Seredipity: Kamas

1 July 2025, by INEL-Webredaktion

Photo: Claudia Love via unsplash.com

• Since the death of her aunt, the last speaker of Kamas spoke Kamas only to God and to her cow.

• The Kamas people nomadized with their reindeer. After most of the reindeer died of disease around 1850, the Kamas settled down and released the remaining animals into the forests.

• The Kamas used to collect the tubers of wild lilies, boiled them, dried them and grinded them into flour. This lily flour was either added to cooked meat or used to cook a kind of porridge.

• The Kamas' hunters were very adept at imitating the calls of a male wild deer - the Altai-Maral. They used one meter long pipes made of cedar wood and produced sounds by inhaling, which required extreme lung power.

• The Kamas word for bear is urga-aba (great father, i.e. grandfather). This reflects a widespread taboo throughout Siberia against calling a bear by its “real” name. The Evenks also use amaːkaː (grandpa), while the Dolgans prefer the term ebekeː (grandma).

• The earliest record of spoken Kamassic is a copy of Kai Donner's wax cylinder from 1914 (archived at the University of Tartu).