The last page of the TLS is the cheeky “NB” section, which discusses things like recent used-book purchases and mentions of the TLS in novels, movies, and the like. I generally enjoy it, but this bit from the Feb. 12, 2016 issue made me grind my teeth:
Lesser-used languages of Europe, an occasional series. Niillas Holmberg is the author of The Way Back: Poems in Sámi
(Clive Boutle, £9.99). We thought we were ignorant of Northern Sámi, both language and region, but learn that it refers to the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. The old terms, Lapp and Laplander, Mr Holmberg writes, are “now seen as pejorative”. The poems are presented in the original, with facing translations. “In spite of centuries of colonization in Sámiland, many of us still speak the language of nature.” The poet also speaks the language of Zen Buddhism. Here are three lines of “Suomaiduvvan” (Assimilation):
Máid sápmelaš bargá
go meahccái láhppo
dat manná ruoktotWhat does a Sámi do
when he gets lost in the wild
he goes homeIf we’re not wrong, the translated “Sámi” is “láhppo” in the original. Are the old terms disapproved of in English but not in Sámi itself?
(Clive Boutle, £9.99). We thought we were ignorant of Northern Sámi, both language and region, but learn that it refers to the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. The old terms, Lapp and Laplander, Mr Holmberg writes, are “now seen as pejorative”. The poems are presented in the original, with facing translations. “In spite of centuries of colonization in Sámiland, many of us still speak the language of nature.” The poet also speaks the language of Zen Buddhism. Here are three lines of “Suomaiduvvan” (Assimilation):As it happens, you are wrong, you smug twits. I mean, you don’t have to do any extensive research to figure this out, you can just go to the frigging Wikipedia article and read “Sámi refer to themselves as Sámit (the Sámis) or Sápmelaš (of Sámi kin), the word Sámi being inflected into various grammatical forms.” Therefore it is the “sápmelaš” in the first line that is translated “Sámi.” Now, I went the extra mile and consulted an online Northern Sami-English Dictionary to discover that “láhppo” is an inflected form of láhppán ‘lost,’ but that wouldn’t have been necessary in order to prevent the idiotic attempt at a gotcha (“ooh, those do-gooders want you to use some fancy word they probably made up, but look, the quaint reindeer herders use the bad word themselves!”). I checked the next few issues, expecting a mea culpa or a correction in the letters section, but nary a word — I guess it’s just too obscure a topic for TLS readers. So here, two years late, is the rap across the knuckles they deserve.
Hmm, had never seen Sami spelled with the accent on the ‘a’ before. Glad to learn this here.
á is [a], a is [ɑ] in Northern Sámi.
It’s taking most people some time to get used to the fact that the knowledge of the world is now at their fingertips. I still don’t look up as much as I should and now easily could.
I feared for a moment there that the post would be about me.
Northern Sami has had no less than 9 orthographies, and it used to be said that the orthography used in Norway changed every time the professor of Sami changed at the University of Oslo.
It’s my understanding that the distinction between <á> and <a> is primarily one of length. But taking up the keen advice and checking Wikipedia, I see that in the (generally more conservative) Eastern dialects of North Sami, frontness is more important.
There’s no clear agreement on the spelling of ‘Sami’ in English. The North Sami distinction represented by the acute is also reflected in the spelling with double a. I have vacillated between the two, so maybe I should try the acute too.
Wiktionary gives the full verb conjugation for láhppot.
Wow, that’s great — thanks!
Re “clear agreement on the spelling of ANYFOREIGNORIGINWORD in English,” if one spelling variant has some foreignish diacritical thingie over one of the letters and the other one doesn’t, the latter spelling wins unless the word is primarily used in English texts by members of some sort of subculture in which using foreign-looking squiggles is a desirable marker of group identity that keeps the unwashed masses with normal-for-Anglophones keyboards at bay. But Saami v. Sami is more of a fair fight. (The doubled-a spelling looks kinda Finnish, but whether summoning up that sort of association is a bug or a feature seems like it might be a divisive question?)
However, in the U.S. you’d probably have to look pretty hard to find someone who will be offended by “Lapp”; the grievances of the people formerly known by that name, however just, are simply not on the radar of even the sort of people unusually eager to offer unsolicited advice correcting the insensitive and/or behind-the-times language usage of others. That probably reduces the degree of any felt need to come up with a consensus spelling for the new-and-better demonym.
Me: There’s no clear agreement on the spelling of ‘Sami’ in English. The North Sami distinction represented by the acute is also reflected in the spelling with double a. I have vacillated between the two, so maybe I should try the acute too.
Now, Sami phonology is irrelevant for the English spelling. The important question is how to represent the English pronunciation. And, since it’s English, do something else entirely.
I was going to post that Loloish (as used for the Loloish language family) is pejorative and that we should be using Yi, but I note this at Wikipedia:
“Loloish is the traditional name for the family. Some publications avoid the term under the misapprehension that Lolo is pejorative. Lolo is the Chinese rendition of the autonym of the Yi people, and it is only pejorative when written with a particular Chinese character (one that uses a beast rather than human radical), a practice that was prohibited by the Chinese government in the 1950s.”
At Lolo-Burmese languages Wikipedia says:
“Until ca. 1950, the endonym Lolo was written with derogatory characters in Chinese, and for this reason has sometimes been avoided. Shafer (1966–1974) used the term “Burmic” for the Lolo-Burmese languages. The Chinese term is Mian–Yi, after the Chinese name for Burmese and one of several words for Tai, reassigned to replace Lolo by the Chinese government after 1950.”
