Ob-Ugric materials from the archives of Eugen Helimski

The personal archive of the outstanding Uralist Eugen Helimski (1950-2007) which, according to his testament shall be accessible for interested researchers is located at the Finnish National Archive, more precisely in the Collections of the Finno-Ugrian Society (602:504). We would like to thank Valentin Gusev for editing Helimski’s archive material and our Finnish colleagues for giving us the opportunity to publish the Ob-Ugric part of these materials on our website.

We would also like to point out that the works of E. Helimski, including works on the Ob-Ugric languages, as well as his teaching materials are accessible via the website of the University of Hamburg:

http://www.uni-hamburg.de


A brief list of materials:

1. “Notes from Leningrad (around 1975).
Khanty: Grunja [Agrafena Semjonowna, ES] Pesikowa, Piŋ
Mansi: Natascha [Natalja Wasil'jewna, ES] Sainachowa, Sos'wa”.
This part of the manuscript begins with a Russian-Mansi-Khanty glossary, comprising nine pages. The first column provides Russian words in no particular order (neither alphabetical nor semantic). The second column presents two rows of Mansi equivalents noted in FUT (in the first row there are words noted in clear handwriting, the words might possibly be taken from the dictionary by Munkácsi/Kalman; next to it are less clearly written words, perhaps taken down by an informant, sometimes the words are complemented by additional translations and notes). The third column provides Khanty equivalents, also in two rows.
Subsequently, there are a Mansi glossary with Russian translations (one page), a Khanty glossary with Russian translations (three pages) and a list of Mansi homonyms (two pages).


2. “Khanty parallels to the vocabulary of Forest Nenets” (A. Pesikowa – M. Njuglemkin)
Without date, one of the informants is called “Njuglemkin”, below also “Njuglomkin”.
This manuscript in two parts consists of materials that were gathered with the help of two informants.

The first part begins with a glossary named “The Surgut dialect. Piŋ vernacular (River Piŋ)”. It consists of nine pages, sometimes there are only few words on a page; at the end, one can find a sketch of the phonetic system of this vernacular.

The following part is entitled “Osty. Surgut (Piŋ). Notes by Agrafena Pesikowa, around 1975”.
It includes the following materials:
- On the first 14 pages there is a numbered list of 335 Forest Nenets lexemes with Russian translations (in no particular order); - on the subsequent 8 pages are two numbered lists (from 5 to 335) in three columns: a) Russian expressions, obviously translations of Nenets lexemes; b) Khanty expressions or comment “don’t know”; c) Russian translations of the Khanty expressions, that mostly match the first column (in some cases of matching one can find the sign --), but sometimes no

The second part begins with a single page of M. Njuglomkin’s biographical data (see above “Njuglemkin”).
On page 14 it provides a numbered glossary with 335 units that are ordered in three columns: a) one word in Nenets, b) the same word in Khanty, c) meaning of the Khanty word, Surgut dialect, Piŋ dialect. The comment “don’t know” can often be found in column b, with a corresponding dash in column c.

E. Skribnik