#kamasin

I know this might not look too flashy, but this might be my favourite stamp sheet. These Estonian stamps are a language tree of the Uralic languages.

Going anti-clockwise from the bottom middle stamp, we have:

The Samoyedic Languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkup, and Kamasin

The Ugric Languages: Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi

The Permic Languages: Komi and Udmurt

The Mari and Mordvinic (Erzya and Moksha) Languages

The Sami Languages (Nortern, Southern, Skolt, Inari, Lule, Ume, Pite, Ter and Kildin Sami)

The Baltic-Finnic Languages: Veps, Karelian, Izhorian, Livonian, Finnish, Estonian and Votic

Languages in brackets weren't mentioned in the stamp, but I thought I'd elaborate anyway

Not so long ago, the last representative of the Kamasin people, the Sayan Samoyeds of the Kan River basin, died. The nationality is quite ancient: ethnographer Alexey Maloletko wrote that only the flowering of the culture of the Samoyeds occurred in the V century of our era.

According to historian Georgy Listvin, the Kamasins lived in a remote area, thus they managed to stay in isolation for a long time. The scientist claims that the Kamasins were one of the first to domesticate deer — the basis of their nomadic economy.

The Kamasin people mainly rode deer in the taiga, also hunted and transported goods. Initially, the indigenous people spoke the same language, but in the XVIII–XIX centuries they were divided into taiga and steppe. The first preserved the culture and continued to live according to the traditions of their ancestors. The latter took up farming, merged with the Russians and Khakas and lost their ethnic identity.

Listvin claims that as an ethnic group he disappeared in the middle of the XX century. The last native speaker of the language, Claudia Zakharovna Plotnikova, died in 1989, and in the 2010 census, only two people called themselves Kamasins.