Talk:Khanty language

It would be nice if someone could provide a recording of this language.

The origin of "sot"
Right now, there is a notice at the end of the numeral section, to wit:
 * "Sot is similar to Russian sto "a hundred"; this is a coincidence. It was not borrowed."

I certainly would not believe that Khanty borrowed this from Russian; but is this really a "coincidence"? This is in disaccord with what I've heard about the Finnish word "sata" for "a houndred". I've heard that this is assumed to be borrowed from some "Satem language", more precisely of the Iranian group (and I just noted that the wiktionary entry claims the same); and is taken as one of the indications for the linguistic forefathers of Finns to have lived in the vicinity of speakers of some language of the Iranian branch of the Aryan languages at some prehistoric time. This would actually make Finnish sata a cognate of Russian sto, not by direct borrowing but by a several thousand years old common descent. In any case, I'd be rather surprised if Uralian linguist expert do not consider Finnish sata and Khanty sot as cognates.

This would make sot and sto cognates, too, wouldn't it; although the similarities of the present-day forms partly would be due to independent but incidently similar simplification of the original satem-language form, probably something similar to Avestan satəm.

Does anyone who has access to more reliable sources than my vague memories a possibility to check this? JoergenB (talk) 05:21, 8 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm to tired to think clearly. If the words are cognates as I proposed, the youngest common origin of course would be placed back at the differentiation of the proto-Slavic and the proto-Aryan groups.JoergenB (talk) 05:50, 8 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It could be at any time, right? Slavic doesn't have to be a descendant of the source language, only a cousin. However, the borrower would have to be proto-Fenno-Ugric or earlier, unless there were a second borrowing. kwami (talk) 06:52, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Was it borrowed at such an early time? Really, I can't deny it, I might have been uncareful in putting this statement in. I'll remove the statement from the article then; on the other hand, perhaps you can tell us where you read the claim that the Uralic languages - for clearly if it has been borrowed it must have been at a very early moment indeed, before Finnic and Ugric split! - borrowed satem from the satem-languages. Steinbach (fka Caesarion) 07:49, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I read it here! My point was just that, if the Khanti and Finnic words are cognate, then they inherited it from their last common ancestor - unless they borrowed it independently from IE or from each other. If the latter is the case, there's no more sense in pointing this word out as a Fenno-Ugric cognate than there is in saying that the Arabic, Japanese, and Aymara words for 'radio' are cognate. kwami (talk) 08:25, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Follow the wikt link I gave: sata! (I'll try to find out where I read it; but it might be from a book, "Uraliska språk" by Björn Collinder, which I've lent out 20 years ago and haven't got back yet...)-JoergenB (talk) 17:59, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Dialect Phonology, Orthography
Several requests:

1) If the three main literary dialects are Kazym, Shuryshkar, and middle-Ob, it would be nice to have some phonological information on these dialects.

2) It would also be useful to map the alphabet with the phonology. For example, what cyrillic characters does the Kazym dialect use, and what are the sounds of these letters?

3) For the examples given in this article, is there mention of which dialect it is?

languagegeek (talk) 18:16, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Split proposal
Much like with Mansi, Khanty is not a language: it is a dialect continuum of related languages. All sources discussing Khanty from a synchronic perspective focus on a particular dialect (usually a Northern or Eastern one). Khanty as a whole is only ever treated as a historical entity.

It seems to me splitting the information into separate articles on 1) Khanty languages, 2) Northern Khanty, 3) Southern Khanty, 4) Eastern Khanty would be beneficial organizationally.

Compare the splitting of Nenets languages into separate bottom-level articles: Tundra Nenets language and Forest Nenets language. We also have split Komi language into Komi-Zyrian language, Komi-Permyak language and Komi-Yazva language despite that these three are still considered to be in only a dialectal relationship to each other.

Scholarly consensus on if the Khanty varieties comprise dialects or languages regardless does not seem to exist though. I'm aware of a very small number of papers explicitly arguing for a separate languages analysis, as well as a large implicit near-consensus (purely by inertia, without explicit arguments!) in favor of a multi-dialect analysis. We might need to pull a Chinese and describe each subgroup as simply a "variety" and leave discussion on the lang/'lect issues into the main article?

-- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 14:59, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Support split. --JorisvS (talk) 14:37, 12 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose. As long as most linguistic sources treat Khanty as a single dialect cluster, then we should have a single article.  The details of internal variation belong in the text, not in the title.  There are many many other languages which are similar in this regard.  — kwami (talk) 23:26, 12 August 2013 (UTC)
 * (Comment) I'm not sure I follow your argument… We have no shortage of articles for dialects of "single dialect clusters" (say, Category:German dialects). This article could well be retained as "Khanty language" in the singular if you feel "Khanty languages" would be too POV. What I'd mainly like to see is to split the discussion of particular dialects into articles of their own, since that is what most of the sources appear to do. E.g. even Abondolo (1998), which is supposed to be an encyclopedic overview of Khanty, starts by describing some of the general variation among the dialects, but then proceeds to present a more in-detail description of the Tremjugan dialect. As the article grows, presenting generalizations covering all the varieties is going to be difficult and might require us to construct them rather than citing them from anywhere; and an article split in sequentially describing the varieties one by one, repeating the same information a couple times, does not strike me as good organization. (BTW, can I assume that editors' views here also apply to the largely similar proposal I have going over at Mansi language?) -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 13:37, 14 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Sure, but we don't delete German language or move it to "German languages" just because we have articles on German dialects. It remains the main article despite the dialects.  If the article becomes unwieldy and repetitive as it's developed, then yes, that would be a good reason to split.  — kwami (talk) 10:12, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Who said anything about deleting anything? I'm proposing more articles, not less. If this one might need renaming is an entirely secondary issue. (Also, the German analogy has the problem that there is no Standard Khanty to present as the "main" variety.) -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:12, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * "Or move it to German languages". German isn't a good analogy.  I guess the ? is whether 2 articles wd be better developed than 1.  If so, we shd split.  — kwami (talk) 20:49, 4 September 2013 (UTC)


 * Support. These are considered to be sufficiently different from each other that the same books are published in different variants. -Yupik (talk) 21:44, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Sure, but that has nothing to do with us. English books may have separate US and UK editions too.  — kwami (talk) 10:12, 3 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Assumedly, you'd still be able to understand the US and UK versions. In the case of Khanty, that's not necessarily true. It's more akin to there being an English version of some book and a Swedish version of it. You might understand some of it, but not a great deal of it. -Yupik (talk) 13:15, 4 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Also since we do have articles for British English and American English, I really do not follow how this comparision is an argument against a split. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:12, 4 September 2013 (UTC)

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Missing (latin) letters?
Compared the ‘Latin (1931–1937)’ table and its corresponding ruWiki, there are
 * Г, г — G, g
 * Ө, ө — ?
 * Ц, ц — C, c
 * Ы, ы — ?
 * ?   — Ł̦, ł̦

Garamond (talk) 15:46, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Disputed alphabet
Should probably say or show somewhere, that the alphabet, not even for Kazym dialect, isn't set in stone, or to which everyone agree to. This can be seen between dictionaries and the current Khatny newspaper. One pheud is between ԯ and ԓ that I've noticed myself.

"El with hook has been in use in Khanty since 1990. El with hook and El with descender are considered variants of the same letter in Khanty; their use depends on the particular publisher."

Ewithu (talk) 18:35, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

New Split Proposal
In accordance with the split conducted on Wiktionary, and on the Mansi languages article, this section should be split as well. I would appreciate it if someone else could conduct this one, since I did the last. Though as a last resort I can do it. Ewithu (talk) 15:46, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Is there a reason "intransitive" is in boldface?
The first sentence of the "Syntax" section is as follows: "Both Khanty and Mansi are basically nominative–accusative languages but have innovative morphological ergativity. In an ergative construction, the object is given the same case as the subject of an intransitive verb, and the locative is used for the agent of the transitive verb (as an instrumental)."

It's not obvious to me, a layman reader, why this word is bolded. I was about to treat it as a strange anomaly and unbold it, but it occurred to me that this might be some kind of formal linguistic notation. Is that the case and, if so, is it in line with the MOS to use bold in that way? MOS:BOLD refers to mathematical notation, but this seems a bit different since we're dealing with inline text.

I am pinging since he appears to be the one who wrote this sentence almost twenty years ago.

Nicknimh (talk) 23:21, 17 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Goodness. It's amazing to me that I wrote this nearly twenty years ago, and I definitely don't know what I had in mind when I wrote it in bold. It's not linguistic notation as far as I'm aware, so I'd say feel free to unbold, and thanks for picking this up. Twenex (talk) 22:04, 18 July 2024 (UTC)