Talk:Kalmyk Oirat

Below is some data from the Kalmyk Manual. Maybe somebody can incorporate it? The book is still under copyright protection.

===CHAPTER 5 Notes on the Kalmyk Language===

Kalmyk belongs to the Western branch of the Mongolian language group, which is an important division of the Altaic family of languages. It is closely related to Khalkha-Mongolian, spoken in Outer Mongolia, now the so-called Mongolian People's Republic, to the various Mongolian dialects spoken in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang-Uyghur Autonomous Region and Manchuria, and to Buriat (Buryat), spoken mainly in the Buriat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in the USSR and in the adjacent areas.

Kalmyk is spoken in the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and by the older generation o£ the Sart-Kalmyks numbering from 2,500 to 3,500 and dwelling in the area of Przheval'sk, near Lake Issyk Kul, in the northeastern part of the Kirghiz Soviet Republic. It is also the mother tongue of about 1,500 Kalmyks living outside of Soviet Russia, in a number of European countries (mostly in France, West Germany, and Bulgaria), and in the United States of America.

According to the 1959 census, there were 106,000 Kalmyks in the USSR of which 91% consider Kalmyk as their mother language. To this figure approximately 1,500 émigrés speaking Kalmyk should be added.

Kalmyk is very closely affiliated with Oirat dialects of the Torghut, Derbet, Bayit, Dzakhachin, Uriankha, Dambi-Ölöt, and Mingat tribes in the north-western part of Outer Mongolia, and of the Torghut in Alashan, Dzungaria, Kuku Nor (Kökö Nūr), Northern Tibet, and other scattered areas of Inner Asia.

The Oirat dialects differ from each other only slightly. N.N. Poppe considers them dialects of one language, i.e., the Oirat language. According to him. Kalmyk differs little from Oirat from the point of view of its phonology and morphology; the vocabulary is, however, quite different.

Poppe included the Moghol language, spoken in Central Afghanistan northwest of Kabul by the so-called Moghols, the descendants of the Moghul conqeurors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in the West Mongolian branch, the Oirat and Kalmyk being the other members.

B.Kh. Todaeva, who in 1956 made on the spot investigation of the dialects of Torghuts, Khoshots, and Ölöts in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, came to the conclusion that the Oirat language ("dialects" in her terminology) consists of two subdialects -Torghut and Ölöt which differ only slightly.

The Oirat adopted an alpbabet of their own in 1648. A learned Lamaist monk, Zaya Pandita, created it on the basis of the vertical Mongol script. The Oirat alphabet of Zaya Pandita (1599-1662) is actually an improved and phonetically more precise Mongolian script. The new script, which was brought closer to the actual pronounciation but was never a phonetic one, was used by all Oirats, among them the Kalmyks in Russia. However, the Zaya Pandita script never succeeded in spreading among the Kalmyks, in part because Tibetian became the liturgical language of the Kalmyk Lamaist clergy.

In spite of repeated attempts to brine it closer to the colloquial Kalmyk language, the Zaya Pandita script (in Kalmyk called todo moŋgol) remained always far apart from the latter. It was accesible only to a limited number of people. Such attempts were opposed by the Lamaist clerey. We should bear in mind that this clergy was brought up and educated in Tibetan which was both the instructional and liturgical language in the Lamaist monastic school. and monasteries (xurul).

The Ruasification of the non-Russian peoples of Russia was another important influential factor. The sole administrative language was Russian, which long ago sucessfully supplanted Kalmyk. There were only a few elementary schools where Kalmyk was taught. Thus the Zaya Pandita sript was destined to die out.

In the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Zaya Pandita script gradualy fell into disuse until the Kalmyks abandoned it in 1923 and introduced the Russian alphabet, which made it easier tor the illiterate Kalmyks to learn reading and writing. It should be mentioned here that the illiteracy among the Kalmyks was very high.

But soon, in 1930, it was replaced by the Latin transcription. This reform was the result of the Latinization drive for the alphabets of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the USSR. The new Kalmyk alphabet was accordingly based on the Latinized Turkic alphabets. It did not last long, however, and ultimately the Russian alphabet was re-introduced in 1937. The Russian alphabet became firmly established among the Kalmyks (and other peoples, too).

After their return (in 1957) from the forced exile in Siberia and remote areas of Soviet Central Asia (see chapter IV), the Kalmyks began to publish again books, periodicals, newspapers, etc., using the pre-war Russian alphabet. In the latter part of 1957, however, a few othographical changes were adopted, among them the abolition of diaeresis(••) above the vowels а, о, and у and their substitution by new symbols ә, ө, and ү (see the introductory part of the Glossary).

The Kalmyk is divided into three dialects - Torghut [torɣūd], Derbet [dörvəd] and Busava [buzāvə]. The famed Russian Mongolist, B. Vladimirtsov, proposed the following classification of the Kalmyk dialects:

• 1. Derbet (Astrakhan') with the subdialects

a) Great Derbet [Stavropol'],
b) Busava [Don Kalmyks].

• 2. Torghut (Astrakhan') with the subdialect.

a) Ural Kalmyk,
b) Orenburg Kalmyk.