‘Lolo’ is from Chinese 倮倮 luǒ luǒ.
‘Mian–Yi’ is 缅彝 miǎn-yì.
猡猡 luó luó appears to be the form with the beast radical. Despite the efforts of the Chinese government six decades ago, quite amazingly it can still be found at the Chinese Wikipedia article on 彝族 (Yi people) as one of the names that the Yi use for themselves. The Chinese love preserving old history. 🙂
I gave up trying to figure out how “one of several words for Tai” was reassigned to the Lolo, who belong to a different language group. That’s one rabbit hole too many.
We went down the Lolo rabbit hole a bit here (and it at least got mentioned back in 2003).
láhppo – ‘lost’
Originally the name they were called by the Norse was Finn (related to Old Norse finna – “to find”))
Looks like a wordplay
OK, Lapp’s the bad word, Sami’s the good word. But if you want to see an apparent derivative of Sami (or a closely related word) become the bad word, check Wikipedia “Talk: Samoyedic languages”. The samoyed is recognized by the American Kennel Club but it’s been expurgated from the Scrabble for schools word list.
But what Samoyed is even supposed to mean in Russian?
Self-cannibal?
Looks offensive, but doesn’t really make any sense.
So where does Lapp come from? The Swedish Academy dictionary doesn’t know. The OED says, “compare Middle High German lappe simpleton”, which seems a bit weak.
I knew enough to recognize Sápme (or something similar) as the self-name of the Sami, but my own naïve guess for láhppo would’ve been “the wild”.
…A few years back, I participated in a discussion about a fanciful alternate-historical map… not sure of the details any more, but TL/DR is that it basically included every place’s early medieval countries (with wildly anachronistically varying dates for “early medieval” – from 5th to 14th century – depending on how far back the area was attested, and which period had the most countries in it; occasionally it ended up with ancient countries, regions that were never independent, or even names that were effectively made up).
A region in northern Finland/Karelia ended up named Sápmi, despite my insistence on using the authentic early medieval name, Kvenland.
Their argument basically came down to “Kven is a derogatory name for the Sami”. I wasn’t sure whether it was (none of the references I was using said that), and had certainly never heard of Sápmi before; however, all the other options I could find were Lappland and Finnmark, which if referring to the Sami certainly would have been derogatory.
Ironically enough, one of the nearby regions ended up with the name Pohjoland, clearly in the “effectively made up” category.
Which reminds me of another story: back in the late 2000s, I ended up in a museum in Petrozavodsk that, among other things, had an exhibit about the Kalevala.
At some point I asked the kind museum worker whether a place name in Karelia was actually connected with the original setting of the poem. (I’m not sure of the exact phrasing I used; it was in Russian anyway.)
They said that no, the town of Kalevala was named directly for the poem, and relatively recently.
“What? No,” I surprisedly answered, “I didn’t even know that one existed. I was talking about Louhi.”
(They had no answer, and I still have no idea. That said, the original Louhi is usually perceived as a negative character, so I’m not sure why would anyone name a town after her.)
(Sorry for the long and not particularly related comment, by the way.)
No, ‘the wild’ seems to be meahccái, cognate with Finnish metsä (meaning woods). There’s a case ending lurking in there; the base word is meahcci according to the dictionary Hat found. It has both the woods and the wilderness meaning.
The -ái is illative singular, per WP.
However, although that article appears to give the full inflection of ruokto- ‘house’, it doesn’t show ruoktot.
If ON Finnr has anything to do with the ancient Fennī or Φιννοι, it can hardly be connected with PGmc. *finþ-i/a- ‘find’, since the progressive assimilation *nþ > nn is a much later Old Norse development.
But what Samoyed is even supposed to mean in Russian?
Self-cannibal?
Looks offensive, but doesn’t really make any sense.
Agreed – it looks like it’s a slur implying that they chew their own legs or something. And there are two perfectly good Russian words for “cannibal”, neither of which are “samoyed”.
Louhi
The dragon was called Flogdreki, which is similar in form to the Finnish words “lohi” (salmon) and “louhi” (ledge, crag, boulder), and “Louhi, Pohjolan emanta” (Louhi, the Mistress of Pohjola). Thus, the Bosa Saga is similar in numerous respects to the structure ot the Sampo cycle.
Fennī must technically be from Pre-Germanic, BTW – predating the *-enC- > *-inC- shift (where *nn counts as *nC).
Isn’t the Chinese Wikipedia blocked on the mainland and therefore almost entirely written by Taiwanese?
Isn’t the Chinese Wikipedia blocked on the mainland and therefore almost entirely written by Taiwanese?
It wasn’t blocked ten years ago, when the majority of articles were first written, and PRC Chinese are many to be found outside the concrete and virtual borders of the country.
> Northern Sami has had no less than 9 orthographies, and it used to be said that the orthography used in Norway changed every time the professor of Sami changed at the University of Oslo.
Reminds me of the old saying that developing your own Chinese romanization is an inevitable sign of senility/tenure for Sinologists.
This is completely unrelated and I know Steve’s not into the Voynich, but I have nowhere else to post it so I hope it’s ok: I’m amused at the war that just erupted at lingbuzz. In 2017, Gerard Cheshire posted Linguistic Missing Links, where he proves that the Voynich is a proto-Romance text in proto-Italic writing – complete with excerpted translations side-by-side with Vulgar Latin et cetera. Recently, J. Michael Hermann posted The Cannabis page of the Voynich Manuscript, where he proves that the manuscript is in a variety of Persian, written with some script related to Pahlavi or Mandaic. He demonstrates this by translating a moralistic rant against hemp habits. Chesire promptly busied himself in updating the earlier article, and in posting Linguistically Dating and Locating Manuscript MS408, where he laments how some people lack respect for the science of palæography and again proves it’s Romance, translating a tabula regio novem charting famous volcanoes and such. I’m holding my breath for Hermann to post some Islamic astronomical diagram translated from the original Persian, and so on. (not linking to lingbuzz to avoid the spam filter, but it should be easy to search.)
