I began studying Sakha using L. N. Kharitonov's Soviet-era textbook, the Самоучитель якутского языка. This is an excellent resource for learning Sakha, indeed I think the best in existence, and it occurred to me as I was working through it that it would be useful to make it available in English. At present, there are virtually no resources for learning Sakha that are accessible to non-Russian speakers. I therefore began systematically translating into English not only the Sakha exercises, but also the Russian explanatory apparatus, the remarks on grammar, and the Russian texts intended for translation into Sakha. This took a considerable amount of time, but I worked slowly and steadily and now have a fairly polished translation of Kharitonov's great work, which I am making available here in a set of pdf files. At present I am only posting Part One (Lessons 1-40), as I am still polishing and correcting the second half. I am certain there are many errors in Part One that I have not caught, and I would be grateful to any reader who draws them to my attention.
It would be fairer to describe what I have done as an adaptation of Kharitonov's work, rather than as a translation. I have made a somewhat inconsistent effort to de-Sovietize the work. In the Soviet period there were generally more unaltered Russian loan words in Sakha than today, and I have changed the spelling of most such words to reflect current usage. This includes both common and proper nouns: I have, e.g., changed врач (doctor) to its Yakutized form, быраас; and Лена (the Lena river) to Өлүөнэ. I have also systematically changed the names of people from typical Russian names (e.g., Вася, Пётр, Мария) to traditional Sakha names (e.g., Ньургун, Кэскил, Сайаана). In a way this adaptation is also a distortion, as even in the post-Soviet period most Sakha people continue to have Russian names, and my uneasiness about such distortion is what explains the inconsistency in the alterations. A greater challenge than proper names was mounted by the particular themes of the lessons. In the early lessons I systematically changed references to, e.g., working at the kolkhoz, to, e.g., working at the hospital. But as the lessons grew more complex, it became clear that the thematization of Soviet realities was ineliminable. And arguably it is wrong to eliminate it: even if the Sakha language has evolved significantly in the past half-century, and most of all since the fall of the Soviet Union, any learner of Sakha will inevitably find herself reading a good number of Soviet-era texts, and so must become familiar with the orthographic and grammatical conventions and with the subject matter of the period.
The result, then, is a hybrid of adaptation and fidelity, and a sequence of difficult judgment calls. I have corrected some small errors in Kharitonov's work, and have moved the 'Remarks on grammar' section from the end to the beginning of each chapter. Kharitonov frequently introduces vocabulary items without providing a translation for them, where a Russian-speaker would easily understand their meaning but a non-Russian speaker would not. In these cases, I have included a translation or explanation, and have added the word to the dictionary (the third of three pdf's here). Kharitonov sometimes does the same with the introduction of new elements of grammar, relying on a coincidental (or perhaps artificially constructed) similarity between Russian and Sakha. In such cases, I have also provided more explanation, for the non-Russian speaker, than he has given. In general, my interest is to provide access to the Sakha language without having to pass through Russian. The relationship between the two languages is complex and deeply rooted over the past five centuries, but in its earlier development and in its deeper structure Sakha is entirely unrelated to Russian, and decoupling the two is an important part of studying the language on its own terms.
I am hoping these materials will be of use to linguists interested in gaining some familiarity with Sakha, particularly to those with an interest in comparative Turkic linguistics. Kharitonov's work is however intended for ordinary people (presumably Russophone Soviets who had transplanted by choice or by fate to the Yakut ASSR) with a serious commitment to gaining proficiency in the language.
I have not translated the prefatory material that introduces the student to the Sakha alphabet. For this the reader is invited to consult the Wikipedia page on 'Yakut scripts'.
A full scan of the third edition of the Самоучитель якутского языка (1969) is available here.
I am also including below a short bibliography of works (primarily in English, Russian, and German) that I have consulted over the course of my studies, and that may be useful to others.
Reference works
S. Afanas'ev, M. S. Voronkin, and M. P. Alekseev, Dialektologicheskiï slovar' iakutskogo iazyka, Moscow: Nauka, 1976.
K. Antonov, Materialy po istoricheskoï leksike iakutskogo iazyka, Yakutsk: Iakutskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo.
Otto von Böhtlingk, Jakutisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 1851.
Drevnetiurkskiï slovar', Leningrad: Nauka, 1969.
Ingeborg Hauenschild, Lexikon jakutischer Tierbezeichnungen, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008.
Wladimir Monastyrjew, Jakutisch. Kleines erklärendes Wörterbuch des Jakutischen (Sacha-Deutsch), 2006.
Eduard K. Pekarskiï, Slovar' iakustskogo iazyka, Yakutsk: Iakutskiï filial Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1907-30.
V. Popov, Etimologicheskiï slovar' iakutskogo iazyka, Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2003.
N. Stakhovskiï, Russko-iakutsiï slovar', 1968.
---- ---- ---- ----, Jakutsko-russkiï slovar', 1972.
Textbooks and manuals
D. D'iachkovskiï, P. A. Sleptsov, K. F. Fëdorov, M. A. Cherosov, Pogovorim po-iakutski, Yakutsk: Bichik, 2002.
Marcel Erdal, A Grammar of Old Turkic, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004.
John R. Krueger, Yakut Manual, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1962; Curzon Press, 1997.
Scholarly works
S. Afanas'ev, Govor verkhoianskikh iakutov, Yakutsk: Iakutskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1965.
Gregory D. S. Anderson, “Historical Aspects of Yakut (Saxa) Phonology,” in Turkic Languages 2 (1998): 3-31.
Anatoliï Ignatevich Gogolev, Iakuty. Problemy etnogeneza i formirovaniia kul'tury, Yakutsk: Izdatel'stvo IaGU, 1993.
Grammatika sovremennogo iakutskogo literaturnogo iazyka. Fonetika i morfologiia, Moscow: Nauka, 1982.
Stanislaw Kaluzinski, Mongolische Elemente in der jakutischen Sprache, Warsaw, 1962.
---- ---- ---- ----, Iacutica. Prace jakutoznawcze, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog, 1995.
I. Korkina, Nakloneniia glagola v iakutskom iazyke, Moscow: Nauka, 1970.
Brigitte Pakendorf, Contact in the Prehistory of the Sakha (Yakuts): Linguistic and Genetic Perspectives, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leiden, 2007.
Gavriil Vasil'evich Popov, Slova neizvestnogo proiskhozhdeniia iakutskogo iazyka (sravnitel'no-istoricheskoe issledovanie), Yakutsk: Iakutskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 2000.
Nicholas N. Poppe, “Das Jakutische,” in Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, ed. Jean Deny, Kaare Gronbech, Helmut Scheel, and Zeki Velidi Togan, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1959.
Elizaveta Ivanovna Ubriatova, Istoricheskaia grammatika iakutskogo iazyka, Yakutsk: IaGU, 1985.
