Re: [tied] Digest Number 1241

Hi Piotr,

And in fact there are around ten different S�mi
languages�. The speakers of these various S�mi
languages tend not to understand each others�s
language. The main S�mi language is the "North S�mi".
The total number on S�mi people is a matter of
definion, but usually one assumes that there are over
40.000 "S�pmelas" in Norway, from 15.000 to 25.000 in
Sweden, around 7.000 in Finland and 2.000 in Russia.

Cheers, Juha










--- Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John L. Berry" <jlbassoc@...>
> To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, February 18, 2003 1:07 AM
> Subject: Re: [tied] Digest Number 1241
>
> > Linguistic questions: (1) how close is Saami to
> Finnish in actual fact? The textbooks I have
> available are evasive on this - are the Saami
> dialects a different language, or are they basically
> Finnish dialects?
>
> Definitely different languages. Finnish is more
> closely related to Estonian than either is to Saami,
> though they all belong to a single subbranch within
> Finno-Ugric (usually called "Baltic Finnic"). They
> probably began to diverge more than two thousand
> years ago.
>
> > (2) Is Romani (can't remember the PC name - the
> language of the Rom or gypsies) an IE language, and
> if so, what are it's affinities? (obviously they
> would be Indo-Iranian, but within that?)
>
> It's an Indic (Indo-Aryan) language, related to the
> dialects of northwestern India.
>
> > (3) Non-linguistic question about Rom: is there
> anywhere else in Europe that the Rom can be shown to
> have arrived almost simultaneously with the first
> farmers?
>
> Certainly not. They came to Europe in the fourteenth
> century.
>
> Piotr
>
>

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