This is completely unrelated and I know Steve’s not into the Voynich, but I have nowhere else to post it so I hope it’s ok
Good lord, of course it is! I don’t mind people talking about the Voynich as long as they don’t mind me muttering about how it’s all a big fake.
We discussed previous decodings of the Voynich manuscript e.g. here and here.
In the second linked thread, slawkenbergius wrote:
Which leads me to suggest that people should produce theories claiming it’s written in whatever obscure language they think should have better resources available.
It’s in Kusaal. I’m amazed that nobody has noticed this previously. The text is mostly concerned with alien astronauts, of course, not cannabis (people are so gullible about these things.)
There was a long thread a short while back (in Hattery time) about how the demonyms Finn and Est(onian) can both go back to IE words for scales / pimples / warts. Presumably because of fish skin clothing. (The words for pimple and Finnlander are in fact homonyms in current Swedish, whatever you think of the cognacy).
Apparently there is a theory that the Voynich manuscript is written in Manchu.
As my mother used to say, though it can no longer be repeated in society: Fu Manchu, but many man smoke.
I love Rodger’s mum.
Ther may have been nine orthographies for North Sami, but it has played out over a period of more 200 years, and three different national standards (or traditions) have been merged into one. For any one speaker that’s less than one spelling reform per generation.
So where does Lapp come from?
The two main theories are connections to Scandinavian lapp ‘patch’ (thus “people so poor they have to patch their clothes”?) or Finnic lappi, lape etc. ‘margin, side’ (thus “people who live in out in the wilderness”). Most of Finland is full of lapp- placenames, often with associated folklore about them being formerly inhabited by “Lapps”, so the former seems likely to be the folk etymology of the two.
A more imaginative variation on the ‘patch’ theory goes that this would be actually a calque of sorts of an earlier Sami ethnonym *Vuowjoš ‘Wedge-y’, supposedly referring to a wedge-shaped patch worn on clothing as a sign of membership in a trader group. I find this to be likely only a fancy coincidence.
Yet, to aid fellow-searchers interested in pursuing the theory, one Voynichologist has scanned and rather accurately digitized Jerry Norman’s Concise Manchu-English Lexicon.
I read some story a long time ago, about someone having a deep ditch dug for free by scattering a few gold coins on the ground and starting a rumor about a buried treasure.
Well, for values of “free” that don’t include the cost of the gold coins.
@Lars (the original one), could you link to the Finnish pimples discussion? My efforts at googling for it didn’t turn anything up.
Is Sápmi/Saami not etymologically the same as Suomi < PIE *dʰéǵʰōm? Or, if it is, why the -p-? I guess it could be an infix or maybe some sort of weird excrescence of a past fortition.
j: The two main theories are connections to Scandinavian lapp ‘patch’ (thus “people so poor they have to patch their clothes”?) or Finnic lappi, lape etc. ‘margin, side’ (thus “people who live in out in the wilderness”). Most of Finland is full of lapp- placenames, often with associated folklore about them being formerly inhabited by “Lapps”, so the former seems likely to be the folk etymology of the two.
I like that better too. Also since ON leppr m.sg. “patch, rag; lock of hair” and lappir m.pl. “Sami people” looks like distnct words to me. But is there an Uralic etymology for Lapp?
A more imaginative variation on the ‘patch’ theory goes that this would be actually a calque of sorts of an earlier Sami ethnonym *Vuowjoš ‘Wedge-y’, supposedly referring to a wedge-shaped patch worn on clothing as a sign of membership in a trader group. I find this to be likely only a fancy coincidence.
What other evidence is there for *Vuowjoš?
With not too miuch stretch of imagination, Finn could be a better calque of the same word. There’s a wide variety of derived senses, but the original meaning must have been something like “spike; stiff straw”, cognate with Latin pinna. It wouldn’t have to be a calque of course. There are both good and bad reasons to use a word for something short, stiff and hardy as a designation for a neighbouring people.
Greg P.: Is Sápmi/Saami not etymologically the same as Suomi < PIE *dʰéǵʰōm? Or, if it is, why the -p-?
Yes, a borrowing from Baltic is the usual explanation. The p of Sápmi is an internal (Northern-ish, I think) Sámi development. Also Suopma “Finland”. I don’t remember the details, and I don’t have Sammalahti at hand.
Because those people not only preaspirate their stops, they prestop their nasals. *m, *n > pm, tn under some condition or other.
But now I’m so curious what the condition is!
Not only that, but the p in sápmi undergoes consonant gradation, a pan-Finnic (or mostly so) phonological phenomenon. The exact principles vary between languages (Saami is a good deal more complicated than Finnish, as far as I can telll). Due to the phonological nature of CG, some forms lack it (or rather, the consonant appears in the “weak grade” as the terminology goes), as the declension tables show:
https://glosbe.com/se/en/s%C3%A1pmi
@Greg could you link to the Finnish pimples discussion? My efforts at googling for it didn’t turn anything up.
Neither do mine, sadly. I rarely have luck googling for Hattery threads, though. As I recall, there was a link to an Academia.edu paper about a Germanic word family *astr- or similar. If that rings anybody’s bells.
