Leiden University Student Repository

Mol-van Valen, Tessa Clazina de (2018)

A description of aspects of the Soyot grammar by means of a Soyot text provided by Rassadin

Master thesis | Russian and Eurasian Studies (MA)

In this thesis a Soyot (Sayan Turkic spoken in Buryatia, Russia) text called The Hunter is analyzed in order to provide more information on the grammar of Soyot. This text came with the only linguistic study available at the moment, the grammar sketch by Rassadin (2010). Besides the text, a minidictionary was also published together with the grammar sketch. This dictionary was the source for the translation of the text, which was subsequently parsed and glossed. This work was published in order to revive the Soyot language which went extinct sometime between the 1970s and 1990s. However, a lot of this language has not yet been studied. The analyzed text provided new data and it was the basis for the description of the functions of participles and gerunds. The text also shows how predicative possession is constructed. On the other hand, the mini-dictionary helped to define the sound inventory of Soyot. With the help of literature on other languages, such as related Turkic languages...Show moreIn this thesis a Soyot (Sayan Turkic spoken in Buryatia, Russia) text called The Hunter is analyzed in order to provide more information on the grammar of Soyot. This text came with the only linguistic study available at the moment, the grammar sketch by Rassadin (2010). Besides the text, a minidictionary was also published together with the grammar sketch. This dictionary was the source for the translation of the text, which was subsequently parsed and glossed. This work was published in order to revive the Soyot language which went extinct sometime between the 1970s and 1990s. However, a lot of this language has not yet been studied. The analyzed text provided new data and it was the basis for the description of the functions of participles and gerunds. The text also shows how predicative possession is constructed. On the other hand, the mini-dictionary helped to define the sound inventory of Soyot. With the help of literature on other languages, such as related Turkic languages or Mongolic languages which have influenced Soyot, a hypothetical IPA orthography could be contructed and the syntax of subordinate clauses and predicative possessive could be compared.Show less

Soyot

Russian minority

language description

language preservation

text analysis

Siberian languages

Turkic languages

Author

Mol-van Valen, Tessa Clazina de

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisors

Stapert, E.L.

ECTS Credits

20

Language

en