#veps

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

I know right!

There are also some dialects of the Karelian language that have meil (when it should be meilä but it gets shortened)

Veps (vepsä)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 1,600

Recognized minority language: Karelia (Russia)

Language of diaspora: Belarus, Estonia, Ukraine

Script: Latin, 29 letters

Grammatical cases: 23

Linguistic typology: agglutinative, SVO

Language family: Uralic, Finnic, Northern Finnic

Number of dialects: 3 main groups

History

1932 - first book in Veps

1937 - minority assimilation policy

1989 - beginning of revival efforts

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a b c č d e f g h i j k l m n o p r s š z ž t u v ü ä ö '.

The apostrophe is used to show the palatalization of the preceding sound.

Grammar

Nouns have no gender, two numbers (singular and plural), and 23 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, partitive, inessive, illative, elative, adessive, allative, ablative, approximative I, approximative II, egressive, terminative I, terminative II, terminative III, additive I, additive II, essive-instructive, translative, abessive, comitative, and prolative).

Nouns have four principal parts from which all case endings are derived: nominative singular, partitive singular, genitive singular, and illative singular.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood (conditional, imperative, indicative, and potential), person, and number. There is also a connegative form and a special reflexive conjugation with middle-passive voice semantics.

Dialects

There are three main dialect groups: Northern, Central, and Southern.