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I know this might not look too flashy, but this might be my favourite stamp sheet. These Estonian stamps are a language tree of the Uralic languages.

Going anti-clockwise from the bottom middle stamp, we have:

The Samoyedic Languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, and Kamasin

The Ugric Languages: Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi

The Permic Languages: Komi and Udmurt

The Mari and Mordvinic (Erzya and Moksha) Languages

The Sami Languages (Nortern, Southern, Skolt, Inari, Lule, Ume, Pite, Ter and Kildin Sami)

The Baltic-Finnic Languages: Veps, Karelian, Izhorian, Livonian, Finnish, Estonian and Votic

Languages in brackets weren't mentioned in the stamp, but I thought I'd elaborate anyway

Edit: put Ingrian instead of Izhorian. Should've known better, sorry

Languages of the world

Selkup (шӧльӄумыт әты)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 1,000

Spoken in: Russia

Script: Cyrillic, 41 letters

Grammatical cases: 13

Linguistic typology: agglutinative, SOV

Language family: Uralic, Samoyedic, Core Samoyedic, Kamas-Selkup

Number of dialects: 3 main groups

History

19th century - creation of a Cyrillic alphabet to write Selkup

1930s - Selkup is written using the Latin script

1980s - new Cyrillic alphabet

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the script: а ӓ б в г д е ә ё ж з и і й к ӄ л м н ӈ о ө ӧ п р с т у ӱ ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я.

There is no fixed stress, but the longest vowel to the right of the word is generally stressed.

Grammar

Nouns have three numbers (singular, dual, and plural) and thirteen cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, instrumental, caritive, translative, coordinative, dative-allative, illative, locative, elative, prolative, and vocative). Animateness and possession are also marked.

Adjectives and numerals precede the noun.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, and number.

Dialects

There are three dialect groups: Northern, Middle, and Southern. Dialects form a dialect continuum whose ends are not mutually intelligible.

Northern Selkup is the basis for the written language.

#langblr #selkup #lingblr

Semirandom Uralic vocabulary of the day: some homophones in Proto-Selkup resulting from various word-internal consonant vocalizations and partly also from the general Samoyedic merger *s > *t (as vaguely gestured at here by Finnish and Hungarian cognates, which happen to exist for an above-average number of these)

A. */tuː/ 1) 'feather' (~ Fi. sulka, Hu. toll) 2) 'to row' (~ Fi. soutaa) 3) 'to close' 4) 'to carry' (? ~ Fi. taluttaa 'to lead (someone on foot)')

B. */tyː/ 1) 'fibre' (~ Fi. syy) 2) 'fire' (~ Fi. tuli; probably ≠ Hu. tűz) 3) 'lung' (~ Fi. dial. tävy, Hu. tüdő) 4) 'to step down' 5) 'to come' (~ Fi. tulla, ? Hu. talál 'to find')

C. */tiː/ 1) 'fathom' (Fi. syli, Hu. öl) 2) 'now' 3) 'cloud' 4) 'to fly' 5) 'to dismount (a horse)'

This appears to have been too much to be stable though, and the homophony gets mostly resolved by suffixation or compounding later on. 'To carry' has been attested as a basic root only from the Ob dialect (Central) per the data available to me, while Northern Selkup only has a derivative *tuː-lcə- > /tulɟə-/; Tym (Central) and Ket (Southern) dialects only have *tuː-ntə- > /tunda-/ (both 'to bring'); 'fibre' is attested only in a compound *poːn_tyː 'fibre of tree' — rather parallel to modern Fi. puun syy 'fibre of tree' vs. syy 'cause, reason'; 'lung' is attested only in a compound *tyːj_mektə 'lung-y pile (?)'; 'to fly' is attested only in parallel derivatives *tiː-mpi-, *tiː-lcə-, *tiː-lʈʂə-. The only words that are the same part-of-speech and coexist as such widely across the Selkup varieties seem to be 'fathom' and 'cloud'.

#selkup #samoyedic #lexicology #homophony #historical morphology #comparative linguistics