ABSTRACT

History of the Investigation into Mansi The fIrst written attestation of Mansi is in the form of personal names, found sporadically in Russian chronicles. Interest in the Mansi language dates from the eighteenth century, when travellers from various lands (Messerschmidt, Strahlenberg, Fischer, Schl6zer, Klaproth, Pallas) began to report vocabulary they had collected. This early lexical evidence is both linguistically naive and of great philological importance; it must be used, therefore, with linguistic judiciousness and acumen.