Manuscripts by N. D. Põder in the Lower Luga dialect of Ingrian (Rosona river) with comments

These manuscripts were written in the 1980–2010s by a cultural leader from the Vanakülä village in the Rosona river valley of Ingria, Nikolai Dmitrievič Põder (b. 1924), in his native Lower Luga Ingrian variety. The corpus contains narratives on how Põder learned to read in three languages (Russian, Estonian, and Finnish) and on practices of splint collection, translations of texts and words from other Finnic languages (most notably, from Votic and Soikkola Ingrian), proverbs, jokes, and single words, including some pairs of homonyms which Põder discovered in Ingrian.

The manuscripts in Põder’s original orthography (in some cases, also with his translation into Russian and glossing) were prepared for publication and enriched with phonological transcription, interlinear glossing, a translation into Russian, as well as with philological comments on particular aspects of phonetics, phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax. The manuscripts were read and commented by Põder himself in 2008–2014, and the audiorecords of these sessions were also used in the publication.

The introduction contains Põder’s brief biography, a note on the history of Vanakülä, a list of the manuscript physical carriers (1.1), data on the previous text publications in Ingrian and on the types of Põder’s manuscripts (1.2), the ways of data presentation in the publication, the glossing rules (1.3) and the transcription principles, together with the main facts on Lower Luga Ingrian phonology (1.3). Among the most prominent phonological features which can be clearly traced in the manuscripts, are ongoing reduction of vowels and consonants and emergent consonantal palatalisation. Subsection 1.4 summarises the most interesting grammatical features of the texts, including case syncretism triggered by vowel reduction, and the emergence of a new allomorph -si- of the imperfect suffix -i- through morphological reanalysis.

Põder fluently speaks Ingrian, Estonian, and Russian, as well as some Finnish. The latter three languages used to be the official languages of instruction and administration in Vanakülä in different historical periods, and the texts reflect the influences of them all. The contacts between Slavic and Finnic languages in the area are very old, and it is not always easy to distinguish between occasional code-switching/-mixing, recent borrowings into the Finnic languages of this particular area, which belonged to Estonia in 1920–1940, and the older layers of borrowings into Proto-Ingrian or even Proto-­Finnic. Possible phonetic/phonological, lexical, and syntactic influences from different time periods discovered in the manuscripts are summarised in 1.5. Põder’s written texts in Russian, some examples of which are also given (e.g., his autobiography and an essay on the principles of his Ingrian orthography) reflect Finnic influences, e.g., the elision of prepositions or grammatical gender mixing.