NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION, TRANSLATION, AND BIBLE CITATIONS

THE TRANSLITERATION OF RUSSIAN AND NENETS WORDS FOLLOWS the United States Board on Geographic Names. Throughout the text, I have used established or simplified orthography for geographical names (e.g., “Bolshezemelskaya” rather than “Bol’shezemel’skaya”—from Большеземельская) and personal names encountered in the field (“Gennadi” rather than “Gennadiy”—from Геннадий, except for the names in the bibliography).

I have transliterated Tundra Nenets from the standard Cyrillic orthography (as in Tereshchenko 2003) with slight simplifying adjustments. q stands for a glottal stop (at the end of a word it sometimes marks the plural, e.g., lutsa “Russian,” lutsaq “Russians”); “ng” (in Cyrillic ӈ) marks a velar nasal; “yo” (in Cyrillic ё) marks a palatal glide. One apostrophe stands for palatalization (e.g., mal’tsya—from мальця).

Unless otherwise stated, I have quoted the Bible in English from the King James Version (1611). The Baptists and Pentecostals in Russia use the Russian Synodal Version (1876), which, like the King James Version, has an archaic tone.

All translations of quotes (except for scriptures) are mine.

Different levels of administrative units in the Russian Federation are translated as follows: respublika—republic, kray—territory, oblast’—province, okrug—region, rayon—district.

In this work, the English “Nenets” marks both singular and plural forms (and not “Nenetses,” “Nentsy,” or “Nentsi”), the adjective, and the name of the language.