196,140 research outputs found
Government policies and indigenous rights:: a case study of the San and the Saami
No full textVarious approaches adopted by state governments towards their respective indigenous populations, as they pertain to the Saami of Sweden and Norway, and to the San living in Namibia and Botswana, have been examined, and their impact on the socio-cultural, economic and political aspects of these societies assessed. This dissertation further analyses the rationale behind the implementation of these policies and concludes that the arguments used to justify government intervention were frequently flawed: earlier policies introduced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were based on perceptions that native populations were 'inferior' and expendable whereas more recent government strategies revealed an inadequate understanding and appreciation of the indigenous groups to which the policies were directed. As a consequence, the Saami and San were dispossessed of their lands, forcibly assimilated into the majority population, and even subjected to campaigns of sterilisation (the Saami) and genocide (the San). It is argued that, although widespread abhorrence of these policies eventually resulted in their demise, renewed threats to the cultural traditions of the Saami and the San have appeared in the form of national economic industries including tourism, energy provision and mineral extraction. The thesis asserts that these new threats have been instrumental in stimulating ethno-political mobilisation and the formation of 'grassroots’' movements amongst the two indigenous groups. Paradoxically, a degree of acceptance of government policies among these indigenous groups has led to conflicts and fragmentation within these movements resulting from the desire by some members to maintain cultural traditions and the wish by others to access the higher living standards enjoyed by the majority populations. The impact of earlier and contemporary anthropological theory on the formulation of government policies has also been examined and adjudged to have had both beneficial and adverse impacts
A North Saami to South Saami Machine Translation Prototype
No full textThe paper describes a rule-based machine translation (MT) system from North to South Saami. The system is designed for a workflow where North Saami functions as pivot language in translation from Norwegian or Swedish. We envisage manual translation from Norwegian or Swedish to North Saami, and thereafter MT to South Saami. The system was aimed at a single domain, that of texts for use in school administration. We evaluated the system in terms of the quality of translations for postediting. Two out of three of the Norwegian to South Saami professional translators found the output of the system to be useful. The evaluation shows that it is possible to make a functioning rule-based system with a small transfer lexicon and a small number of rules and achieve results that are useful for a restricted domain, even if there are substantial differences b etween the languages.</jats:p
Introduction:currents of Saami pasts
No full textA scientific field is a constant process, and, as all processes, it is defined by dialectics, since standpoints are only defined in opposition to something else. Saami archaeology is no exception, and this field emerged precisely because of oppositions, when political conflicts enforced the realization of a lack of consideration of the Saami presence in the prevailing understanding of the past in northern Fennoscandia. Furthermore, the opposition to Saami archaeology and the identification of cultural heritage as specifically Saami has no doubt continued to shape the research within this field. Yet the field is neither ultimately defined by this genesis nor maintained without constant discussion and internal and external repositioning
Russian loanwords in Skolt Saami
No full textThe distribution of the Russian loan vocabulary within the Saami languages centers on Skolt, Akkala, Kildin, and Ter Saami. In Skolt Saami, this loanword stratum forms the largest loanword stratum and contains more than 750 lexemes. Despite the significance of the loanword stratum, there has hardly been any actual analysis of the Russian loanwords in the Saami languages. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting an overview of Russian vocabulary in Skolt Saami from a phonological, morphological, and semantic point of view. Besides analyzing the loanwords, approximately 150 new loan etymologies are discussed and some thirty new comparisons with Russian loanwords proposed in other Saami languages. It turns out that the Russian loan lexicon is relatively recent, and most if not all the words were borrowed from the Northwestern dialects of Russian between the beginning of the 17th century and 1920. Semantically the vocabulary is heterogenous. The most important semantic categories include religion, clothing, buildings and houses, diet, as well as administration and society
Indo-Uralic consonant gradation
No full textKoivulehto and Vennemann have recently (1996) revived Posti’s theory (1953) which attributed Finnic consonant gradation to Germanic influence, in particular to the influence of Verner’s law. This theory disregards the major differences between Finnic and Saami gradation (cf. Sammallahti 1998: 3) and ignores the similar gradation in Nganasan and Selkup (cf. Kallio 2000: 92)
The western and eastern roots of the Saami: the story of genetic "outliers" told by mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes
No full textThe Saami are regarded as extreme genetic outliers among European populations. In this study, a high-resolution phylogenetic analysis of Saami genetic heritage was undertaken in a comprehensive context, through use of maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and paternally inherited Y-chromosomal variation. DNA variants present in the Saami were compared with those found in Europe and Siberia, through use of both new and previously published data from 445 Saami and 17,096 western Eurasian and Siberian mtDNA samples, as well as 127 Saami and 2,840 western Eurasian and Siberian Y-chromosome samples. It was shown that the "Saami motif" variant of mtDNA haplogroup U5b is present in a large area outside Scandinavia. A detailed phylogeographic analysis of one of the predominant Saami mtDNA haplogroups, U5b1b, which also includes the lineages of the "Saami motif," was undertaken in 31 populations. The results indicate that the origin of U5b1b, as for the other predominant Saami haplogroup, V, is most likely in western, rather than eastern, Europe. Furthermore, an additional haplogroup (H1) spread among the Saami was virtually absent in 781 Samoyed and Ob-Ugric Siberians but was present in western and central European populations. The Y-chromosomal variety in the Saami is also consistent with their European ancestry. It suggests that the large genetic separation of the Saami from other Europeans is best explained by assuming that the Saami are descendants of a narrow, distinctive subset of Europeans. In particular, no evidence of a significant directional gene flow from extant aboriginal Siberian populations into the haploid gene pools of the Saami was found
Clausal complementation in Kildin, Skolt and North Saami
No full textKotcheva K, Rießler M. Clausal complementation in Kildin, Skolt and North Saami. In: Boye K, Kehayov P, eds. Complementizer Semantics in European Languages. Empirical Approaches to Language Typology. Vol 57. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton; 2016: 499-528
Skolt Saami passive verbs
No full textAbstract
This paper deals with the Skolt Saami passive verb suffixes -j- and -õõvvâ- (e.g. mott-j-ed ‘change (intr.)’, rottš-õõvvâ-d ‘be pulled’) cognate with North Saami -o(j)- and -uvva- (e.g. dahkk-o-t ‘be done’, muhttaš-uvva-t ‘change (intr.)’) as well as Finnish -u- ~ -y- (e.g. käänt-y-ä ‘turn (intr)’). The research material has two complementary parts: a dialectal dictionary and a speech corpus. The semantics of the relevant verbs in the material is examined. The main distinction is made between intentional passives (true passives having a volitional agent) and automative passives (actions that happen spontaneously or by accident, anticausatives). The results show that at least the suffix -jed and to a lesser extent -õõvvâd are mainly used to mark automative passives, but some instances of intentional passives are also found as well as some cases that are ambiguous between the two. The suffix -õõvvâd is used in the passive function more rarely than the suffix -jed and it has more functions
Soot in the Saami and Germanic languages
No full textThis paper examines the Scandinavian terminology for ‘soot’ in connection with
a number of Saami appellatives with a view to deciding which of them are native and
which result from borrowing. Special attention is paid to the problem of adopting
loanwords in Northern Europe, especially in the Scandinavian Peninsula. Two Proto-
Germanic words denoting ‘soot’ are discussed from the morphological and etymological
point of view. It is suggested that the West Germanic noun *hrōta- m./n. ‘soot’ is
closely related to PG. *sōta- n. ‘soot’, which, in turn, is derived from the Proto-Indo-
European verbal root *sed- ‘to sit’. The present authors intend to demonstrate that WG.
*hrōta- derives from the Indo-European archetype *ku̯u-sōdo- ‘bad soot; thick layer of
soot’, originally ‘what a soot!’. The original semantic distinction between PG. *sōta- and
WG. *hrōta- seems to be preserved in the use of two independent Saamic loanwords,
cf. Saa.N suohtti ‘soot (in the chimney)’ and ruohtti ‘big layer of soot’. The remaining
Northern Saami words under analysis include čađđa ‘charcoal, soot’ (< Proto-Saamic
*će̮δe̮ ‘carbon, charcoal, soot, grime’ < Ur. *ćüδ́i ‘coal, charcoal’), giehpa ‘soot’ (< PSaa.
*kēpe̮ ‘id.’, probably a Proto-Baltic loanword) and gožu ~ gohčču- ‘soot, layer of soot,
deposit of smoke or soot on things near a fireplace’ (< PSaa. *kočɔ̄j ‘soot’). Establishing
the etymologies of this rich Saami terminology concerning ‘soot’ is significant to the gradual change of Saami lifestyle from a nomadic hunter-gatherer one towards a nonperipatetic
community reliant on farming, animal husbandry and fishing.The present article is part of a research project entitled Prehistoric Contacts between
Indo-European and Uralic, financed by the scholarly development fund of the
Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz
Archive infrastructure and spoken language corpora for Saami languages in Finland
No full textAbstract
This study presents the results of an Aanaar Saami pilot project in the Saami Culture Archive, University of Oulu. The project has established a set of conventions to transcribe and annotate Aanaar Saami recordings in the archive’s collection and created a mechanism through which grammatically annotated but anonymous versions can be imported to the Korp search interface in the Language Bank of Finland. The practices include wide use of Saami language technology, the use of Finnish computational research infrastructure, and they can be extended later to other Saami languages in the archive
- …
