'What's your name?' in Tungusic and beyond

This study investigates questions about personal names, i.e. questions correspond-
ing to What’s your name? in English. This potentially universal type of question is
referred to as the personal name question (PNQ). The study sketches the
typological variation found in the PNQ from a cross-linguistic perspective and analyzes
the synchronic typology and diachronic development of the PNQ in Tungusic, a
small but important language family spoken in Northeast Asia.

Cross-linguistically, two main types of PNQs are attested. Type A is an equational
copula sentence (e.g., What is your name?) while Type B contains a speech act verb
(e.g., What are you called?). Tungusic shows a tendency for Type A but, because
of contact languages such as Mongolian and Russian, also has instances of Type
B. One of several other dimensions of variation among the world’s languages is
the kind of interrogative used in PNQs. Tungusic languages originally used an
interrogative meaning ‘who’ (literally Who is your name?). The use of ‘what’ in
several languages located in the south and of ‘how’ in many languages in the north
can be attributed to influence from Chinese, Russian, and other languages.

Historical accounts of Tungusic are usually restricted to individual items (e.g., *si
‘you (sg)’ *gärbü ‘name’, *ŋüi ‘who’, e.g. Benzing 1956), but rarely are larger
expressions reconstructed to Proto-Tungusic. This study shows that the Proto-Tungusic
PNQ as one idiom can be plausibly reconstructed as *si(n-i) gärbü-si ŋüi?
‘2sg(.obl-gen) name-2sg.poss who’. Most deviations in modern languages can be explained
by contact with surrounding languages.