian, Ob, and Irtysh dialects. The eastern group of dialects includes the Surgut and Vakh-Vasyugan dialects, which, in turn, are subdivided into thirteen other dialects. All these dialects significantly differ from each other by their phonetical, morphological, and lexical features - to the extent that the three main "dialects" (the northern group as the third) are mutually unintelligible. Thus, based on their significant multifactorial differences western and eastern Khanty could be considered individual but closely related languages.

Alphabet

Cyrillic

The case of "ma" are accusative "manət" and dative "manəm".

The demonstrative pronouns and adjectives are::"tamə" "this", "tomə" "that", "sit" "that yonder": "tam xot" "this house".

Basic interrogative pronouns are::"xoy" "who?", "muy" "what?"

Numerals

Khanty numerals, compared with Hungarian, are:

Except for "ten" and the compound forms, these are quite similar in the two languages. Note also the regularity of IPA| [xot] - [haːz] "house" and IPA| [sot] - [saːz] "hundred".

yntax

Both Khanty and Mansi are basically nominative-accusative languages, but have innovative morphological ergativity. In an ergative construction, the object is given the same case as the subject of an intransitive verb, and the locative is used for the agent of the transitive verb (as an instrumental) . This may be used with some specific verbs, for example "to give": the literal anglicisation would be "by me (subject) a fish (object) gave to you (indirect object)" for the equivalent of the sentence "I gave a fish to you". However, the ergative is morphological (marked using a case) only, not syntactic, so that, in addition, these may be passivized in a way resembling English. For example, in Mansi, "a dog (agent) bit you (object)" could be reformatted as "you(object) were bitten, by a dog(instrument)".

References

* [http://www.policy.hu/filtchenko/khanty_language.htm Khanty Language]
* [http://www.omniglot.com/writing/khanty.htm Omniglot]
* [http://www.policy.hu/filtchenko/Documenting%20Eastern%20Khanty Documentation of Eastern Khanty]
* [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=kca Ethnologue]
* [http://www.eki.ee/books/redbook/khants.shtml Khanty Language and People]
* [http://www.hunmagyar.org/turan/khaman/khant.html Brief Khanty Demography, History & Socioeconomy]
* [http://www.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~kmatsum/kaken/Rusbiblio/Khanty.html Khanty Bibliographical Guide]