Words up its sleeve

The Nivkh in their own language talk about these sleeves as uyghr (or uyghir) and the section at the end, the part that has a different color from the rest of the robe, is called erh. When we put on a coat, most of us will start by sticking our hands into one sleeve. It is a point of entry, so to speak. Well, the following is like a sleeve, a point that I would like to make before we continue:

Language matters. Simply put, this platform would be Things Cannot Talk if we would not have language to talk about them. The Nivkh call this part of the robe uyghr . We choose 'sleeve' to translate this word, but when focusing on parts of things we need to call them by their real name. The words connected to this garment help put it in its proper context. Here, we are looking at the uyghr of a curk or a co menydx xuxt, which simply means ‘huxt ‘, ‘made of fish skin’. The word huxt itself needs further explanation. Huxt (or xuxt) is a more general term for a type of women’s robe mostly worn during cold weather.

Wording matters. In older sources, for example, the Nivkh used to be called ‘Gilyaks'. Had we not mentioned this here, you would have no direct way of knowing that ‘Nivkh’ and ‘Gilyaks’ refer to the same people. To complicate matters, their official name ‘Nivkh’ is based on how they refer to themselves as Nyivx, which means ‘person’. The related word in the Nivkh dialect of East Sakhalin is nyighvng.

Words matter. Words themselves can often tell more than is apparent at first glance. They can contain clues as to who people mingled with and for what reasons. The word huxt, for example, closely resembles certain words for garments found in languages spoken by peoples living close to the Nivkh or somewhat further away. For example, the neighbors of the Nivkh, the Ulch, have the word hụktụ ‘padded winter coat’, while the Manchus, rulers of the Qing dynasty (1636-1912) further south, had the word huktu ‘a long padded gown made of cotton’.

While there are at present no comprehensive linguistic studies into the connections between the language of the Nivkh and the languages of their neighbours, some lexical parallels have been found between Nivkh and the Tungusic languages (the language family to which the languages of the Ulch and the Manchus belong). With further study, it will become possible to point not just to the apparent visual similarity between this robe and Manchu clothing styles, but also to this lexical similarity as additional proof of the historical contacts between the Manchus and the peoples of the Amur river.

This piece of clothing together with the addition of these words could then become one possible thread to arrive at a better understanding of the history of the Nivkh people and other peoples of this region.

Now that we have put on the uyghr, we are ready to take on the whole robe. The terminology for different parts of the robe as described here, come from Čuner Mixajlovič Taksami's description of a huxt made of cloth and his and Valentina Nikolaevna Savel’jeva’s dictionary.