Ossetian Language

Surprise Sarmatian post! Which means I'm procrastinating and will be getting back to work immediately after posting this...

I recently had a conversation with someone which prompted me to try again to find internet sources for listening to or learning bits of the Ossetian language. The Ossetian language is a direct descendant of the Scytho-Sarmatian languages with the Alanian language as the bridge between them. It's the only living member of the Northeast Iranian language group, though modified through proximity to Caucasian languages. The three dialects are the extant Dagor–spoken in western North Ossetia, Iron–spoken elsewhere in Ossetia and the standard for the written language, and the now-extinct Jász language–which was spoken in Central Hungary from the 12th through 15th? centuries. The living full languages closest to Ossetian are Pashto and Yaghnobi in the Southeastern Iranian language group, spoken in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, respectively.

I had more success finding sources this time (as in I had success at all). Quite a bit of it is in Russian, so those of us who don't speak it are at a severe disadvantage. But here are the links I've found:
http://ossetian.free.fr/
http://ossetic-studies.org/en/links
Here's a video of a man speaking Ossetian, but the description says he shifts into Georgian sometimes and I don't know which is which.
And the Wikipedia page actually has quite a bit on phonetics and grammer lifted from the research of Vasily Abaev, though I can't understand the phonetics table.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossetic_language
What I would really like, though, is audio tracks accompanied by the letters and a discussion in English (French is fine too). If any of you know of a site or audiobook or anything like that, please let me know.

The first link is the closest I've found to that. No audio, but it has the words written in English phonetics along with the Cyrilic. I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation without audio to reference, but it's at least better than nothing. And as for emphasis, I only know from that Abaev says the difference between "a ___" and "the ___" in Ossetian is the emphasis–the former puts the emphasis on the second syllable, the latter the first.

I'm thinking it might be fun to incorporate some of these while at events–especially if in a zone where "period" is required...which I can't go in yet because I don't have a full period kit. Not enough time or money to put together at the moment. :/
Some that SCAdians might be familiar enough with, or you may use often enough for frequent companions to easily learn are below. The format is English word- Ossetian written alphabet- English phonetic pronunciation. All are from ossetian.free.fr.
Hello                        Салам                 salam
     SCAdians may recognize this because it sounds like (or at least very similar to) the Arabic word for "peace", used in a similar way. Think "peace be upon you/and upon you peace".
How are you            Куыд цæрyт?     Kwyd tsærut?
Goodbye(1)             Фæндараст         fændarast
Goodbye(2)             хорзæй баззай    horzæï bazzaï
     I'm not sure what the difference is.
Please                      дæ хорзæхæй     dæ horzæhæï
Thanks (so much)     (стыр) бузныг    (styr) buznyg
Yes                          о                          o
No                           нæ, нæы             næ, næy
I am sorry                ныххатыр кæн    nyhhatyr kæn
Excuse me               бахатыр кæн       bahatyr kæn

No Two Truths and a Lie This Year

Alas, I'm still too busy. Fortunately, it's been the "getting things done" kind of busy as opposed to last semester's "running around in circles not advancing my career" kind of busy.I missed making a post in March (I was writing a ton of grants to fund research trips to Europe and Asia later this year) and I don't want to leave you guys hanging, so I'll be doing a quick, small post every Monday this month. I haven't had time to do any Sarmatian-specific research, so these will be about something I'm already familiar with- animals. Each Monday, I'm going to post information about an extreme animal that shared the steppes and its waterways with the Sarmatians. I've talked a lot about the Sarmatians, but not so much about the environment in which they lived, and context is good. So this will be a step (albeit a sensationalist one) toward doing that.

Jász Linkdump

I mentioned the Jász in a previous post (I had used the descriptor Jassic, but have been told that's an Anglicized version, so I won't be using it again.). There's a Jász man named Attila Fábián Rigó on facebook who posts a lot of good historic information. I recommend following him and browsing through his photo albums. :) He and a friend have done some amazing recreations of pieces from the Golden Deer of Eurasia book which I at first mistook for the real things. They exhibited them at the Jász World Meeting last summer. He's an administrator of a genetic survey called the Ossetian DNA Project (his section is the Hungarian Jászság DNA Project). It's in progress, so there isn't a lot of explanation of the results up on the web yet, but keep your eye on it if it peaks your interest. So if you want to know more about the Jász, here's a linkdump he sent me for you to browse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asii 
http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/70_Dateline/alan_dateline_En.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangju
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asud  
http://www.jatland.com/home/Ahlawat
http://www.jaszmuzeum.hu/

Ask the readers: Animals

One year ago today, we adopted a cat from the local shelter. Tali'Miller-Camp vas Iowa (yes, that is a Mass Effect reference) is a pet- an animal kept for pleasure. But unless your SCA persona is upper class and probably late period, the animals s/he could have kept are unlikely to have been purely pets- they would have had some sort of practical use.

