Almost thirty years ago, some forward looking teachers at Samisk
videregående skole og reindriftsskole teaching metal work and Northern
Sámi, decided to create a list of words used in Northern Sámi metal
work. After almost ten years this resulted in a dictionary database,
published as the book
"Mekanihkkársánit :
Mekanikerord = Mekaanisen alan sanasto = Mechanic's words" in
1999. The
story of this
work is available from the pen of Svein Lund, one of the leading
actors behind this effort. They even got the dictionary approved by
the Sámi Language Council as the recommended metal work words to use.
Fast forward twenty years, I came across this work when I recently
became interested in metal work, and started watching educational and
funny videos on the topic, like the ones from
mrpete222
and This
Old Tony. But they all talk English, but I wanted to know what
the tools and techniques they used were called in Norwegian. Trying
to track down a good dictionary from English to Norwegian, after much
searching, I came across the database of words created
almost thirty years ago, with translations into English, Norwegian,
Northern Sámi, Swedish and Finnish. This gave me a lot of the
Norwegian phrases I had been looking for. To make it easier for the
next person trying to track down a good Norwegian dictionary for the
metal worker, and because I knew the person behind the database from
my Skolelinux / Debian Edu days, I decided to ask if the database
could be released to the public without any usage limitations, in
other words as a Creative Commons licensed data set. And happily,
after consulting with the Sámi Parliament of Norway, the database is
now available with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license from
my gitlab
repository.
The dictionary entries look slightly different, depending on the
language in focus. This is the same entry in the different editions.
English
- lathe
dreiebenk (nb) várve, várvenbeaŋka, jorahanbeaŋka, vátnanbeaŋka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)
Norwegian
- dreiebenk
lathe (en) várve, várvenbeaŋka, jorahanbeaŋka,
vátnanbeaŋka (se) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)
(nb): sponskjærande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med
skjæreverktøy lausgjør spon frå eit roterande
arbetsstykke
Northern Sámi
- várve, várvenbeaŋka, jorahanbeaŋka, vátnanbeaŋka
dreiebenk (nb) lathe (en) svarv (sv) sorvi (fi)
(se): mašiidna mainna čuohppá vuolahasaid jorri
bargoávdnasis
(nb): sponskjærande bearbeidingsmaskin der ein med
skjæreverktøy lausgjør spon frå eit roterande
arbetsstykke
The database included term description in both Norwegian and
Northern Sámi, but not English. Because of this, the Northern Sámi
edition include both descriptions, the Norwegian edition include the
Norwegian description and the English edition lack a descripiton.
Once the database was available without any usage restrictions, and
armed with my experience in publishing books, I decided to publish a
Norwegian/English dictionary as a book using the database, to make the
data set available also on paper and as an ebook. Further into the
project, it occurred to me that I could just as easily make an English
dictionary, and talking to Svein and concluding that it was within
reach, I decided to make a Northern Sámi dictionary too.
Thus I suddenly find myself publishing a Northern Sámi dictionary,
even though I do not understand the language myself. I hope it will
be well received, and can help revive the impressive work done almost
thirty years ago to document the vocabulary of metal workers. If I
get some help, I might even extend it with some of the words I find
missing, like collet, rotary broach, carbide, knurler, arbor press and
others. But the first edition build from a lightly edited version of
the original database, with no new entries added. If you would like
to check it out, visit
my list of published
books and consider
buying
a paper or ebook copy from lulu.com. The paper edition is only
available in hardcover to increase its durability in the workshop.
I am very happy to report that in the process, and thanks to help
from both Svein Lund and Børre Gaup who understand the language, the
docbook tools I use to create books, dblatex and docbook-xsl, now
include support for Northern Sámi. Before I started, these lacked the
needed locale settings for this language, but now the patches are
included upstream.
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
