Mikola-konferencia 2004 [antikvár]

The series of Mi kola-conferences organized biannually by the Finno-Ugric Department of the University of Szeged is intended to be devoted to a special subject-matter at every turn. At the first occasion in 2002 this idea has not been realized because at that time colleagues, students and friends of the late Tibor Mikola were invited and asked to give presentations without any thematic limitation. At the second occasion in 2004, however, Samoyedic studies were brought into focus. As Tibor Mikola was an acknowledged specialist in Samoyedology it was obvoius that various aspects of this scientific area should be the theme, i.e. the Samoyedic languages and peoples from linguistic, ethnic, folkloristic aspects. Although the number of Samoyedologists is not high at all throughout the world all the representatives of the discipline could not be assembled. Despite this fact eminent experts accepted the invitation from abroad and from Hungary as well. This volume contains nine papers of the 2"''Mikola-conference. Due to different reasons not all the papers presented at the conference could be included into this volume. Among the topics that were most intensively discussed there are linguistic questions. What the phonological aspects concerns Eugene Helimski studies the vowel system of Proto-Samoyedic, and proposes the reconstruction of a 13"' Proto-Samoyedic vowel phoneme, whereas the aim of Zsuzsa Várnai's paper is to question a traditionally accepted statement of Samoyedology. On the basis of meticulous analysis she suggests that it is the syllable and not the mora that should be the characteristic metrical unit in Nganasan. Morphological aspects of tense and aspect are raised by two papers. Tense and aspect markers in the extinct Kamass language are investigated and a list of them is set up in Gerson Klumpp's contribution. „Tense, aspect and actionality in Nenets: the riddle of the delimitative {cika attenuative)" was the title of Tapani Salminen's presentation. Discussing the rise and fall of the so called delimitative he suggests the delition of this case (written version is not included into this volume). The paper by Valentin Gusev takes up the issue of derivational suffixes in Nganasan, a language especially rich in such endings, and explores a number of „new" ones not mentioned earlier in the literature. In his cross-Samoyedic study Sándor Szeverényi aims to categorize the property concept words on semantic grounds serving with a new aspect, namely word-class analysis of these languages.