But now I’m so curious what the condition is!
Sinus trouble.
I rarely have luck googling for Hattery threads, though.
Do you prefix your search terms with site:languagehat.com? Because that’s the Way. That said, I’m having no luck with this either.
I do use the site: magic, but it rarely helps. I hope I wasn’t hallucinating in this case.
Found the source. It’s from Hyllested’s dissertation, of course, much discussed here. Chapter titled “Estonia and the Aestii: Baltic Etymology as a Key to Fennic Ethnonyms”
Alternative Etymology: Baltic *aistra- is a translation of PGmc. *finōn
I didn’t find languagehat discussion of these etymologies, perhaps you discussed it on some other site.
No, but I read Hyllested when it was mentioned here — and that was the connection that remained in my mind. Thanks, SFReader!
I remember it too. I thought it was the Urchin discussion, but now I’ve read through most of the thread without finding it. I wonder if it could be in one of the linked papers.
Edit: Sorry. Update before posting.
This seems to be the original Hyllested thread.
Yes, and also Pecan vs. Pecan.
But what Samoyed is even supposed to mean in Russian? Self-cannibal?
I thought so too, it seems to be a common misconception. Apparently it might come from saam-jedna, which means “the land of Saami”, which also means Lapland:
goo.gl/s1QJNX
Sámiid ædnan (obligatory).
I have never heard that etymology before, but why not? Backformed from an adjective Samojedniy or something like that? By Novgorodian traders, presumably.
January First-of-May’s fanciful story reminds me of the game Crusader Kings 2, which is set on a detailed map of medieval Europe + north Africa + most of Asia. Due to the necessity of providing place names, these farflung locations come in for close attention from the game’s developers … if not, however, always very attentive attention. I dived at one point into the morass of their Egyptian place names, many of which seemed to be garbled if not just plain made up. Some appeared to be in the wrong place, especially those relating to Giza, which the game believes is in the desert west of Cairo, apparently because a stretch of desert in that area became part of Giza Governorate in 2011. In any event, the names Sápmi, Lappland, and Finnmark are all in use for an overlapping range of places. I don’t recall encountering a Kvenland, though.
Crusader Kings, by the way, has a strange fascination with giving the names of selected places in the language of the ruler, or, rather, in some modern language considered equivalent. So, Norway, if the ruler is Norwegian, is not Norway but “Norge” and Ireland, if the ruler is Irish, is not Ireland but “Éire”; on the other hand, if the ruler of Ireland is Welsh, then it’s “Iwerddon”; or, if he or she is Breton, “Iwerzhon”, and so forth. They seem to have invested a lot of time into looking up the names of various countries in assorted languages.
*m, *n > pm, tn under some condition or other
Medial *-m-, *-n-, *-ń-, *-ŋ- have pm, tn, tnj, kŋ as their default reflexes; mm, nn, ŋŋ occur after a word-initial nasal (namma ‘name’, mannat ‘to go’, maŋŋit ‘late’). (There do not seem to be any actual examples of the theoretically possible root structure *N-ń-.) Both types result in m, n, nj, ŋ under consonant gradation.
Sápmi is primarily the geographical term “Samiland” (no especially standard English translation that I know of), Sámi is its genitive-accusative case: “of Samiland; Samilander, i.e. Sami”.
There are also bm, dn, gŋ which continue earlier geminate nasals *-mm-, *-nn-, *-ŋŋ- (and which gradate to pm, tn, kŋ).
Gradation itself happens, by the canonical formulation, at the onset of a closed syllable; closure per Proto-Samic though, so e.g. mannat < *mënëtēk with the *n still in an open syllable *-në-.
Alternately, in Sami it would be actually quite feasible to instead consider the weak grade the default grade, and the strong grade to be derived by strengthening when in the onset of an *open syllable: gemination for most consonants or clusters, plus further complications involving stop consonants.
I’m refraining from giving IPA since there is not too much agreement on what pm bm tn dn are exactly, either phonetically (varies quite a bit by dialect) or phonologically (unit phonemes? clusters? if the latter, with what?)
January First-of-May’s fanciful story reminds me of the game Crusader Kings 2
I think I might as well reveal it – the map was to be used in a mod of Europa Universalis 3, a game from the same studio as CK2 (Paradox Interactive).
Unfortunately, that particular mod never really went anywhere (to the best of my knowledge, anyway).
I was not aware of CK2 itself having similar problems, but it doesn’t surprise me very much; after all, a lot of the time we don’t really know what exactly the actual map of such places would have looked like in the 9th century (or, in some cases, even the 11th).
…The underlying weirdness of Paradox Interactive’s research, in yet another game (this time a WW2-based one), is hilariously touched upon in the glorious ongoing AAR Inevitable Defeat – Slovakia ’44, which is… pretty much exactly what it says: Slovakia loaded in the June 1944 scenario, where it effectively cannot do anything except get overrun.
(Eventually. The AAR was started in 2011, had since passed through four in-game months, and no overrunning of Slovakia had happened so far.)
So the AAR is instead mostly about the weird randomness and random weirdness of Paradox’s research (surprisingly sloppy at times, as it turns out) as interpreted by the game’s AI (which can be rather weird and random just by itself).
So perhaps the prestopping isn’t a sound shift at all, it’s the analogical creation of a strong grade for consonants that previously lacked one?
See also: Welsh gw.
