Short words in North S?mi

5 Responses to Short words in North S?mi

1. Richard Kettlewell says:

   2012-02-24 at 00:55

   ja: cognate with gothic

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   • Richard Kettlewell says:

     2012-02-24 at 00:56

     Of course that should be “cognate with gothic ‘jah'”, only as spelled at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%90%8C%BE%F0%90%8C%B0%F0%90%8C%B7 – something seems to have lost the gothic characters, at least as displayed here.

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     • colin says:

       2012-02-24 at 09:07

       Ah. Gothic is in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, which might account for MySQL or WordPress eating them.

       (It shouldn’t, as it’s UTF-8, but maybe there’s a handrolled UTF-8 converter somewhere in there, given that PHP didn’t handle UTF-8 for ages.)

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   • colin says:

     2012-02-24 at 08:49

     I don’t think North S?mi and Gothic share a common ancestor we know about, so I don’t think we can say they’re cognates. It might be a borrowing.

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     • Richard Kettlewell says:

       2012-02-26 at 23:03

       Oh, yes, that?s just me being ignorant of the properly narrow definition of ?cognate?, I didn?t mean to imply a common ancestor. At any rate I hear that the word is similar in modern Finnish too.

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