Vladimirtsov admits, however, that the Ural and Orenburg subdialects are insufficiently investigated.

N. N. Poppe, in his earlier articles on the Kalmyk language, considered Busava (Don), Ural and Orenburg Kalmyk as subdialects of Torghut dialect, the other main Kalmyk dialect being Derbet. But in his later work he divided Kalmyk into Derbet, Torghut and Busava dialects.

The Busava dialect is very close to Torghut, and it is spoken by the Don Kalmyks, who before the early 1930's used to live in the Sal'sk district (okrug) of the Don region (oblast') (the region in the southern part of European Russia inhabited mainly by the Don Cossacks). They are the descendants of a group or displaoed Derbets moved to the Don oblast' at the request of the Emperor Peter the Great.

The Derbet dialect, spoken by the Derbet of Astrakhan' (L1ttle Derbet ulus) and Stavropol'

Great Derbet ulus) regions, varies somewhat but insignificantly from the Torghut and Busava dialects in that it frequently has a (I can't read these Mongolian words in Latin)

The dialects spoken by the Ural and Orenburg Kalmyks, the majority of whom were moved to the Kalmyk ASSR in the late 1920's, are also very close to Torghut. N.N. Poppe classifies them as subdialects of Torghut.

In general all Kalmyk dialects are very close to each other, and they differ only slightly. Nothing is known about the dialect of the Terek Kalmyks, who in 1897 numbered some 3,600 people. They too, were moved n the 1920's to the territory of the Kalmyk ASSR.

Until 1934 there existed no standard literary language among the Kalmyks. Both the Torghut and Derbet dialects enjoyed equal rights, although the language textbooks were based on Torghut. W. L. Kotwicz, the chief authority in Kalmyk linguistics, gave the prefrence to Torghut in his Kalmyk grammar. In March, 1934, the decision was reached at the fourth linguistics conference in Elista to adopt the Derbet dialect as the standard literary language.

The single full vowel phonemes of Kalmyk are as follows: i ü u
ɵ ö o
ä a

The schwa vowel /ə/ is a highly reduced, indistinct sound. In modern Kalmyk orthography this vowel is disregarded altogether, and there is no special symbol to denote it. The letter ə does exist, but it stands for /ä/.

Kalmyk vowel phonemes

	Front		Central		Back
	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
High	i	ü				u
Mid	ɵ	ö	ə			o
Low	ä		a

The vowels i, ü, u, ɵ, ö, o, and a are represented by the following symbols in the present-day Kalmyk alphabet:

i	и	ö	ɵ
ü	ү	o	o
u	у	ä	ə
ɵ	ɵ	a}	a

--Skipped Section-- A few of the characteristic features of the Kalmyk language are as follows:

• 1) The presence of two distinctive inventories of vowel phonemes in the initial stressed and non-initial unstressed syllables. In initial position the following vowel phonemes are present:
  

single- i, ɵ, ä, ü, ö, u, o, a.
geminate- ii, ɵɵ, ää, üü, öö, uu, oo, aa.
In non-initial syllables, however, the short vowels have disappeared, having been replaced by the schwa vowel /ə/, which has a quality of a highly reduced indictint sound, and syllabic consonants, e.g., ... Notes

--Erkin2008 23:11, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

• I removed the history part because all the information is already in the Kalmykia article. Can anyone do a fact check on the claim that Kalmucks were not allowed to speak Kalmuck? Andris 16:04, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

• Fact check done. "Not allowed to speak" was an exaggeration. Corrected. Andris 20:29, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

• to some degree it was true.For instance, kalmuck children in orphanages during the exile period were not allowed to speak kalmuck to one another by the institution's authorities (its just one example). even upon having returned back home from siberia, children in schools were not allowed to speak kalmuck, even at some work places the kalmucks were not allowed to speak their language.speaking the language was concidered as expression of kalmuck nationalism, though mass media did exist in the kalmuck language, but it all mainly carried declarative character,"on paper".My name is Arslan. i am a kalmuck, and the witnesses for all that are my parents who were born in siberia, my grandparents who were deported to siberia and all the rest of my family. so saying that we were not allowed to speak our language during the soviet period, i meant the period of exile and after.

but i do really appreciate correcting of some paragarphs in the article. I should have been more precise about some details for its a source of true knowledge.thank you, Andris.