Prestopping applies just fine also where there is no weak grade to compare with at all, such as in trisyllabic roots: siepman : stem siepmana- ‘seed’ (pseudo-PS *sēmënë, actually from Finnish siemen : siemene-). Also, pm : m gradation only occurs in Western Sami. Eastern Sami and also older Ume Sami indicate that it is derived from earlier mm : m gradation, i.e. the same purely quantitative pattern as for most clusters and non-stops.
Now, OK, a small part of the long prestopped series indeed comes from *PN clusters (bodni ‘bottom’ < *potnē ← Scandinavian *botna-), but I dout these would suffice as a purely analogical source of prestopping for all other geminate nasals.
(also, scratch my earlier line about the nonexistence of geminate retention for *N-ń: mannji ‘daughter-in-law’)
And Finnish siemen is Indo-European (thought I, and Wiktionary agrees), and with that we’re back to more familiar territory.
January First-of-May,
Well, some places definitely require some speculation, but they could at least be expect to get the names of places in, say, Egypt spelled right and in the right spot. I think Paradox would be wise to crowdsource this type of research. In most cases, you’d hope to at least get somebody from said country to correct obvious inaccuracies. Best case, the crowdsourcing might attract someone with some genuine expertise in, say, medieval settlents in such-and-such place.
By the way, this paper “Common Era Sápmi Language Replacement: Motivation and Mechanisms” by John Weinstock discusses the origins of Sami/Sápmi. He mentions the Old Norse word
and goes to the trouble of emphasising that this is not the same root as Sápmi.
Thanks, That seems like a good synthesis of recent scholarship (and very similar in conclusions to Hattic speculations based on some of the same sources). But I don’t know the field well enough to see if anything is missing.
I knew a Finn whose given name was Sami; he was at pains to point out that this was not the same as Saami.
But was it the same as Sammy?
No, more like Summy.
Still reading Agrarian Life in the North 2000 BC – AD 1000. Christin Jensen’s and Johan Arntzen’s article A Late Bronze Age Sheep Farm North of the Arctic Circle? may be of interest here.
In the last few years, archaeology has moved the Nordic Bronze Age further north — on both sides of the peninsula as well as in Finland. Farmsteads with longhouses, evidence of cereal farming and occasional bronze artefacts have been found on island sites around Harstad. In Sweden a whole little cluster of NBA farms has come to light near what was then the mouth of the Ume river, just outside the modern town of Umeå. The article lays out the find of a Bronze Age farm even further north — and in a surprising location: A small three-aisled longhouse with NBA ceramics was dug out from the wet soil in Sandvika, a windy beach near the open coast west of Tromsø. The place was used for a couple of centuries in the late Bronze Age, ca. 1000-800 BCE. There’s only vague and circumstancial evidence for cereal farming, but this may be a result of erosion. After the abandonment, the farmstead in Sandvika was never settled again, but it seems to have been used for grassing during the Migration Era.
Judging from the dating of the other northern sites mentioned in the article, there seems to have been a general retraction of southern elements towards the end of the Bronze Age, followed by new expansion, especially in the Migration Era, until another round of abandonments with the mid-6th-century crisis. We know from other sources that Southern Scandinavian culture expanded again in the Viking Age and the Late Medieval Era, and, after a setback with the Black Death, from the 15th century or so until this day.
The implication of this for Sámi is that we’d expect a layer of (Post-)Proto-Germanic loans mediated through Paleo-Laplandic, maybe not discernible from a layer of (Post-)Proto-Germanic loans into (Pre-)Proto-Sámi, one layer of (pre-synchope) Proto-Norse loans into the emerging dialects of Sámi, and since Old Norse, a continuous stream of loans from various forms of Scandinavian into various forms of Sámi. Supposing that NBA was Proto-Germanic and that Sámi spread from southern Finland in the Iron Age.
It may be of interest that Hellquist’s Swedish Etymological Dictionary of 1922, online at http://runeberg.org/svetym/, has this entry for ‘lapp’:
lapp (folkslag), fsv. lapper = isl. lappir plur.; möjl. finskt lånord, jfr fin. lappalainen, egentl.: person från Lappi kanske med betyd, ’ödemarken i norr’), o. ry. löparj. Det äldsta nord. namnet synes ha varit finnar (se d. o.). Själva kalla sig lapparna sapme sing., sabme, same m. m. K. B. Wiklund Nord. fam.-bok 15: 1186 f.
which I translate as
lapp (a people), old Swedish lapper = Icelandic lappir (plural); possibly a Finnish loanword; compare Finnish lappalainen, evidently a person from Lappi (perhaps meaning ’northern wasteland), and Russian löparj. The earliest Scandinavian word seems to have been finnar (q.v.). The Lapps call themselves sapme, singular sabme, same etc.
Me: Supposing […] that Sámi spread from southern Finland in the Iron Age.
Here’s a brand new doctoral thesis from Luleå University of Technology:
Carina Bennerhag: Steel Making Hunter-Gatherers in Ancient Arctic Europe, 2023
tl;dr: Advanced iron production and smithing was widespread among North Scandinavian hunter-gatherers from a couple of centuries BCE. The scale and method of production implies connection to a trade network, mobilization of a workforce for making charcoal and digging bog ore, and that those managing the furnaces were sedentary for long periods./tl;dr
Edit: Oh, I meant to add the concluding paragraph of the final remarks:
Advanced iron production and smithing was widespread among North Scandinavian hunter-gatherers from a couple of centuries BCE
Yet more support for Scandi-Congo. West Africa went straight to the Iron Age without bothering with a Bronze Age (saves time.)
