The Languages of the Soviet Union

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CUP Archive, 4 juin 1981 - 317 pages
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A general account of the languages of the Soviet Union, one of the most diverse multinational and multilingual states in the world as well as one of the most important. There are some 130 languages spoken in the USSR, belonging to five main families and ranging from Russian, which is the first language of about 130,000,000 people, to Aluet, spoken only by 96 (in the 1970 census). Dr Comrie has two general aims. First, he presents the most important structural features of these languages, their genetic relationships and classification and their distinctive typological features. Secondly, he examines the social and political background to the use of functioning of the various languages in a multilingual state. The volume will be of importance and interest to linguists and to those with a broader professional interest in the Soviet Union.
 

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Table des matières

Altaic languages
39
Uralic languages
92
IndoEuropean languages
142
Caucasian languages
196
Paleosiberian and other languages
238
Ethnic and linguistic composition of the U S S R according to
279
Alphabets of the languages of the U S S
286
Recent statistics and literature
301
Subject index
315
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Page 85 - Uralic family), many languages of the USSR have recently developed or are in the process of developing subordinating conjunctions, either borrowing them directly from Russian or calquing them on the structure of Russian conjunctions. ... for instance by using interrogative pronouns to introduce relative clauses, or to introduce time clauses, like Russian kogda 'when', which, like English when, can introduce both questions and time clauses. (Comrie 1981: 12—13, 85) Kalmyk and Gagauz are just two...
Page 167 - Greek, there were five cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and vocative), three numbers (singular, dual and plural), and three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter).
Page 13 - ... example, the dominance of German, Turkish and, above all, Russian shows up in the domain of adverbial subordinators: Indeed, the occurrence of conjunctions marking subordinate clauses is something of a rarity among the languages of the USSR, though ... under the influence of Russian, and also the influence of certain other languages (eg, Arabic on many Turkic languages, German and Scandinavian languages on some Balto-Finnic languages within the Uralic family), many languages of the USSR have...
Page 27 - The mother tongues of the small ethnic groups and communities continue to function as a means of communication in everyday life. In cases of this type bilingualism should be viewed as a transitional stage to monolingualism, which will be reached by the small ethnic groups when their assimilation into the corresponding nations is complete.
Page 264 - For transitive subjects (ergative relation), only the D series is used, and prefixes encoding transitive subjects always occur initially, preceding both parts of a discontinuous root. For intransitive subjects and for direct objects (absolutive relation), either the B or the D series is used, the choice being determined lexically (apparently arbitrarily); in this function, the affixes occur before a nondiscontinuous root, but between the two parts of a discontinuous root.
Page 266 - Paleosiberian language group) spoken on the lower reaches of the Amur river and on Sakhalin Island in Eastern Siberia in several dialects.
Page 200 - intensive" stops are strongly affricated, intensive affricates have lengthened affrication and are unaspirated, and the intensive fricatives are lengthened and unaspirated. In all these languages, the nontense correlates of these phonemes are short and aspirated. Thus in Avar we have the pairs k-kk, k'-kk\ ts-tss, ts'-tss', s-ss, /-//, etc realized as [kh-kx, k'-kx', tsh-tss, ts'-tss', sh-ss, etc].
Page 70 - It has recently been argued ( Ard 1980) that the basic phonetic feature that conditions vowel harmony in the Tungusic languages, or at least in Proto-Tungusic and still in some Tungusic languages, such as Even, is advancement versus retraction of the tongue-root, a kind of vowel harmony that is otherwise wellattested in West African languages. We may now give some examples to illustrate vowel harmony in Even, using the stems berken 'crossbow...

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