He also identified three dialects, speakers of which understood each other perfectly well: “eastern” (spoken along the Pacific coastline and in the valley of the Kamchatka River), “southern” (spoken around the town of Petropavlovsk) and “western” (spoken along the western coastline of Kamchatka).

Russian does not express any of these pieces of information on the verb, except the “one time only” meaning, which can in some cases be indicated by a special suffix: for example, compare čixat’ ‘sneeze’ vs. čixnut’ ‘sneeze once’ and glotat’ ‘swallow’ vs. glotnut’ ‘swallow once’.
This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional.

Thanks to Jonathan Bobaljik and Tatiana Degai for their assistance in working on this post!]. Евангелие от Луки на ительменском языке.

But before we consider those issues in detail, let’s briefly examine the history of the Itelmen people and their language. First records of Itelmen language were made by S.P.

Finally, the argument based on adaptability fails too, as all languages, including Itelmen are malleable. According to James Forsyth’s A History of the Peoples in Siberia, “like the other tribes of north-east Siberia, the Itelmen had no hereditary chiefs… lived in quite large villages surrounded by palisades as a protection against raids by neighboring clans… [and] used implements and weapons of bone and stone, knowing iron only from the rare objects which found their way to Kamchatka from Japan via the Kuril Islands”. In the latter, past tense verbs are formed by adding the past tense suffix -id and an ending encoding one of the six person/number combinations.

So why was there such a sharp reduction in the number of Itelmen and in the territory they occupy, as well as in the number of those who speak the indigenous language?
* A transitive verb in Itelmen has literally hundreds of distinct forms, as prefixes and suffixes are used to indicate not only whether the action is in the past, present, or future (e.g. McWhorter attributes the relative grammatical “simplicity” of Persian to the fact that, being the language of the Persian Empire, it has been imposed on several generations of non-native adult learners, as imperial languages tend to be.

So what prompted these ethnic Itelmen to abandon the language of their forefathers and switch to Russian? Vladimir Atlasov, who annexed Kamchatka and established military bases in the region, estimated in 1697 that there were about 20,000 ethnic Itelmens. Itelmen Language Facts: Itelmen is a language belonging to the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family traditionally spoken in the Kamchatka Peninsula. If you need to type in many different languages, the Q International Keyboard can help. For example, Itelmen verbal inflection is much more complex than Russian verbal inflection, but Russian nominal and adjectival inflections are in many ways more complex than those of Itelmen.