[‘Blacksmith’ is reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta. Naturally …]
The limiting factor in bronze production is normally the tin. Are there major tin deposits in West or Central Africa? I don’t recall ever hearing about any, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
I recently had an interesting discussion of historical metallurgy with the South Carolina state archaeologist (in the course of he and I and others trying to convince my younger son that there were worthwhile things to learn at temple religious school). Once people know how to smelt iron, it quickly takes over, usually. Iron ores are common, and iron is the hardest multi-purpose metal until you develop carbon steel (which is itself mostly iron). However, I do know of one important exception. Late-period Egypt was never the dominant power that the Bromze Age Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom were. Part of the reason for this was probably that the seasonal, inundation-based agriculture along the Nile was, while amazingly productive for grain crops and vegetables, not well suited for trees. And for high-temperature iron smelting, charcoal is critically important, which meant that Iron Age Egypt had difficulty producing enough iron tools and weapons to compete with other powers like Assyria.
Yes, iron is considered more democratic. cf: “This already volatile situation was compounded by two further stimuli to flux and change, namely the spread of iron at the expense of bronze and the emergence of consonantal alphabets, which competed with the cumbersome and complex syllabic/pictorial writing systems of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Both items had been in existence much earlier, but only began to make gains towards the end of the second millennium. Both are seen as having a decentralising influence upon political and economic power. Iron, unlike copper or tin (from which bronze is made), is found practically everywhere on the globe, and so its mining could not practically be controlled by ruling elites as copper had been. ”
“ iron is the hardest multi-purpose metal until you develop carbon steel”
Is it? I thought bronze is harder. But I imagine much depends on the specific kind of bronze and iron compared (and used).
@drasvi: Really good bronze (typical of alloys made today) is harder than wrought iron, but with tin as the limiting ingredient, it usually made more sense in antiquity to skimp on the tin. Although they are much softer, two sword blades of 6% tin bronze are still more useful in net than a single one made of 12% bronze. The quality bronzes thus tended to be restricted to particular uses. Even if you had enough tin to make those 10% or 12% swords and spearheads, it would be foolish to use that much tin when making armor.
(I wonder whether “flux” in that quote was an intentional pun.)
Do you need trees to make charcoal? Can’t you make suitable charcoal out of smaller plants? Iron is reduced at about 1250°C. Brick kilns are 900°C or so, and the Egyptians certainly had those and other ceramics.
The hot topic in carbon sequestration here is pyrolysis of straw and animal waste, which I gather is much the same thing as what happens when making charcoal. (Driving off most components except elemental carbon with heat in anaerobic conditions). The point of course is to bury the carbon afterwards, but I’m sure it would burn just fine. (Though charcoal is easier to handle).
(It seems that after burning enough flue gases to make the process self sustaining, you reduce the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere by about 60%, and it will all be carbon dioxide instead of nasty things like methane and ammonia).
@Y: I don’t think there’s any reason why one cannot make charcoal from woody bushes, but in most environments their biomass is small compared to that of trees. I don’t know any details, but I highly doubt there are enough shrubs in Egypt’s alluvial plain to make up for the paucity of trees.
Brett, I guess, hardness also depends on smithing techniques.
In WP numbers for iron on Vickers scale are unimpressive (30–80HV5).
Mohs scale (again, WP) is, conversely, 4 for iron, 3 for bronze.
I don’t know which scale matter more for weapons. But Vickers numbers measured in different parts of medieval steel weapons vary very widely.
PS. once I googled biomass of various species and found article estimating (very roughly, of course) mass of carbon. Trees indeed are orders of magnitude ahead of the ocean and everything else. Cattle and then humans are leadears among animals.
@drasvi: Since alloying almost anything with copper makes it harder, there are naturally a lot of recipes for bronze. Arsenic, tin, zinc, even silver (although I suspect that if people had known they were using a copper-silver alloy, they might have preferred to separate out the silver rather than just leaving it in).
Iron smelting with charcoal also tends to impregnate the iron with a certain amount of carbon, but it’s difficult to control with open furnaces. People have apparently been fiddling with the formula for smelting iron to get harder steels from the first moment iron tools became important. By late antiquity, some particular recipes had emerged, but only in the early nineteenth century, with the invention of the Bessemer process, did it become cost effective to replace all virtually all iron with standardized steel.
There is a lot of carbon fixed in the form of woody plants. Unlike algae, which have most cells actively photosynthesizing, trees have cores of mostly dead structural matter. So they are actively fixing far less carbon compared to their existing biomass.
@Brett, yes, that’s why I would prefer to have an actual bronze sword (many of them, actually) and an actual iron sword (maybe African if their technology is similar… though why would it be similar in every respect, especially in absense of competition with bronze..?). Bronze swords are relatively well preserved.*
Vickers 30-80 sounds very soft.
About variation in hardness.
* I wonder why all of browze swords I see (well, almost) are double-edged and symmetrical.
PS. a video featuring a smith who makes modern replicas of bronze swords. I have already seen his name in an archaeologist’s publication. Most of the video is about chopping wood with it (but the smith own channel is mentioned too).
I just happened to see numbers on animal biomass yesterday. It seems that humans, at the time a vanishingly small proportion, managed to reduce the number by at least 50% between 100kbp to 10kbp by killing off North American wildlife, but that since then humans and livestock have added ten times or more as much. (Wildlife, including whales as the presenter said, comes in at at small percentage of the total. God knows how that number looked before we started using whale oil [and industrial pigs and cows were a thing]).
Did the hunters have ICBM in 100kbp? How did they collect, preserve and transport the meat? How did all this advanced technology disappear?
