Le mokša ancien, une langue sans adverbes ?

The paper first presents a little-known language, Mokša, belonging to the Uralic family, and investigates adverbs as they were listed in the first linguistic description of Mokša published by Ahlquist in 1861. It is shown that originally all adverbial forms in Mokša were motivated and transparent derivatives of deictics, adjectives and nouns. There apparently did not exist primary adverbs, unanalyzable in the synchronic system of Proto-Mokša. The unanalyzable adverbs stem from recent borrowings taken from Russian and Turkic languages. This situation opens the way toward a kind of lexical utopia where there would exist no primary unanalyzable adverbial form in a language.