#enets

I know this might not look too flashy, but this might be my favourite stamp sheet. These Estonian stamps are a language tree of the Uralic languages.

Going anti-clockwise from the bottom middle stamp, we have:

The Samoyedic Languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, and Kamasin

The Ugric Languages: Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi

The Permic Languages: Komi and Udmurt

The Mari and Mordvinic (Erzya and Moksha) Languages

The Sami Languages (Nortern, Southern, Skolt, Inari, Lule, Ume, Pite, Ter and Kildin Sami)

The Baltic-Finnic Languages: Veps, Karelian, Izhorian, Livonian, Finnish, Estonian and Votic

Languages in brackets weren't mentioned in the stamp, but I thought I'd elaborate anyway

Enets (Онаь базаан)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 43

Spoken in: Russia

Script: Cyrillic, 36 letters

Grammatical cases: 7

Linguistic typology: agglutinative, SOV

Language family: Uralic, Samoyedic, Enets-Nenets

Number of dialects: 2

History

1664 - first documentation of the language

1978 - first dictionary

1980s - adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet to write Enets

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the script: а б в г д е ё ԑ ж з и й к л м н ӈ о п р с ҫ т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я.

-ц-, -ш-, -щ-, -ъ-, and -ы- only appear in names and loanwords. Partial or complete vowel reduction occurs in the middle and at the end of the word.

Grammar

Nouns have three numbers (singular, dual, and plural) and seven cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, lative, locative, ablative, and prolative). The category of destinativity is also used to show whether the entity is destined for someone.

Postpositions agree in person and number with the noun phrase.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, person, and number. Some negative constructions can be used in positive contexts with special pragmatics.

Dialects

@a-little-bit-of-maxi-in-my-life asks (via the old blog):

Do you also belive that Yurats was the indirect middle of Nenets and Enets? I'd be glad to hear some other opinions. And I know, it is really hard to gain information on Enets and especially Yurats, but still. Thank you for reading this.

Depends on what “indirect middle” is supposed to mean…

From what I’ve heard recently (via Olesya Khanina & Valentin Gusev), there’s firstly a related issue where even Enets itself appears to be partially due to secondary convergence. Aside from ethnographic indications, such as the Forest Enets and Tundra Enets not considering each other a part of a single people, there’s a surprizing amount of exclusive Tundra Enets + Nganasan isoglosses. Even some of the basic vocabulary differences between the two Enets varieties fall in this category. Gusev raises the possibility if this means that either Nganasan and TE have formed an areal group from very early on, or even that the primary dialect division in Northern Samoyedic might fall between Forest Enets and Tundra Enets, not between Enets and Nganasan.

I am skeptical of at least this latter suggestion though. There are still also numerous features distinguishing Nganasan from the Nenets–Enets group, or even from the entire rest of Samoyedic. One of the former is *a > *ä in N–E, early enough to trigger the Common Samoyedic palatalization of *k (e.g. *kajwå ‘shovel’ > N–E *säiwa > TN сива = śīwā, Enets seo, versus Ng kajbu; *kaliŋ ‘armpit’ > N–E *säliŋ > TN сялʼ = śāl°, FE śeri, TE śeðiʔ, versus Ng kaľiŋ). Two of the latter: *j > ∅ in *jïntə ‘bow’ (TNe ӈын = ŋin°, Yurats ngidde, Enets iddo, Selkup ynty, Kamass īnə, Mator mindi, versus Ng ďintə; *j- is original as shown by other Uralic cognates like Finnish jousi, Northern Sami juoksa), and Nganasan having *-ntənA (> -ntənU) and not *-kənA as the ending for the locative case.

But the Enets-as-partly-areal analysis sounds still plausible, and is actually visible also elsewhere. For one example, there is a very deep phonetic isogloss where Proto-Samoyedic word-initial *ä- results in Tundra /e-/ but Forest /na-/, suggesting that the FE/TE split goes pretty far back. This seems to predate numerous common Enets innovations, such as loss of initial *ŋ, depalatalization of initial *ń, and general raising of *ä to /e/ — that is, in FE there is an intervening development *ŋ́ä > *ŋ́a > *ńa before any of these other shifts happen.

