Morphology of Personal Pronouns of the Udmurt Language in M. A. Myshkin’s Grammar

The article analyzes the unusual case forms of first-person and second-person personal pronouns, singular and plural, presented in the work by Mikhail Myshkin An Experience of Brief Otyatskaya Grammar (late 1770s). The handwritten grammar book is a valuable source for studying the morphology of pronouns in the historical and areal aspect since it indicates the exact place where the presented linguistic material was found – Ukan village of Glazovsky district (currently Ukan village of Yarsky district of the Udmurt Republic) and nearby settlements. Within a small linguistic area, there were used three variants of the instrumental case; indirect forms of plural personal pronouns were formed on the basis of the genitive, they are structurally similar to the forms of pronouns of the Komi languages and differ from modern Udmurt forms. The paper analyzes the reasons for the stated range of case forms to appear within a small area and attempts to find out whether the forms derived from the genitive are borrowings from closely related languages. In the course of the study, morphological and comparative historical analyses of case forms were carried out, examples from the Komi-Permyak and Komi-Zyryan languages were used. In order to identify the intensity of interlanguage contacts, the author preformed an analysis of publications on interethnic contacts, including studies on the spread of Komi and Udmurt toponyms in possible cross-territories of related peoples. The author makes an assumption that variants of the instrumental case – with simple and possessive declension suffixes and a duplicated suffix – could appear due to migration processes within the Udmurt ethnic group. The study has found that the case forms of plural personal pronouns derived from the genitive cannot be borrowed since there are currently no historical and linguistic studies confirming the existence of contacts between speakers of the Udmurt and Komi languages that were close enough and lasted for a sufficiently long period for such a conservative part of morphology as case forms of personal pronouns to be borrowed. The archaisms recorded by M. A. Myshkin can either be a confirmation of the hypothesis on areal and areal-genetic connections between closely related peoples or an Udmurt dialect phenomenon, rooted in the common Permic language.