Ebook: Soyotica

Editorial preface

In November 2009, the 70th birthday of Valentin Ivanovich Rassadin was celebrated in Elista in the framework of a conference entitled Problemy mongolovednyx i altaisticheskix issledovanij. This occasion gave an opportunity for long personal discussions with Professor Rassadin, focusing on his researches and valuable findings on the Soyot language. He informed me that in 2002 his material has been published in the form of a Soyot -Buryat - Russian dictionary. When I asked him if he had any spare copies of this dictionary, it turned out that it had been published in merely 50 copies, and he himself had only one copy. Later, in 2006, the dictionary had been published again, this time in 300 copies, but for financial reasons the Buryat part of the material had been omitted. Both editions became unattainable practically immediately after publication. Nevertheless, Professor Rassadin possessed the manuscript in digital form, and gave it to me, together with his permission for me to use it, and to present the material to Turkologists outside Russia. After I returned from the capital of the Kalmyks, I presented the material to the members of the Department of Altaic Studies in Szeged. Taking into account the very low number of existing copies, and the value of the material, we decided to publish it in a re-edited form in our series Studia uralo-altaica. In this connection I would like to thank Professor Maria Ivanics, Head of the Department of Altaic Studies, for her help in the publication process. My gratitudes go to Eva Kincses-Nagy and Bayarma Khabtagaeva for reviewing the material. I am especially indebted to Trofimova Svetlana Menkenovna, the wife of Valentin Ivanovich, with whom we were in everyday contact in the final months. To enhance the value of the material still further, I asked Professor Rassadin to add a short description of the Soyot people, and to survey the main grammatical features of the Soyot language. The grammatical sketch originally was written in Russian, the English translation is mine. In addition, the Soyot tale published in this volume serves as a specimen of the language. In order not to change the original material too much, I chose to leave the linguistic data in Cyrillic, according to its use for Soyot. During the editorial work, it turned out that inclusio of the Buryat material was indeed a good idea, and facilitates the writing of scientific papers on the Soyot -Buryat linguistic relationship.

Béla Kempf