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Linguistic geography of the Tungusic peoples. The Tungusic languages: principles of classification. The living forms of the Evenki language, the main dialectal groups. The earlier Latin and the present standard Russian Cyrillic orthography for Evenki. Its elementary grammar, phonology, phonotactics and vowel harmony. Word/morpheme categories. Morphology of the nominal and verbal stems; plural markers, syntactic markers (the twelve to twenty "cases"), possessive markers; aspect/tense and mood markers. Pronouns and numerals. Word formation: verbal nouns and verbal adverbs; deverbal and denominal verbs, deverbal and denominal nouns. Nounverbs. Invariable and variable enclitics. Syntax: sentence types, statement, question, negation, prohibition, direct and indirect speech; sentence final particles; word order; concord; co-ordination and sub-ordination, concatenation. Lexicon: innovation; dialectal diversity; Mongolian, Turkic (Yakut), Russian, etc., elements. Reading folklore texts: tales, epics, songs, riddles, proverbs. Reading specimens from Evenki textbooks and contemporary texts; texts selected from folklore collections in Latin script and modern texts printed in Cyrillic orthography and/or in Latin/Cyrillic phonetical transcription with glossary.
Course Requirements: Rudiments of English and general grammatical terminology. Reading knowledge of Russian helps in consulting Vasilevich's ethnographical sketch on Evenkis, her Evenki-Russian and Boldyrev's Russian-Evenki dictionary, Voskoboinikov's Evenki folklore as well as Tsintsius' comparative lexicon, but not required.
Days and Time: Arranged.
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