Kyakhta Russian–Chinese Pidgin was a

contact language Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact with and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. Language contact can occur at language borders, between adstratum ...

(specifically a

pidgin A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a grammatically simplified form of contact language that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common: typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn f ...

) used by

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

and

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

traders to communicate during the 18th-early 20th century. The pidgin owes its name to the town of

Kyakhta Kyakhta (, ; , ; , ) is a town and the administrative center of Kyakhtinsky District in the Republic of Buryatia, Russia, located on the Kyakhta River near the Mongolia–Russia border. The town stands directly opposite the Mongolian border to ...

, a Russian town on the border with the

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...

's region of

Outer Mongolia Outer Mongolia was the name of a territory in the Manchu-led Qing dynasty of China from 1691 to 1911. It corresponds to the modern-day independent state of Mongolia and the Russian republic of Tuva. The historical region gained ''de facto'' ...

, which was the most important border trading point between the two regions for more than a century after its foundation in 1728.

Phonology

Due to the absence of consonant clusters in Chinese and their quite frequent occurrence in Russian, the need for

epenthesis In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the first syllable ('' prothesis''), the last syllable ('' paragoge''), or between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process in whi ...

– adding additional sounds to words – arises to make pronunciation easier. Thus, the following transformations are typical: In a number of words, the

stop consonants In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...

and and the

affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...

transform to the

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

Vocabulary

Most of the words in the Kyakhta pidgin come from Russian. Many of them, in particular those that do not have consonants clusters, undergo no change; for example, ''воля'' ("will"), ''люди'' ("people"), ''мало'' ("little"), ''надо'' ("it is necessary"), ''рубаха'' ("shirt"), ''сюда'' ("to here"), ''чужой'' ("alien"), ''шуба'' ("fur coat"). As a rule, pidgins have limited grammar and vocabulary. To compensate for this, words are often borrowed with additional meanings. In Kyakhta pidgin, for instance, the adverb ''мало'', along with the meaning of "little" that it has in Russian, also means "not only"; ''посиди'' means not only "to seat", but also "to converse". An example of significant difference between the Russian meaning and the meaning in Kyakhta pidgin is the word – it means "months" in Russian, but "forever" in the pidgin. The predominantly colloquial origin of words is very noticeable. Many words are present in exclusively diminutive form: ("woman") comes from Russian , the diminutive form of ''жена'' ("wife"); ("wine glass") comes from Russian ''рюмашка'', the diminutive form of ''рюмка''; ("white") comes from Russian ''беленький'', the diminutive form of ''белый''. While Russian is clearly the main source of vocabulary, some words are borrowed from

Mongolian Mongolian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Mongolia, a country in Asia * Mongolian people, or Mongols * Bogd Khanate of Mongolia, the government of Mongolia, 1911–1919 and 1921–1924 * Mongolian language * Mongolian alphabet * ...

which was spoken in the same region, such as ("exactly"), and ("to write"). Still, the influence of Mongolian is minimal. The only significant contribution of

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...

to the vocabulary is the word meaning "store, shop" (Mandarin zh, c=鋪子, p=pùzi). Aside from that, Kyakhta pidgin contains several new compounds that could have been inspired by Chinese: * ("madness," literally "end-of-mind") instead of Russian ''сумашествие'' * ("hard-heartedness", literally "heart-awl") instead of Russian ''жестокосердие'' * ("eloquence", literally "tongue-honey") instead of Russian '' красноречие.''

Morphology

Like most pidgins, Kyakhta pidgin lacks many morphological categories: there are no cases, numbers or gender of nouns. Russian pidgins in general tend to have clear verb indications. In Kyakhta Pidgin, similarly to other Siberian pidgins, most verbs have ending -j/-i: ("to be sick"), ("to turn out"), ("to bury"), ("to drive"), ("to be unaware"), ("to scold"), ' ("to seat"). This ending makes verbs similar to the imperative form of Russian verbs: for example, is the Russian verb
болеть
' ("to be sick"), but in the imperative mood. We can speculate that such forms prevailed when Russians addressed their interlocutors. During the late stages of the pidgin, the indicators of verb tenses appear: indicates the past tense, indicates the future tense, indicates the present tense; for example, means "to have walked", means "to be walking", means "will walk". An object is identified with , a preposition from the Russian language that has many semantic properties. It is the only preposition present in the Kyakhta pidgin and it is used in the following way: means "come to us" (''приходи к нам'' in proper Russian), means "in our store" (''в нашем магазине'' in proper Russian). Russian pronouns came into the pidgin in an exclusively possessive form: ("I") means "mine" in Russian, ("you") means "yours" in Russian, and ("he") comes from Russian , which means "his" in Russian. This feature is shared with the Norwegian-Russian pidgin

Russenorsk Russenorsk (; , ; English: Russo-Norwegian) is an extinct dual-source "restricted pidgin" language formerly used in the Arctic, which combined elements of Russian and Norwegian. Russenorsk originated from Russian traders from Kola (north-wes ...

. All declensions of pronouns are formed with the already mentioned : , , .

Sample Text

Notes

References

External links

* Мусорин А. Ю
Лексика кяхтинского пиджина
// Функциональный анализ языковых единиц. Новосибирск, 2004. — С. 79-86. * Перехвальская Е. В.

'. Автореферат диссертации на соискание ученой степени доктора филологических наук. СПб., 2006. * Перехвальская, Елена Всеволодовна; Перехвальская Е. В. ''Русские пиджины''. М.: Алетейя, 2008. {{DEFAULTSORT:Kyakhta Russian-Chinese Pidgin Chinese-based pidgins and creoles Russian-based pidgins and creoles Mixed languages Russian diaspora in China Languages extinct in the 20th century China–Russian Empire relations Extinct languages of Asia