Talk:Chukchi language

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[edit] Is there a problem?

Russian Federation needs to be capitalized, in case someone was confused. Kazak 03:01, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Discrepancies in number of speakers

Chukchi people article states that there are 15 000 Chukchi; this article says there are 10 000 speakers. Which one is wrong? Or does not every Chukcha speak Chukchi language?.. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Alexander Iwaschkin (talk • contribs) 14:43, 1 March 2007 (UTC).

You're correct: not all Chukchi people speak Chukchi. While 15000 is about the right figure for the number of people registered as ethnic Chukchis, I suspect that 10000 speakers is wildly optimistic. But I'm not aware of any accurate count. The census figures overestimate too, since the question about native language can also be interpreted to mean "what is the language of your ethnic group". Ngio 20:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I have a book here called Languages of the World from 2002 that gives 12,000 speakers for the language. Shall we change it to that? Here's the page on Chukchi for future reference:
Chukchi is spoken in northeasternmost Siberia, principally in the Chukchi National District, whose capital is Anadyr. With only 12,000 speakers, it is nonetheless the most important member of the Paleo-Asiatic family of languages. Chukchi is written in the Cyrillic alphabet with the additional letters (these are already in the article so I won't bother trying to find them). A curious feature of the language is that the letter k is pronounced k by men but ts by women, while the combination rk is pronounced rk by men but tsts by women. Thus thu Chukchi word for "walrus" is pronounced kyrky by men but tsytstsy by women.
Mithridates 16:12, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, the Russian census is online (see especially tables 4-3 and 4-4), available in English as spreadsheets. I've fixed the numbers.
The issue of overestimation of the number of speakers still stands. The wording of the question is pretty clear, but e.g. in the case of Kerek language it reports 15 speakers, whereas Kerek is almost certainly extinct (and was nearly extinct in 2002 as well). I suspect that people are exaggerating their language abilities to support their ethnic group. -- Ngio 06:27, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Translation from ru:

I've created a new section by translating section Распространённость from ru:Чукотский язык, as per this request. Note that a single source of contradiction may have been introduced: whereas the en: article, prior to this addition, used to claim that less than half Chukchis speak their own language, the ru: version claims to contrary. If you know for sure the en: version is correct, feel free to revert the appropriate phrases. I'm not an expert on this subject at all, nor have any opinion, but have merely translated the ru: info. IgorSF 08:51, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Upon a further inspection, it seems that the en: version referred to a more recent census, which can explain the difference. I've self-reverted the specific part claiming otherwise. IgorSF 08:53, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

In addition, I've translated the Внешнее влияние section, which included a bit of linguistic terms, some of which may be improper due to literal translation from Russian. Not being a linguist, I wouldn't know, so if you are, feel free to correct :) IgorSF 09:04, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

The Russian version seems to be a bit strange in places, if I'm reading it correctly. For instance, the writing system part that I've been working on claims that Tenevil was the author of the pictographs found whereas I was taught that the pictographs were much older than Tenevil and that Tenevil made the first attempts to create a writing system for Chukchi as we know it today. I've left thus all mention of that out of the translation until I find some sources to back it up one way or another. Thanks by the way for translating this, too :) -Yupik 19:13, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
On the basis of an ancient Soviet popular science magazine I once came across in a sack intended for toilet paper (!?) I believe that Tenevil was the creator of the pictographs. There were some samples of these pictographs with notional translations, but on the basis of these I doubted very much that the pictographs were an encoding of language in such a way that other people familiar with the system would be able to decode them reliably, or at all... Furthermore it has never been claimed that the pictographs were known outside Tenevil's immediate family. I think they're really a just a curiosity like a hobbyist's constructed language, and I would suggest omitting any mention of them at all. -- Ngio 14:43, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cyrillic El with Hook

  • In the text it is claimed that this letter dates from the late 1980s. Is there any documentation of that? I was under the impression it was first used in Emel'janova and Nutekeu's 1996 textbook (the one I've just added an image from).
  • Since the "El With Hook" characters are so new in unicode, I doubt they are rendered on most people's computers. I saw somebody was experimenting with adding images, but apparently gave up. Should we worry about this, or should we just wait for unicode fonts to catch up with us?
-- Ngio 14:53, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Primer

Hi,

I was very pleased to see the image of the Chukchi textbook here. I absolutely love textbooks printed in Russia: they just say the name of the subject and the grade number on the cover and they are uniform in all schools. (At least that's the way it was in the Soviet times, when i was a schoolboy in Moscow.)

Anyway, I see that it's for the fifth grade. This is a little weird - i would expect that a primer would be used in the first grade. In Russian-language schools the first alphabet-learning book is called Букварь, and grammar textbooks for students that already learned the letters are called Русский язык X (Russian language X, where X is the grade number) all the way to graduation.

Now this book is called "Chukchi language 5" (in Chukchi). It can mean two things:

  1. Chukchi schools mostly teach in Russian and Chukchi language lessons begin only in the fifth grade - which probably also means that Chukchi children hardly learn it at all.
  2. This book is not a primer, in which case the title of the image should be fixed.

It would be great if anyone could clarify this. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 15:29, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

As you note, it's not called a primer or anything else on the book itself. Textbook is probably a better description. I'll change it here now, and then I'll change the name of the image once I work out how. I'm glad you enjoyed the image: A Soviet-style Chukchi textbook is a pretty cool artifact! -- Ngio (talk) 15:54, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks!
Do you know whether there are books for earlier grades? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 16:25, 16 May 2008 (UTC)