Proto-Samoyedic accent: External and internal reconstruction

The article posits the question of whether the Proto-Samoyedic accent has any external correspondences. The analysis was made using the usual methods of comparative-historical linguistics. The author followed Vladimir Dybo, who worked out the concept of paradigmatic stress based on Slavic languages, and, firstly, analyzed the changing of the place of stress in word paradigms in specific dialects in field and archival data, secondly, compared the most closely related dialects, and then languages, lexeme by lexeme, thus reconstructing the paradigmatic stress to the proto-language level. The first indication of paradigmatic stress existing in Samoyedic languages was a phrase from the letter Eugene Helimski wrote to Ariadna Kuznetsova, now available online, that said that the catalogue compiled by Andrei Dulzon and his disciples had marked stresses in central and southern Selkup dialects, which were for some reason dropped in the dictionary published after this catalogue. In 2008, in Tomsk, the author had an opportunity to scan about 30,000 cards with marked free stress for all Selkup wordforms from several tens of settlements where southern and central dialects were spoken. The author confirmed that this material was correct while working with the last native speakers of Selkup dialects, with the books by N. Grigorovsky published in the 19th century and with the archival materials of Matthias Castrёn collected in the 18th century. At the same time, while working with the Helimski archive in Helsinki, the author found roughly 500 cards on the imperative forms in Taz (Northern) Selkup, in which, again, the stress was marked. It turned out that the principle of stress placing in the forms of imperative is one and the same in the Taz dialect and in southern and central dialects of Selkup. This made it possible to reconstruct the Proto-Selkup accent system, which is described in the first part of the section for Samoyedic languages. In 2010, Maria Amelina agreed to researching the accent systems of Nenets dialects, and since that time has conducted five expeditions to the speakers of dialects from different groups - Tundra (Yamal, Gydan, Kanin, Bolshezemelsky) and Forest. These data, analyzed in the Praat phonetic software, showed that the place of stress is more or less the same in all dialects, and is the same as the macron in the dictionary by Lehtisalo (1956); however, it is expressed prosodically in different ways, which speaks in favor of it being stress, not length. The author compared the data on accent in Nenets and Selkup dialects and saw that they correspond to each other. Based on this comparison, the author could reconstruct the place of stress in Proto-Samoyedic, on which the development of the Proto-Samoyedic vocalism system depended. This article compares the reconstruction of the Proto-Samoyedic stress to the free stress in Proto-Finno-Volgaic, Permic, Ob-Ugric languages, and reconstructs the Proto-Uralic free paradigmatic stress. As a result, the author has found out that Proto-Uralic had four accent paradigms, which survived without changing in Komi-Permyak dialects, but fused into two paradigms in Samoyedic languages.

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