Sakha Lessons, Continued

Last summer I posted here my English translation of the first half of L. N. Kharitonov's Russian-language Sakha textbook, the Самоучитель якутского языка (Third Edition, 1969). I have finally completed the translation of the second half (Lessons 41-80), and so am posting here a single pdf file of the entire thing. I am also posting, in a separate pdf file, the solutions for all of the exercises in the textbook. Finally, I am posting a third file, a significantly expanded Sakha-English dictionary, based on the vocabulary in Kharitonov's book, but also including many other helpful words compiled from other sources. 

1. L. N. Kharitonov, A Self-Study Manual of the Yakut Language, Parts I and II (translated from Russian).

2. Solutions to all exercises in the manual.

3. A Sakha-English Dictionary

As I continued in my work through Kharitonov's texts and exercises, I became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of his approach (though for better or worse it is still almost certainly the best that exists, in a very small field of competitors). For one thing, Kharitonov is the very model of the Homo sovieticus, and the range of topics he covers is not at all adequate for dealing with texts and themes either from the 21st-century realities of the Sakha Republic, or from the profound and complex Sakha oral-literary tradition that precedes the Soviet period by several centuries (even if it only began to be written down toward the end of the 19th century). There is no introduction to traditional Sakha beliefs, no Ysyakh festival, there are no representations of the cosmos or nature, nor of the interiority of human life. There is just work on the sovkhoz, and more work, and occasionally a hunting trip or a planning meeting of the regional Soviet. 

The volume is also frustratingly and strangely quick with certain rather difficult grammatical features of the language, while belabouring other features that seem, at least to me, obvious and easy to master. For example, so-called service verbs are only introduced in Lesson 79, i.e., the penultimate lesson of the whole book. Having gone on to work with more advanced sources, I have learned that service verbs are not some rare frill in the language: they occur in nearly every sentence of standard Sakha-language texts, such as you will find in a daily newspaper or a folk tale or a school-child's composition exercise. Yet they are not to be found until the tail-end of Kharitonov's work. He also gives very few comprehensive tables of grammatical forms; for example, nowhere in the work is there an exhaustive listing of all the different case-endings a noun can take in the possessive form. 

In noting these shortcomings I in no way mean to disparage Kharitonov's work, which, again, is unsurpassed in the field of Sakha didactics. It is just that when learning a relatively non-cosmopolitan language such as Sakha (and this would be all the more the case if one were learning, say, Ket or Yukaghir), one must scrape together whatever resources one can find, and treat all of them as a sort of composite textbook. One must of course also seek out native speakers and learn directly from the source.

I have made a table of nominal case-endings in the possessive form, using the model noun ат (horse), which fills at least one of the gaps in Kharitonov's work:

Possessive declension: singular

Падеж	Case	First Person	Second Person	Third Person
Төрүт	Nominative	атым	атыҥ	ата
Араарыы	Partitive	--	--	--
Сыһыарыы	Dative	аппар	аккар	атыгар
Туохтуу	Accusative	аппын	аккын	атын
Таһарыы	Ablative	аппыттан	аккыттан	атыттан
Туттуу	Instrumental	аппынан	аккынан	атынан
Холбуу	Comitative	аппыныын	аккыныын	атыныын
Тэҥнии	Comparative	аппынааҕар	аккынааҕар	атынааҕар

 

Possessive declension: plural 

Case	First Person	Second Person	Third Person
Nominative	аппыт	аккыт	аттара
Partitive	--	­­­­--	--
Dative	аппытыгар	аккытыгар	аттарыгар
Accusative	аппытын	аккытын	аттарын
Ablative	аппытыттан	аккытыттан	аттарыттан
Instrumental	аппытынан	аккытынан	аттарынан
Comitative	аппытыныын	аккытыныын	аттапыныын
Comparative	аппытынааҕар	аккытынааҕар	аттарынааҕар

In the coming months I hope to come up with more such tables and schematic learning aides for Sakha, as well as expanding the English-Sakha dictionary I've started, a version of which I've posted above. 

One immediate query I have for other linguists concerns my identification of the туттуу case as “instrumental”. Russian-language sources, and not only Kharitonov, identify this case not as the творительный падеж, but rather as the орудный падеж. Its functions, however, seem to overlap fairly well with the Russian instrumental. For what it's worth, the only other languages I have been able to find which Russian-language sources identify as having an орудный падеж are Japanese and Buryat. 

Comments

[Stephen Menn]

For what it's worth, I notice that Ukrainian Вікіпедія has an article "Орудний відмінок, або інструментал". So maybe it's just an alternative way of describing the same case.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

Thanks, Stephen. Thanks. I'm coming around to the conclusion that both 'творительный' and 'орудный' are perfectly equivalent translations of the Sakha 'туттуу'. 'Орудный' is after all really just a Slavicization of 'instrumentalis'. I suppose the more difficult question is why in Russian (unlike Ukrainian) the primary term for the instrumental is 'творительный' rather than 'орудный' or the non-existent 'инструментальный'.