Reconstruction of verbal conjugation in Samoyedic languages: Personal inflexions of the indicative and markers of conjugation types

The article addresses reconstruction of the verbal conjugation in Samoyedic languages. As is well known, their conjugation system is the richest in Nenets, Enets and Nganasan, where the verbal paradigm shows four series of personal affixes (the subjective conjugation, the objective conjugation used for objects in the singular, the objective conjugation used for objects in the dual/plural, and the reflexive conjugation). Additional morphophonological transformations of the grammatical stem also point to the need for reconstructing the formants for two conjugation types — the objective conjugation with dual/plural objects and the reflexive conjugation. Although the idea of the need for verbal conjugation reconstruction in the Samoyedic languages is not new, the article specifies the phonetic reconstruction of personal suffixes as 1Du *-mə-in2, 2Du *-rə-in2 in the objective conjugation for singular objects (instead of *-min2, *-rin2, as proposed earlier). The main argument for reconstruction of the vowel sequence is a twofold reflexation: in Nganasan we find the phonetic development path like *-mə-in2 > -mə-jn2 > -MIC (the plain final *ń would result in j in Nganasan, but we also cannot reconstruct the final *n on the base of Selkup correspondences like -mī; thus the only option left is reconstruction of the final -jn2 for Proto-Nganasan), whereas in Tundra Nenets the path is like *-mə-in > -mə-in > -məih > -mih (the plain Proto-Samoyedic or Proto-Northern Samoyedic *i would result in ə in Proto-Nenets — thus the correct reconstruction implies a vowel sequence). This means, that the personal suffixes have preserved their complex character both in Proto-Samoyedic and in Proto-Northern Samoyedic. The paper for the first time proposes a reconstruction of the reflexive conjugation formant *-ń on the base of the nasal element of personal suffixes in Nganasan (like 2Pl -N-TUɁ or 3Pl -N-TƏɁ in the reflexive conjugation) and on the base of morphophonological modifications of the grammatical stem in the reflexive conjugation (though these modifications by and large resemble the modifications before the *j, they are not identical with them in Tundra Nenets). From the point of view of historical phonetics, the development of this *-ń of the reflexive conjugation matches the phonetic development of the derivational suffix *-ń of verbs with medial semantics, still preserved in its original form in Nganasan, cf. Nganasan hi-n- ‘to be cooked’.