Kamas language

Kamas
"Kamass", "Kamassian"
Kaŋmažən šəkət
Native to	Russia
Region	Sayan Mountains
Ethnicity	2 Kamasins (2021)
Extinct	1989, with the death of Klavdiya Plotnikova
Language family	Uralic Samoyedic (core) Kamas–Selkup Kamas
Dialects	Koibal Kamas Eagle Fat
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xas
Linguist List	xas
Glottolog	kama1351 kama1378
ELP	Kamas
Traditional distribution of the extinct Sayan Samoyedic languages including Kamas[1][2]

Kamas (Kaŋmažən šəkət) is an extinct Samoyedic language, formerly spoken by the Kamasins. It is included by convention in the Southern group together with Mator and Selkup (although this does not constitute a subfamily). The last native speaker of Kamas, Klavdiya Plotnikova, died in 1989. Kamas was spoken in Russia, north of the Sayan Mountains, by Kamasins. The last speakers lived mainly in the village of Abalakovo, where they moved from the mountains in the 18th-19th centuries.^[3] Prior to its extinction, the language was strongly influenced by Turkic and Yeniseian languages.

The term Koibal is used as the ethnonym for the Kamas people who shifted to the Turkic Khakas language.^{[citation needed]} The modern Koibal people are mixed Samoyed–Khakas–Yeniseian. The Kamas language was documented by Kai Donner in his trips to Siberia along with other Samoyedic languages, but the first documentation attempts started in the 1740s.^[4] In 2016 the university of Tartu published a Kamas e-learning book.^[4] The grammar and vocabulary of Kamas are well documented.^[5]

Linguists managed to record about 1,550 words of the Kamasin language. And It has been noted that at present a few activists still have knowledge of the Kamasin language.^[6]

The Kamasins had never been a large group, and they lived a nomadic life, living next to Turkic and Yeniseian tribes. In the middle of the 17th century, Sayan Samoyeds started to assimilate into Turkic peoples and Kamas was the only one to survive until investigators came, such as Castrén and Kai Donner. Due to many hardships in Russia, Kai Donner was virtually certain that he would be the last one to investigate the Kamas language before it went extinct. Already in the middle of the 20th century it was thought Kamas had died. However it was later found there was still one speaker of Kamas left: Klavdiya Plotnikova. The Kamas speakers also assimilated into the Russians, as well as being turkicized. In the 20th century half of the Kamass people were born to Russian mothers, due to a higher death-rate of girls, which caused much influence to come from the Russian language. After the Russian Civil War, usage of the Kamas language started to fall drastically.^[7]

Kamas had two dialects: Kamas (also known as Kamass) and Koibal. However, the Koibal dialect is not well documented and only about 600 words of it are known, without any text or grammar. The Kamass dialect also had two sub-dialects, "Fat" and "Eagle", which mainly differed in phonology. The Eagle dialect was the most dominant Kamass dialect.^[7]

The phonological account of Kamas is very basic, due to unclear data labeling by K. Donner and Castren. It is uncertain whether Kamas had primary vowel length, consonant gemination, and palatal stops or affricates as different phonemes. It varied widely between speakers. However, there are audio recordings of the last native speaker.^[8]

Kamas has both palatalized and palatal phonemes.

1. The affricates may just be consonant clusters.

K. Donner also mentioned a sound ϑ (θ) and a f sound that was used in loanwords. Kamas also had aspiration.^[5]

1. ɣ seems to have been an allophone of g for some speakers.

The maximal syllable structure is CVCC. The only type of cluster allowed in the coda is ʔC. An example of this would be naʔb (duck). Palatalization only occurs in front of vowels. Three consonants do not occur word initially: the trill r, the velar nasal, and the glottal stop.^[4]

The last Kamas speakers had some variations in their speech and a few vowels and consonants were slightly different depending on the speaker, for example:^[5]

oo ~ ee

ə ~ ɯ

x ~ k͔´

b ~ β (w)

Kamas is an agglutinative language and it has many flective markers.^[4][7]

Kamas has 7 cases:

The plural ending is -zaŋ ~ -zeŋ ~ -saŋ ~ -seŋ. However, there are a few irregularities : ešši 'child', esseŋ 'children', bulan 'moose' and genitive bulaan.

There are three tenses and moods in Kamas: conditional, imperative, future, present tense, past tense and optative.

The conditional is formed by -na ~ -ne after vowels and -ta ~ -te ~ -da ~ -de after consonants. The second component is -ze which comes after the personal ending.

kandamze 'I would go'.

• Imperative is done by adding -ʔ or -Kǝ.
• Optative ending is -š(ti) in the singular and -Šǝ in the plural and dual.
• The past tense is done by adding -BiA for the 1st and 2nd person singular or -Bi in others.
• The future tense is marked with -LA.

In Kamas a verb is made negative by adding the word e ~ i with the main verb. Examples with the word šo- 'come':

• ej šoliam = I don't come
• ej šolial = you don't come
• ej šobiam = I did not come
• ej šobial = you did not come
• em šoʔ = I will not come
• ellǝ šoʔ = you will not come

Factitive verbs have the ending aa: ešši 'child': eššā = make children.

Deverbal nouns have the ending (ǝ)š: am- 'eat': amǝš 'food'.

Instrumental nouns have the ending (p)zan or (p)zǝn: kaj = close, kajzan = lid.

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Kamas is a nominative type language, and the common structure of a Kamas sentence includes the subject, the object, the adverbial modifier, and a predicate. The subject is in the nominative case. The indefinite object is often expressed by using the nominative but the definite object with the accusative case. The adverbial modifier can also be expressed with adverbs or nouns in the form of local or instrumental cases. The predicate in Kamas can be preceded by gerundial verb forms, which indicates the manner or tense of an action that is expressed by the predicate. Composite sentences are not used in the Kamas language. Instead of sentences which are complex Kamas uses simple sentences with gerundial verbal constructions in which case it has no need to use conjunctions or a sequence of several simple sentences. In Kamas the subject and predicate must both agree in the person and in number.

Words which typically are used in attributive positions: (demonstrative pronouns, pronominal adjectives, and numerals) can also function as argument expressions. There are also no prepositions in Kamas, instead postpositions are used and the head of a postposition, usually is marked with a genitive (-ǝn/-n). However, there are also primary postpositions which can govern the lative case. The word order in Kamas is SOV (subject-object-verb), but the word order VO occurs when using an imperative. Clauses which introduce a situation, the locative adverbial often precedes the subject. In clauses which a new subject appears in a place which is given there is a reverse order. In Kamas the third person, zero copula predication varies with the usage of the verb i- 'be'. Kamas direct objects are subject to differential object agreement and to differential object marking. Subordinating conjunctions in Kamas are kamǝn 'when' and paka 'while', which is a borrowing from Russian пока.^[4][7]

(examples in the UPA script)^[4]

Basic phrases in Kamas:^[9]

• Kăde tănan kăštəliaʔi? = what is your name
• măna kăštəbiʔi = my name is
• pasiba = thank you
• Dărowă/zdărowă = hello
• naga = isn't
• jakšə = good
• ej = no

• Kamas-English glossary
• M. Alexander Castrén's extensive book on the Samoyed grammar, including Kamas (in German)
• Kamas dictionary and grammar book
• Kamas e-learning
• Kamas corpus (Audio recordings of Kamass native speakers)
• Kamas Wikipedia on Miraheze
• Kamas DoReCo corpus compiled by Valentin Gusev, Tiina Klooster, Beáta Wagner-Nagy and Alexandre Arkhipov. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations.