Meadow Mari Prosody. Linguistica Uralica. Supplementary Series 2, Tallinn 2005

Mari (earlier known also as Cheremis) is a Finno-Ugric language of the Volga branch spoken by about 500,000 people in Central Russia. This book that presents new acoustic data of Meadow Mari prosody is a part of the project ”Finno-Ugric Prosody”, led and partly funded by Ilse Lehiste, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. The main goal of the project is to provide new phonetic data of the prosodic structure of various Finno-Ugric languages in the same methodological framework and thus to produce a data-based comparative overview of Finno-Ugric prosody. A monograph that treats Erzya prosody was published in 2003 (Lehiste, Aasmäe, Meister, Pajusalu, Teras, Viitso 2003), initial results about Mari prosody were presented in 2001 (Lehiste, Meister, Pajusalu, Parve, Teras, Viitso 2001). The leading expert of the project in Finno-Ugric languages is Tiit-Rein Viitso, Professor Emeritus of Finnic languages at the University of Tartu. The administrative leader of the project is Professor Karl Pajusalu, Head of the Department of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics at the University of Tartu. Several research fellows, students, and graduate students of the University of Tartu have been involved in the project. Vasilij Nikolajev participated in the project as a native speaker of Mari. The book consists of four chapters. The first, introductory chapter gives an overview of research problems and the structure of the study. The second chapter presents outlines of previous phonological and phonetic treatments of Meadow Mari prosody. The chapter was drafted by Toomas Help, Karl Pajusalu, and Tiit-Rein Viitso, and elaborated by Ilse Lehiste. The third, central chapter contains the experimental-acoustic analysis of Meadow Mari prosodic structure. The principal author of the chapter is Pire Teras. The study is based on the measurements of speech samples of eight speakers of Mari. Each of them pronounced frame sentences with 100 test words in two sentence positions. The words were selected by Tiit-Rein Viitso. The recordings were made by Einar Meister, Head of the Laboratory of Phonetics and Speech Technology at the Institute of Cybernetics of the Tallinn Technical University, and Pärtel Lippus, doctoral student at the University of Tartu. The acoustic measurements of the recordings were made by Pire Teras, Pärtel Lippus, Liina Leemet, Sander Pajusalu, Merike Parve, and Eva Liina Asu. Statistical analyses were made by Pire Teras and partly by Pärtel Lippus and Einar Meister. Einar Meister was also consulted throughout this work. The last chapter of the book summarizes the main results of the research. The primary acoustic data are presented in the Appendices. A map of Mari language areas and a division of the Uralic languages, both composed by Tiit-Rein Viitso, are also included in the Appendices. The introductory and final chapters of the book were written by Ilse Lehiste and Karl Pajusalu in consultation with the other authors. Ilse Lehiste has contributed to all parts of the book. The authors of the book are most grateful to all the speakers of Mari who participated to the study. The book is dedicated to the Mari people, who this year hosted the Tenth International Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies in Joškar-Ola, the capital of their state.