Jhendin

Thank you for your contributions to the Northern Sámi wikipedia! It was a pleasure to see that someone had been active here (and not vandalizing the place :D) over the weekend. A couple quick things I should point out about Northern Sámi: the names of the months (and days, etc.) and languages are always written in lowercase. In addition, birthplaces are written in the locative form (so Amerihká ovttastuvvan stáhtat --> Amerihká ovttastuvvan stáhtain). Beyond that, keep up the good work and thanks again! -Yupik 08:05, 31 borgemánu 2009 (UTC)

Very small world indeed :D Are you from the Chicagoland area? There are actually dictionaries and vocabs, but they're pretty well hidden. For Sámi-English odds and ends, there's http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/same/ ; for Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and a number of Sámi languages, there's http://www.risten.no/exist/risten/index.html ; and for etymological purposes (but people use it as a normal dictionary anyways, there's Álgu at http://kaino.kotus.fi/algu/index.php?t=etusivu&kkieli=sa . If you know enough Norwegian, you can play around at http://oahpa.uit.no/ and there's a number of computational linguistic programs at http://giellatekno.uit.no/ . -Yupik 19:10, 31 borgemánu 2009 (UTC)

What a small world :D And yes, that's who I am. I grew up in the part of Hinsdale out by Burr Ridge for the most part. Are you from Chitown itself or from the burbs? As for Finnish, I ended up learning it because my then in-laws didn't know any English and because my father-in-law loved teaching me the weirder parts of Finnish for his own amusement. Always said the man should have been a linguist, but he didn't see anything special in his love of the language and its dialects. A loss for the linguistics world! As for Latvian vs. Lithuanian, it is just a pragmatic solution as I tend to take off for Latvia whenever I get a chance (not often nowadays) and I'd like to be able to communicate somewhat :) -Yupik 10:27, 3 čakčamánu 2009 (UTC)

Somehow I get the feeling you'll like link, too: http://isizulu.net/ . There's a whole forum behind that link, so have fun :) -Yupik 10:34, 3 čakčamánu 2009 (UTC)

Russian

If you get a chance, could you please switch all of the ruoššalaš to ruošša? For some reason, it's one of the few adjectives that doesn't follow the normal paradigm. I'll delete the ruoššalaš dáiddárat category when I get the chance to. And thank you so much for the wonderful work you're doing on here! -Yupik 10:51, 9 cuoŋománu 2010 (UTC)

It is a challenge. Writing a grammar in English for Northern Sámi has been on my list for a number of years, but no publisher seems to care about this small of a language that most English speakers have never heard of. There's a small version in Northern Sámi and Norwegian on Risten.no, but I don't know how much help they'll be if you don't know either language. -Yupik 12:03, 10 cuoŋománu 2010 (UTC)

It's absolutely frustrating. I think part of the problem lies in that Northern Sámi has "enough" speakers that they feel complacent about the situation of their language; they don't seem to feel the urgency that speakers of the smaller Sámi languages do. It's also frustrating when trying to write articles here knowing that I don't even know words and phrases for some of the simplest things; for instance, when trying to write a stub about the Polish president that just died, I didn't know the word for "to crash"! This wiki used to have a native speaker, but she gave up in frustration that she was the only one. She's responsible for anything and everything that has been translated in the infrastructure and almost all of the articles, too. Finnish is peppered with English nowadays, too, so Swedish isn't alone in its foolish pursuit of all things English :( -Yupik 13:03, 10 cuoŋománu 2010 (UTC)

One of our bureaucrats (Trondtr) is quite fluent in Northern Sámi, but he's busy with the Nynorsk wiki and outside commitments, so he hasn't been on here for a while. I've been thinking of lowering my fluency level to 1 (on bad days to -1 :D), I've been so frustrated with being able to express myself when translating articles here. The number of non-native speakers working on other wikis has exploded in recent years. When I first started contributing on the Finnish and Swedish wikis, I was an anomaly. Nowadays not so more, fortunately! I've also noticed that non-native speakers can contribute a lot to wikis where they know nothing of the language; in fact, it's a subject I'd like to talk about at Wikimania this year if I get selected to give a presentation there.

How did you get involved with the Rhaeto-Romance wiki? That was one of the languages I wanted to learn when I was a kid. I thought I'd hit the jackpot when I was in hs, because our neighbours were Swiss, albeit German-speaking ones though...That plan kind of fell through :D Lithuanian is a cool language and plenty present in the everyday life of Chicago. They even had their own club at the hs I went to. How long did you study it for?

One thing I thought about while herding children around today was that Volapük has one key feature that the Sámi languages (and a lot of other minority languages) don't have, namely that it has never experienced the assimilation policies that so many minority languages have been subjected to. With Skolt Sámi, for instance, there is a "lost generation" that can't speak their own mother tongue because they were openly punished and shamed for doing so when at school. Northern Sámi speakers went through the same thing at the boarding schools and the "Sámi schools", so we run into a lot of potential contributors who are petrified of writing their own mother tongue for many reasons. If nothing else, the constant changes to the Sámi orthographies will do anyone's head in. Trond and his good bunch of linguists have made various programs (Divvun, http://giellatekno.uit.no/doc/admin/physical_meetings/tromso-2006-01-divvun-updates.html to help them overcome these fears; hopefully, one day they'll be convinced to contribute. Northern Sámi has become well represented on the web if you just know where to look (even some of Norway's and Finland's legislation is in Northern Sámi online), but Inari and Skolt Sámi are not. The online situation with Inari Sámi though is looking better thanks to Kierâs, the online newspaper they put out and now Saa'mi Nue'tt ry is doing the same thing with a blog for schoolchildren where they can write in either Finnish or Skolt Sámi. I can't wait to see what the situation is like by the end of the year! -Yupik 18:50, 10 cuoŋománu 2010 (UTC)

Please, could you translate en:Podolsk into Sámegiella? Naturally if you have available time!

Good day to you! Could you, please, translate into Sámegiella the article, containing two-three sentences, about this city in Russia? I’d like to thank you in advance :)--Переход Артур 10:42, 15 guovvamánu 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, but as I mentioned earlier, it would be better if you contacted a native speaker about this. And I'm going to pass on this one, because I'm not understanding the reasoning behind this. I have a feeling it's not going to stop here.Jhendin 22:39, 15 guovvamánu 2011 (UTC)

It would be appreciated if you created a user page. It would help validate all of this. Jhendin 22:41, 15 guovvamánu 2011 (UTC)

Thanks again for your support :)--Переход Артур 11:35, 16 guovvamánu 2011 (UTC)

I guess I failed this test. I'm still trying to figure out why the three people who contacted me through the Finnish Wikipedia would only write to me in Finnish, even though they all listed a level three for their English. Goodbye scholarship.Jhendin 23:24, 16 guovvamánu 2011 (UTC)