What kind of animals did your persona (or their culture if not them, specifically) keep? What breed? Is it or breeds descended from it still around today? What were they used for?


Unlike my other "Ask the Readers", I can actually answer this one! Collectively, Sarmatians kept horses, cattle, sheep, and dogs.

Apologies for the lack of centering (it's at the top).
Turns out I don't have an image of this on my computer.
I'll replace it with a better version when I get home.

The sheep and cattle they kept for food, wool, and leather. Scythians did too and you can see an example of Scythians making a sheepskin shirt on a beautifully intricate torse made by the Greeks.

Mongolian horse and rider
Image source: http://www.studiomme.com

Their horses were their livelihood. They were meat, clothing, milk, wealth, transportation, and mounts all rolled into one. They would have been short and stocky compared to the horses we're accustomed to seeing in the West today- probably a lot like horses kept by modern steppe nomads.

Kazbegi type Georgian Mountain Dog
Image source: http://kaukasus.blogspot.com

Their dogs were big molossers who served as livestock guardians and war dogs. The dogs of the Sarmatians sensu stricto were Sarmatian Mastiffs. The breed kept by the Alans was the Alaunt (which would have been partially descended from the Sarmatian Mastiff. The word 'Alaunt' later came to be used for a general phenotype, rather than a particular breed, in Europe. The original Alaunt probably looked similar to the Kazbegi type Georgian Mountain Dog, which is probably a descendant.

(References will be when I get home. Sorry!)

Blog news (good this time!)

Hello everyone! Many, many apologies for the extended hiatus. GPA comes before SCA, as they say, though in my case it was partially school and partially career stuff eating up all my time and energy. But now the semester's over, I've had time to rest and recuperate, and I'm able to doing SCA stuff again. I'm expecting to go back to the once a month frequency I kept before. I don't foresee doing any long posts anytime soon because I do still have quite a bit of paleo research and writing to do.
I'm heading to Thailand for some of that research in a couple days. I may have limited internet access until mid-January, so I've already written and scheduled the first one of the new year to come out while I'm away. See you on the 10th!

Still too much mundane stuff to deal with

  HIATUS IS CONTINUING TO LATE DECEMBER
  Mid-November has come and gone and I still haven't posted. If you don't care why, you can stop reading or skip to the end (there's nothing Sarmatian or SCA in this post). If you want an explanation, here it is:

   I've unfortunately had more work than I expected when I set the date. I've had to reformat and resubmit a paper several times now for different journals. I was expecting it to be in review all semester, but the first journal rejected it straightaway as "nothing against the paper, but it's inappropriate for this journal; submit it to a paleo journal instead". Which was crap because that journal publishes paleo papers all the time. One of its top three downloads last year was a paleo paper on a group with no living relatives. It's published a description of a single specimen in a group with no living relatives. Unfortunately, there's a not-insignificant portion of neontologists who have it out for paleontology, and I suspect the editor who was assigned to my paper may be one of them.
  The second was also rejected as not right for the journal's focus, but that time it made sense. I really only tried there because I was in the middle of finishing things before two close deadlines and it didn't require a ton of reformatting.
  The third was sent back by a technical editor because I missed a bunch of the formatting changes, so I'm currently working on that so I can resubmit it to that journal. At the same time, I'm playing massive catch-up on both the grading I've gotten behind on and my gross anatomy class. My grade is uncomfortably low because it's not the sort of class you can take and not spend oodles of time studying- but unfortunately I've had to spend all my time writing a massive grant proposal so I can go do research in Europe and Asia next summer and fall, reformatting and resubmitting the paper so I can tell the grant committee that no, really, I am trying to get a paper published on the work I did with the money you gave me before, and doing research and making a poster for the academic meeting a month ago. Which left me with no time to do anything else. With rare exception, I even cut out all the things I do for fun at the beginning of the semester- no dance class, no video games, no arts & crafts, no SCA, no birding, no Pathfinder... It's royally sucked and I'll be glad when it's over...so long as I can pull my grade up in anatomy.

  My anatomy final is December 19th. I'll probably want to take a few days to rest and recuperate before diving into SCA research. We aren't going anywhere or having visitors for Christmas, so that won't keep me from doing research. But it does take quite some time to research and write each of these posts. My goal is to get one out before the end of the year. If I'm feeling motivated, maybe it will be two.

Not Dead Fred

I'm still here. I've been kept very busy with mundane research and prepping for a hafla that happened this past weekend. I meant to write posts during that time and just haven't had the time/inclination to complete one. I've tried a couple times and haven't felt like the result is post-worthy. Honestly, it's a bit more stress than I want to deal with right now. I'd really like to get even a small something out, but I really need to finish these two paleo papers posthaste. So this is a belated hiatus announcement. Unless the Sarmatian bug bites me between now and then, expect me to be back in late August.
EDIT: Make that mid-November. I'm going to be in a constant state of busy and stressed until then.