Drei Schamanengesange der Ewenki-Tungusen Nord-Sibiriens aufgezeichnet von Konstantin Mixajlovic Ryckov in den Jahren 1905/1909.

• Author: Kara, G.

Since Peter Simon Pallas' eighteenth-century Vocabularia comparativa and Matthias Alexander Castren's nineteenth-century Tungus grammar, many important studies have been written, mostly in Russian, partly in German and English, by devoted scholars like Shirokogoroff, Titov, Vasilevich, Poppe, Cincius, Konstantinova, Sunik, Myreeva, Romanova, and others on Tungus language and lore. Nevertheless, because of the immense territory over which the Ewenki people are scattered, their dialects are still insufficiently explored, so any publication of recent records or of unedited archive materials may contribute to the knowledge of Tungus vocabulary, grammar, and traditions. Such a publication is this book, the second part of Professor Menges' Materials on Ewenki Shamanism of the Middle and the Lower Tunguska (the first part, with Suslov's records, also in German, appeared in Wiesbaden, 1983). During his stay in Leningrad/St. Petersburg in 1976 and 1977 Professor Menges also studied Konstantin Rychkov's records, made in 1905-9 when in exile among the Northern Tungus. In R.'s Ewenki texts kept in the St. Petersburg Russian Museum we find three cycles of shaman's songs: the transcription of R.'s transcription, R.'s Russian rendering, Professor Menges' German translation, and his detailed linguistic and ethnological commentary.

The contents are as follows, with German titles translated:

Preface, concerning the genesis of this book, pp. 7-8; Introduction, with information on records of Tungus shaman texts in general and on Rychkov's manuscripts, in particular, pp. 9-20. Three facsimile pages of the original are included.

1. Linguistic and ethnological remarks on the Tungus texts and the commentary, pp. 21-39.

2. Characteristics of the language and the contents of Rychkov's three shamanistic texts, pp. 40-58. Difficulties of interpretation due to the inconsistencies of R.'s notation are emphasized (for instance, central e is often marked as o and o); also discussed are the staccato character of the invocations (usually one line = four syllables = one or two words forming a phrase, or a sentence), their abundance in non-morphemic, prosodical-only additional syllables ("Fullsel"), "anorganic" or secondary vowel-length due to the rhythm or to wrong notation, and the special shamanistic and dialectal vocabulary influenced by Dolgan and Yakut, Russian, etc. (Church Slavonic words appear in lines 1219-24; cf. Indo-Tibetan spells and Tuva phrases in Mongolian...