How the classification of Mansi dialects was changed (on the material of the first Cyrillic books and dictionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries)

The first books and dictionaries written in Mansi dialects in the 18th and 19th centuries that were never described before have been found in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg branch) and the National Library of Finland. This paper presents the data on six dialect features identified by L. Honti in seven 18th-century dictionaries and three 19th-century books. These archival sources show that the Proto-Mansi phonemes to be differentiated in the 19th century were usually realized by doublet archaic and innovative reflexes in the 18th century. Apparently, there were no clearly distinct dialect differences between the Northern and Western Mansi dialects in the 18th century. This situation changed in the middle of the 19th century when the Proto-Mansi *ā became o in all the Southern, Eastern, and Northern dialects under discussion. Proto-Mansi *i (*a according to the reconstruction proposed) has no doublets and is reflected as a in all the dialects. The reflexes of the Proto-Mansi *c and *š make it possible to differentiate the Eastern and, presumably, Northern and Southern subdialects of the Tobolsk province. The reflex χ- of the Proto-Mansi *k- before back vowels appears not only in the Northern and Eastern dialects but also in, presumably, the Southern dialects. Thus, the study shows that the vowel phonemes had practically no doublet reflexes in the 19th century and coincided in the four dialects examined. The consonant phonemes, on the other hand, make it possible to differentiate between the Southern, Northern, and Eastern dialects.

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