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Re: Obscure languages

From:Frank George Valoczy <valoczy@...>
Date:Saturday, September 29, 2001, 21:13
On Sat, 29 Sep 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Frank Valoczy wrote: > >If you want, I can help you with learning Votian > >(Uralic/Finno-Ugric/Balto-Finnic; spoken by approx. 25 people in 5 > >villages [incl. Krakolye and Luzhitsy] in Leningrad Oblast, north of > >Ivangorod in Russia), youngest speaker is in his early 60s). > > Which means it's alot better of than Ingrian (Balto-Finnic, spoken in St > Petersburg) - the last I heard it had three native speakers, all over 60, > and that was three or four years ago. (Ingria is an old name pf the area > that St Petersburg lies in - once upon a time it was the Swdish province of > Ingermanland).
According to info I have, every speaker of Votian also speaks Ingrian. But Ingrian is a confusing term, as it is often used to refer to Ingrian Finnish [inkerin kieli] and to Izhorian [isurin kieli]. Izhorian is native to there, and have less speakers than Ingrian Finnish, which is a dialect of F. spoken by descendants of refugees.
> > BTW, is it still officially called Leningrad Oblast? That'd be pretty > remarkable ... >
AFAIK, yes.
> >Obviously I'm > >not a native speaker, but my knowledge of it is thorough enough that I > >could carry on a conversation with a Vote in the unlikely event that I > >were to meet one. However, I do use it occasionally in speaking with > >Estonians, sometimes with amusing results. > > How come you know Votian?
I ordered a book about Udmurt (Votyak), but received Ariste's "A Grammar of the Votic Language". I kept the book, put it aside for a while, then I picked it up and discovered that it is very interesting. I learned the contents of the book to the point where I know most of it by head. Then I acquired the available Jogopera-dialect dictionary and some other documents, and I am still in the process of assimilating it. My Votian is a bit mixed, using mostly Kattila dialect grammar and Jogopera dialect vocabulary...so in short, I know Votian because over the past four years, it is the only language which I have seriously studied.