Wiktionary:About Moksha

This page is intended to outline considerations specific to Moksha.

Orthography
Currently in Moksha entries there are efforts to show word stress in the headword line when it doesn't fall on the first syllable, e.g.,. This is done by providing head=ведьге́монце to the head template. When the stress is on the first syllable, no such indication is made.

Developments in Moksha orthography can be roughly divided in 3 "eras."

Early USSR
fennougrica.kansalliskirjasto.fi features more than 1.5 thousand digitized (OCR'd) publications in Moksha (also, majority appears to be released into the public domain) from circa 1920 ~ 1950.

The orthography is usually practically identical to modern (second era), however, in some cases there are "phoneticized" spellings (that don't really provide any extra clues of the pronunciation of a word), e.g., the sg. def. nom. suffix is -s' and one can encounter spellings of def. form of parazit as parazic' (phonetically /parazitsj/), the modern spelling of this form would be parazits' having exactly the same pronunciation but showing the sg. def. nom. ending.

Such spellings are still featured in quotes from these books, if necessary the modern form is indicated in square brackets.

90's and 2000's (de facto standard)
This is considered the most recent and the most consistent form of Moksha orthography, featured in, for example, Poljakov's books. Furthermore aside from minor inconsistencies it is largely identical with the first era.

The reform of 2010
A law was passed in 2010 (http://docs.cntd.ru/document/906303002) introducing rather drastic changes, striving to follow "the morphological principle" in their words. Orthographic indication of many consonant shifts is supposed to be deprecated (-t in particular precipitates many shifts), e.g., m to p shift is not to be indicated, thus sinonimt, antonimt instead of sinonipt, antonipt. The plural-only indication of assimilation by voicedness is abolished, though in the second era orthography it allows differentiating indef. pl. nom. and def. sg. gen. in soft d-stems.

As of writing this, this reform is being largely ignored in Wiktionary's coverage of the Moksha language, as the single most important criterion on Wiktionary is usage in durably archived (print) media.

Inflection

 * Appendix:Moksha declension
 * Appendix:Moksha conjugation