A review of "A Grammar of Pite Saami" by Joshua Wilbur
This obscure publication actually has three
product pages on Amazon. My full review can be found on the first one. Pite
Saami is a Saami language spoken in the Swedish municipality of Arjeplog and
adjacent parts of Norway. The Saami, Sami or Lapps are native people in northern
Scandinavia and Finland, but today they are a minority group.
I never been to the Arjeplog area, but as far as I understand, this is “end of
the world” territory. Or maybe not, since Arjeplog has apparently become
something of a center for the international car industry – due to its harsh
winters, this is where car manufacturers want to test their vehicles for
durability! But that's another show…
As for Pite Saami, the language is almost extinct and only about 30 people
speak it fluently. This book is a detailed study of Pite Saami's grammar and is
therefore unsuitable for the general reader. If you are a linguist with an
interest in Uralic languages (or are they Ural-Altaic? Or Finno-Ugric? Or
Pan-Turanian?), this might be just what you have been looking for *all these
years*.
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