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.