• I am strongly opposing referring Kalmyk people as Western Mongols. Historically, Kalmyks always had very high degree of separation from Mongols. Very well known "formula" introduced by Mongols by the way - 4 Kalmyks (Oyrats) and 40 Mongols. Existence of Mongolia brings another confusion into account making impression that Mongolia is Kalmyk motherland. But historical Kalmyk domain has been divided between Russia, China, Kazakstan and Mongolia. So, Western Mongolia is, actually, just Eastern Kalmyk land. Calmouk 19:24, 1 Jan 2006 (UTC)
  • Kalmyks are Oirats but not all Oirats are Kalmyks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.178.20.252 (talk) 23:01, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

That's just what I've been most worried about when reading this article. Kalmyk is just a name for two modern Oirat dialects spoken by a shrinking number of native speakers in Kalmykia, while no scientist I'm aware of would label the Oirat in Xinjiang as "Kalmyk". But it would need quite a bit of editing to correct this, and as a precondition for such editing ideally the ability to use a bunch of Russian-language literature that I lack. If anyone was in for that job, I would probably be able to name some useful sources to start with. G Purevdorj (talk) 23:04, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

• I added Writing System category Calmouk 21:17, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Altaic reference

I removed an awkwardly worded reference to Altaic (diff) and the associated citation request tag. There seems to be no controversy that Kalmyk belongs to a subgroup of the Mongolic language group, and that Mongolic is a component of the Altaic grouping. It is only the validity of the overall Altaic hypothesis that might be in question, but it isn't a matter of Kalmyk having some specific controversy within the Altaic discussion, which the wording seemed to (perhaps unintentionally) suggest. - David Oberst 10:03, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Total speakers: 518,500

Are there so many kalmyk speakers in russia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.178.20.252 (talk) 22:56, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Classification

I made some changes in the article regarding the classification of Kalmyk. In the end, this must mean abandoning the Ethnologue classification of Mongolic. While I myself would hold that the classification of Luvsanvandan is most appropriate, the classification of Sanzheev (which is in effect a non-classification by justraposing all major entities) might be most unprejudiced. I've conducted the recent changes in accordance with Sanzheev. G Purevdorj (talk) 11:38, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Kalmyk language template

If you are a native speaker of Kalmyk then you can help translate this template into your own language:

xalThis user is a native speaker of Kalmyk.

Edit

--Amazonien (talk) 02:47, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

This is not a good idea at all. The template would have to run "This user is a native speaker of Oirat". Kalmyk just WAS the most important dialect of Oirat, but no one seriously doubts that those guys over there in Xinjiang or the Deed mongols speak the same language. It is not entirely my fault that the article on Oirat language is a mediocre stub. Then, we have a second problem. Xinjiang Oirats and Kalmyks use two script systems, Cyrillic alphabet and Clear script, and usually they cannot READ the other script. So which scipt to use in the template? G Purevdorj (talk) 09:45, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Dialect

See Talk:Torgut dialect#POV (talk it here). --虞海 (Yú Hǎi) (talk) 06:36, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

The changed link for ISO 639-3 was invalid, otherwise I wouldn’t have reverted this at this point. The claim that Kalmyk is treated as a dialect of Torgut reflects a sourced claim that I wrote on Torgut dialect. While this claim might be problematic and was the reason why 虞海 suggested that it is POV, it does no good to paste an unsourced mirrored claim about the Kalmyk dialect before the issue has been discussed. But I’m in agreement with 虞海 that this problem should be discussed in one place: Talk:Torgut dialect#POV. G Purevdorj (talk) 10:35, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

The discussion on Talk:Torgut dialect (which is possibly not yet finished) from my point of view seems to point in the direction that the renaming action here might have been wrong. Language is an awkward term, granted, but it is more conventional to use this term for a variety that is a Standard language. Possibly, this usage of the term presupposes that we assume Kalmyk to be a register. The funny thing is that we seem to get into a conflict between two categories of classification: regiolects respective the shunned term dialect vs. Standardized varieties with a lower degree of spoken reality. Eg the normative pronunciation in Khorchin in South Mongolia is set as Chakhar dialect, but no one gives a damn. Anyway, Chakhar is not the Standard language of Mongolian in China, which is termed "South Mongolian" and based on the grammar of Chakhar and Khorchin dialect alike. Another case is Standard Mongolian as spoken in Mongolia which is based on the Khalkh dialect and the language of Mongolian literature. (If we take this definition seriously, the Khalkhas that deviate most from the norm are those of Ulaanbaatar, but de facto they speak on TV and direct the course of language development.) But at least here, there is an approximate correspondence between "Standard language" and an actual dialect. This doesn't hold for South Mongolia, and it seems to hold only to some degree for Kalmyk. As Uwe Bläsing wrote in "The Mongolic languages", "There are two main dialects of Kalmuck. Dörbet is mostly spoken in the west of the Kalmuck Republic, while Torghut prevails in the East. ... The modern literary language is mainly based on the Torghut dialect, though it incorporates a large number of concessions to Dörbet". Here, we have two definitions of Kalmuck in one: 1. a national language (without any necessary linguistic reality); this might be reinterpreted as a cover term for all Oirat spoken in Kalmykia (which might be more or less arbitrary, depending on the strength of Russian language influence on this set of Oirat varieties) 2. a literary language that is related to Torgut dialect, but due to deviations from it is not necessarily spoken. We need to know what THIS article is about, we need a concept that can be defended, and then all the contradictions that are showing up in this article now can be addressed. Any input welcome! G Purevdorj (talk) 08:41, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

You have hit the nail squarely on the head. Sociolinguistic factors are often more important in determining what is a language and what is a dialect than linguistic factors. Kalmyk is called a language in much of the literature and its "users" consider it to be a language with a name and a clear identity. (Taivo (talk) 10:56, 14 March 2009 (UTC))