Diversity in Saami terminology for reindeer, snow, and ice

Abstract

The physical environment leaves its mark on cultures. Knowledge of snow and ice conditions has been a necessity for subsistence and survival in the Arctic and sub‐Arctic areas. Snow and ice terminology in the North Saami language, which is spoken in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, is based on the physical condition of different kind of layers of ice and snow. In addition, the relation to changes of weather and temperature conditions is often integrated in the terminology. Very basic in the meanings is also the quality and quantity of snow, judged according to the practical needs of people and animals. The author demonstrates this by explaining the terminology for conditions and layers of snow, terms based on the transportation and pasture needs of reindeer and those based on different kind of tracks in the snow. These are all nouns. With different kinds of derivations, the number of nouns, verbs and adjectives denoting snow, ice, freezing, and melting may easily amount to 1,000 lexemes. By analysing this kind of terminology, we can learn much about snow and ice conditions in the Arctic and living conditions for animals and human beings.

Arctic climate change discourse: the contrasting politics of research agendas in the West and Russia

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Speaking of Corporate Social Responsibility

“…1 Similarly, Magga (2006) As shown in the above example, English and French mandatorily require speakers to put "will" or a future tense ("fera" in French) in the sentence describing tomorrow's situation, while German and 2 Copley (2009) offers a detailed analysis of the difference in obligatory FTR between English and German. Copley demonstrates that in English, "futurates" (sentences about future events with no FTR) can only be used to convey information about planned/ scheduled/ habitual events, or events which arise from law-like properties of the world.…”

Conceptualising resilience in Norwegian Sámi reindeer pastoralism

“…The characteristic flexibility of Sámi institutions -for example, the manner in which herds might be combined or separated according to variable conditions, or individual herders might move from one working group to another as required -constitute them as adaptive, relative to rapidly changing and unpredictable material environments. Resilience here also involves dimensions of human learning, entrainment and pedagogy -including particularly the transmission and development of complex technical language (Eira et al, 2013;Magga, 2006), but also less formalised aspects of experience and memory: herds, herders and siidas that have experienced and recovered from shocks or extreme events may, for example, be better equipped to deal with similar events in the future (Mathiesen et al, 2013). Sustaining these factors depends on processes of knowledge development and dissemination, training, education and intergenerational transmission -brought together under the heading of 'traditional knowledge', and its relationship to other forms of knowledge.…”