* I wonder why all of browze swords I see (well, almost) are double-edged and symmetrical.
That could merely be due to sword-fighting techniques in fashion in the age when swords were forged from bronze. Whether made of bronze or not, a two-edged sword can cut on the backswing, so it’s not necessary to rotate it first.
I imagine, though, that you can too easily cut your own head off by accident after cutting off your opponent’s head.
Single-edged Japanese swords are elegant and effective. They gave us Kill Bill.
@PP, I assume the hunters went after the big game by more mundane means. I don’t have numbers for the meat yield of big prey animals, or for the meat consumption of hunter/gatherers in 10kbp, but I’d be surprised if a single person didn’t make it through a ton or five of animal biomass per year.
So if the wildlife just stands around without reproducing, even 1000 humans in NA could make a big dent in say 3000 years. Except it doesn’t, and hunting off enough to impact the replacement rate is a different proposition. Maybe it was warming after the ice age that did the megafauna in, and not human predation. It seems more research is needed. In it was done, however, and that seems to be what makes the numbers for animal biomass smaller in 10kbp than in 100kbp.
@lars
I just meant modern human impact in N.A. presumably started sometime after 50kbp rather than already in 100kbp. I agree that depletion of “sitting duck” wildlife could proceed very quickly.
The presentation didn’t say when between 100 and 10kbp the predation happened, it just gave the two numbers. I sort of assumed that it was connected with the human migration into NA at the end of the latest ice age, because that’s when the fossil record says it happened. (Unless the latter has been disproven since I was in school). Maybe the first waves of humans didn’t feel like tackling the mastodons.
@Lars, the paper I saw suggested changes over the time from 10kybp to now, I think, and I compared the number to the biomass of cattle on my own.
What surprised me is:
(1) I never thought about trees, but it is easy to see how they contain a lot. Enough to imagine a square in a forest, and it is clear that the big tree there and a small one contain much more than your squirrel and insects.
(2) I thought ocean must contain a lot, because it is “big”.
@drasvi, Stu Clayton: I think it’s right that having both sides sharpened makes the sword more useful, since there are more geometries available for slashing. Once you have hammered out the blade and sharpened one full edge and both edges around the tip, it may just not be much additional work to sharpen the whole back edge of the weapon. However, the existence of katanas and other single-bladed backswords does indicate it’s not a necessity to have both sides sharpened. I just experimented with swinging my kris* both forehand and backhand, and it definitely felt most natural to flip my hand over for the backhand stroke, so that I was leading with the same edge either way. However, it was not a problem to strike backhand with the other edge; although it was slightly awkward, I can see how that flexibility might be advantageous in combat, when a warrior might not want to lose a split second turning his hand and giving his foe time to recover his defenses. My damascene longsword* (named Peladon**) is with my eleven-year-old at his mother’s right now, since he used it as part of his Halloween costume,*** so I can’t experiment with a full-sized blade to see how it feels to swing it backhand.
Both bronze and iron corrode and dull, of course, but I think rusting is a much more serious problem for iron. Mycenean bronze swords found in shaft graves typically aren’t in very good condition, but iron grave goods from a millennium later are often little more than piles of red dust. Before stainless steel became commonplace, swords had to be consistently cleaned, oiled, and honed after use, lest they lose their edge. Often this involved disassembling the hilt and quillons to make sure there is no moisture building up in the crevices between the solid steel pieces. I have a knife I made, with the supervision of a semi-professional blacksmith, out of a railroad spike. It’s a nice piece, but since it’s low-carbon steel, it has to be cleaned of rust every time it gets used and cleaned.
* See here for discussion of the reasonableness of how many blades I own.
** It is named after the classic Doctor Who stories “The Curse of Peladon”**** and “The Monster of Peladon,” which take place on a medieval planet. “The Monster of Peladon” was the first Doctor Who serial that I saw (almost) in its entirety, and it was a huge favorite of mine for a long time. (In general I think seasons eleven and twelve, Jon Pertwee’s last and Tom Baker’s first, are among the consistently best periods in the show’s history. My all-time favorite story, “Death to the Daleks,” immediately precedes “The Monster of Peladon,” and the period also includes such unquestioned classics as “The Time Warrior,” “Planet of the Spiders,” and “Genesis of the Daleks.”) However, when I later saw “The Curse of Peladon” from a couple years earlier, I realized that a lot of the elements of “The Monster of Peladon” were rather derivative—although this was not unintentional. The stories were written by the same person, and producer Barry Letts tried to hire, to the extent possible, the same crew of designers and staff for the sequel, to keep the look and feel the same. Nevertheless, while “The Monster of Peladon” has some new creative elements, a lot of it is derivative of “The Curse”; the villains, in particular, are less handled less creatively.) I picked the name of the sword, and my eleven-year-old subsequently named the Viking war horn I got him as a present Agador (the titular curse and monster, although he appears in both stories and is really not a bad guy). Both were components of his Halloween costume.***
*** I wonder how homeowners in the neighborhood would have reacted if they had know that the scabbarded sword he was carrying was completely real (if not especially sharp).
**** This four-episode serial guest starred, in the role of King Peladon (Peladon being the name both of the planet and its kings—or maybe their dynasty) David Troughton (son of Patrick Troughton), in his second appearance on Doctor Who. He had previously appeared as a teenager as an extra in his father’s last serial, since he didn’t want to miss a chance to appear on the program.