(You can now find Khanina, Shluinsky and Koryakov’s presentation covering differences between the two Enets varieties from the program page for the recent 7th International Conference of Samoyed Studies.)

Back at Yurats, then: the most visible feature it shares with Enets is the denasalization of nasal + stop clusters (*mp, *nt, *ŋk > bb~b, dd~d, g), in contrast with *nt > *n and retention of /mp ŋk/ in Nenets proper. IMO this seems fairly trivial though. Already within Uralic, the same happens also in e.g. Hungarian, Permic and most Sami languages, and so this could be easily areal rather than common inheritance. Yurats also lacks some other related consonant cluster assimilations; e.g. in Enets *ms *ns *rs all > *źź (> TE ď, FE z > s), but in Yurats *ms > bs (əmså > *ŋămsa > ngabsa ‘food’) and *rs > rs (*märkä > *märsä > merse ‘wind’) (no examples of *ns are attested). Innovations that Yurats clearly shares with Nenets are not too much more common either, but they include e.g. *ə > a, *ŋ́ > ń and apocope (versus in Enets: *ə > o, *ŋ́ > ∅, no apocope). IIRC the lexicon also points slightly towards Nenets, though I don’t have at hand Helimski’s article where he discusses this.

So if we want to put these languages on a tree and not just call them a dialect continuum / linkage, what seems to me like the best approach is Yurats being a sister group to Nenets; this “wider Nenets” plus Enets (be it in one branch or two) combining to form “Northwestern Samoyedic”; and this being likely independent from Nganasan entirely, even if they share at least *ŋ-epenthesis.

For general Enets sources, I mentioned a few reference materials in my recent main blog post on Kamassian (but these are maybe not news for you). There indeed are not a lot of materials for the language(s) though. Not published at least. Helimski’s collections on Tundra Enets remain in edition, and at the Samoyedology conference I also asked a few people if Natalia Tereshchenko’s archives might have something; but if there is, it is apparently not public knowledge. Also, Florian Siegl is still preparing some additional reference materials on Enets, even if he is otherwise no longer working in Samoyedology.

The forthcoming linguistic volumes of the Manuscripta Castréniana series will have their share of Enets coverage too, but I don’t think there is an ETA yet.

The ancestors of the Enets people were Samoyeds who came from Southern Siberia and the area around river Tom. (Picture source: Commons.)

The Enets people were first mentioned in a text originated in 15th century Novgorod. In 17th century the Enets people lived a nomad life, the Tundra people around the downstream of the rivers Taz and Yenisey, and the Forest people in the Turuhan river valley. In the end of the century they had to give way to Nenets and Selkup groups and move to the eastern side of the downstream of Yenisey. The ones that stayed on the west side of Yenisey and around the Taz area were assimilated to the Nenets groups that moved there. In the 1930s’ kolkhozes were formed and the Enets people moved to multicultural population centres and were mostly assimilated to the Nenets and Nganasan peoples. (Moskva: Bolšaja Rossijskaja entsiklopedija)

Zoya Ivanova Palchina after her graduation. The national district of Taimyr, 1969. Author: A. Snezheyev. (I had some trouble with translating the Russian text. If you notice a mistake, please inform me.) Source: Некультурная антропология.

“There are, between the various Samoyed peoples, or rather between particular groups of Samoyeds, significant differences not only with respect to language, but also with regard to way of life or material culture.“ -Péter Hajdú, The Samoyedic peoples and languages, 1962, page 10.

A young Enets woman. (Source: Энцы)

According to Hajdú, in the 60s’ hunting and fishing played an important role in the lives of the Forest Enets, while reindeer breeding was the most important source of income for the Tundra Enets. “The Enets way of life was in part like that of the Nenets and in part like that of the Nganasan,” he wrote. Enets tents were similar to the Nganasan ones and the cut of their clothing varied, sometimes being alike the Nganasan shape, sometimes of that of the Nenets.