Reindeer Lore - Language Log

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Yuletide is upon us, so it's time for some more reindeer talk.  The guest post below comes from Juha Janhunen, to whom I put the following questions:

Do any of the following ride reindeer?  Sami, Lapp, Evenks (or other Siberian people)

How long ago did the Sami, Lapp, Evenks (or other Siberian people) domesticate reindeer?

There's no price of admission to read this post, but a suggested donation, in the spirit of the season and in the tradition of this blog, is that you tell us how to say "reindeer" in your language and perhaps in a few other languages with which you are familiar.

There is a lot of literature on the domestication of reindeer. One of the authorities is (was) Sevian I. Veinshtein from Russia. One of his books is also available in English. The general opinion is that

(1) The reindeer was first domesticated in the Baikal-Sayan region as a pack animal some 2000-2500 years ago upon the model of horse breeding. The region is mountainous and forested, and the herds owned by individuals and families were very small. The Sayan reindeer is big in size. Among the candidates who may have domesticated the reindeer are the speakers of Proto-Samoyedic, a language spoken some 2000 years ago in the region. Proto-Samoyedic has a word for domesticated reindeer (*cëx). The same type of reindeer breeding is still practised by the local ethnic groups, which now speak forms of Taiga Sayan Turkic (Tuha, Dukha, Tofa, Soyot). Veinshtein did a lot of field work among these groups (he was a Russian Jew whose parents were exiled to the region).

(2)  Reindeer breeding was soon adopted also in the Middle Amur basin, where it was practised by the speakers of Proto-Ewenic (Northern Tungusic). From both the Sayan region (along the Yenisei), the Baikal region (along the Lena), and from the Amur (along its tributaries) reindeer breeding spread into the central parts of Siberia. We do not know when, but possibly quite early, reindeer was also ridden. Riding reindeer is today practised by the Ewenki and, to some extent, by the Ewen (Lamut).

(3) The next step was the expansion of reindeer breeding to the open tundra zone in Arctic Siberia, where the practise was adopted by the local populations, which gradually came to speak languages spreading from the south: Samoyedic, Tungusic and Turkic (Yakut-Dolgan), or also Kamchukotic (Koryak, Chukchee). In the tundra zone, the herds grew to very large proportions, with a single family owning up to some thousand reindeer. This was, however, a very recent development, which happened not earlier than during the last 500 years or so.

(4) It is unclear what connection the Saami reindeer culture has with its Siberian parallels. The tundra Saami (Northern Saami) also have large herds since a couple of centuries, and this is also reflected by the size of the their human population. The Saami do not ride the reindeer, but they do milk it, which is not common in Siberia.

[Thanks to Kristin Pearson, who gave a marvelous presentation on the Scytho-Siberian practice of ornamenting horses with antlers in my seminar yesterday afternoon.]

[Update 12/28/16; from Nimrod Chiat:

I've looked into the issue of 'reindeer' in Hebrew. Modern Hebrew lexicography is a bit strange, but I've checked both the go-to HE-HE dictionary (Even Shoshan), which says the translation is אַיַּל הַצָּפוֹן (ayyal ha'tsafon), and an excellent online dictionary (Rav Milim), which is based on the work of the work of one of our best (arguably the best) computational linguists (Prof. Yaacov Choueka), which says it is merely אַיַּל (ayyal), which is too general in my opinion (could refer to deer, moose etc.). We don't have any serious etymological dictionaries for Modern Hebrew yet, but ayyal is a biblical word (e.g. Deuteronomy 14:5 — https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/deu/14/1/t_conc_167005), which is thought to have been ultimately derived (according to Even Shoshan) from the Akkadian ayalu, referring in general to any organism of the genus Cervidae known to the ancient Mesopotamians. Ha'tsafon simply means 'of the north,' and is also a biblical word (Genesis 28:14 — https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/gen/28/14/t_conc_28014). Even Shoshan suggests the ultimate derivation as being the Ugaritic 'sfn'.]

December 8, 2016 @ 9:08 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Animal behavior, Awesomeness, Language and culture

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