However, it was not a problem to strike backhand with the other edge; although it was slightly awkward
Etymologically awkward means precisely ‘in the backhand direction’. An awkward stroke was originally one in an odd or surprising direction, and then a clumsy stroke.
the scabbarded sword he was carrying was completely real
It’s not very clear what a “real” sword is, if it’s not sharp.
As an English airport security man once said on confiscating my breadknife “I could still cut you with it!”
I wonder if he would say that about a butter knife.
That does make me wonder why the use of lead and arsenic in bronzemaking completely stopped once tin became fashionable. Surely they must have been locally cheaper than tin in some places?
Well, when I was little, there was a series of pencil murders in the news. Someone was stabbing people to death with pencils – must have been really good at aiming.
“Life covers the land; it merely stains the seas.”
Some estimates for the microorganisms in practically solid rock at least 5 km down, however, surpass all the trees.
That does make me wonder why the use of lead and arsenic in bronzemaking completely stopped once tin became fashionable. Surely they must have been locally cheaper than tin in some places?
Arsenic may be cheap, but metalworkers are expensive: it doesn’t do to poison them.
@John Cowan: Over the years, I had several Halloween costumes that included swords. When I was five or six, I dressed as Thorin, but my Orcrist was made of cardboard with jewels I had drawn on in crayon. Subsequently, I had commercial toy swords with hilts of varying quality and verisimilitude. Had I drawn them, they would have been obviously fake, but I’m sure most people who saw me in costume would have assumed they were fake even without being drawn. Benji’s costume included a scabbarded sword belted to his waist, and if people looked closely, they could have seen that the scabbard was of real leather, the hilt of wood and brass. Still, I doubt that they would have expected it to be attached to a polished steel blade with a knife edge, even if that edge is only ground as sharp as a bread knife.
To me a bread knife is a long sharp serrated knife for cutting bread. Are people using it to mean a table knife?
To me a bread knife is a long sharp serrated knife for cutting bread.
To me as well (and to my wife — I just asked her).
@Kieth Ivey: No, I agree with you about the basic meaning of bread knife. I just used that analogy because it had been mentioned above (although PlasticPaddy might have meant something different), and bread knives aren’t very sharp. Like table knives, they aren’t really designed to be sharpened, relying instead on the serrations (which are precisely what makes them hard to sharpen effectively) to cut through the crust of a loaf. Note that in the blog post linked above, I did not count my bread knife among the knives I owned. A bread knife is a knife, but it’s not a knife (channeling Crocodile Dundee).
Bread knives are sharp over here, where bread crusts are hard. They’re long, too; mine has a blade 20 cm long – and, unusually, it’s not serrated, just wavy.
(…It’s not sharp anymore, though. I eat so little bread that it routinely becomes really hard. Sometimes I split bread more than cutting it.)
http://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_medium/public/thumbnails/image/2015/03/17/17/AN651938734-Victorinox-Rose.jpg
This would be the sort of thing. The blade was so flexible that you could put the knife between your palms and bring them together so the blade bent in a semicircle. So useless as a throwing knife and even for stabbing (the end would glance off before it penetrated), but I suppose the security man had experience in converting such a knife into a weapon (holding it and striking in a particular way or maybe breaking off the tip like a berserker).
I’d never have thought of trying to take that onto a plane. It seems like at least as useful a weapon as a box cutter or a razor blade. I wouldn’t try to take a saw onto a plane either.
I agree.
Before stainless steel became commonplace, swords had to be consistently cleaned, oiled, and honed after use
Indeed, they didn’t have stainless steel in Narnia. (Labored attempts to make Christian symbolism out of cleaning a sword are the kind of Grand Unified Theory you get from people with no clue about the history of material culture.)
There are striking scenes of cleaning and oiling a soldier’s rifle in Alan Garner’s The Aimer Gate — and, I find on checking the text, the tooter the sweeter is said by that soldier, on leave from World War I.
I wonder if he would say that about a butter knife.
Technically, it was illegal for Germans to own bread knives in Berlin under allied occupation statutes up to German unification in 1990, because they theoretically could be used as weapons. But practically, this wasn’t enforced for decades.
@ktschwarz: On the Narnian sword cleaning issue.
That’s the same link, Brett.
That’s the same link ktschwarz posted.
<meta>That’s the same critique, Hat.</meta>.
Indeed, they didn’t have stainless steel in Narnia
In fact, stainless steel is not used for functional swords: it is too brittle, and over the long span of a sword it will bend or even fracture under the pressure of being stuck into something. Stainless-steel knives work fine, and so do dress swords. Indeed, the whole reason we have so many steels is that none of them can do everything.
Ha! I didn’t even notice there was a hyperlink in that first paragraph. My parser that I have trained for processing Language Hat blog comments just skipped over it, because the link text was colored as already followed.
Me: Advanced iron production and smithing was widespread among North Scandinavian hunter-gatherers from a couple of centuries BCE.
The limitation of the scope to Sweden, Finland and Norway was surely due to limited availability of data from further east. It would be interesting to know if, when, and how far, this iron-producing economy reached into Russia.
That… makes it useless for cutting bread this side of fluff for toasting, explaining why I had never seen or heard of such a thing before. It’s also not guessable from the photo, which looks unremarkable for a bread knife.
I have inherited a bread knife from my great-grandmother that is not serrated but _wavy_. It’s from the 1920s. It produces less breadcrumbs. Why don’t they make them that way anymore? Cheaper?
As mentioned above, they do – mine is wavy, and it’s from the 2010s or 2000s.
(It’s also not flexible. The reason it’s less than perfect as a katana is that it’s too light…)
Sorry, I didn’t notice. Yeah, it’s also no flexible.