Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo - Alternative Religions ...

Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo - Title Page
tuvik, shoulders; tatdlíka, my arms; agssait, fingers or hand; to8o, death; to8usso8, dead; nigdlerto8,
cool; panerto8, dry; masagto8, wet; ûnarto8, hot; ingne8, fire. The apparent differences between these
two lists seem evidently to have arisen from mere misunderstanding, without any real variation between
the languages. On comparing, in the same manner, the rest of the lists of words from Behring Strait,
two-thirds or three-fourths of the words are found to be more or less Greenlandish. Moreover, taking into
consideration the manner in which travellers have been enabled to communicate with one tribe of
Eskimo, by interpreters taken from another, and that the difference between the Greenland p. 14 and the
Labrador is smaller than, for instance, between Swedish and Danish, one is induced to assume an affinity
of language among all the real Eskimo sufficient to allow mutual intercourse everywhere. On the other
hand, it cannot be denied that the language of the Eskimo to the west of the Mackenzie is considerably
different from that of the eastern tribes.
Taking it for granted that Greenlandish may be held to represent the Eskimo tongue in general, we shall
endeavour to give an idea of its remarkable construction. Its most striking general peculiarity is the
length of its words; and this, in fact, expresses its chief dissimilarity from all languages, except the
American. What in other tongues may demand a whole sentence, and even additional dependent
sentences, in Greenlandish may sometimes be expressed by a single verb. Consequently, Greenlandish
grammar has both to construct words and to fix them in the sentence. This construction is effected by the
help of additional elements or imperfect words, having no meaning by themselves, but expressive as
additions to the main word, with which they can be combined in varieties of number and order, every
combination altering or modifying the sense of the radical or adding a certain complexity of notions to it.
Composition is completed by flexion, and particularly by conjugation, which not only, as in several other
dialects, can make the verb include a pronoun as subject, but also as object, and in this way can form a
sentence by itself, whereby these additional elements may render the sentence compound, or even
include other sentences. The following abstract of Samuel Kleinschmidt's Greenlandish grammar will
give a sufficient idea of this process:
Writing and pronunciation.The language is written with the same letters as the German, only omitting
some, and with the addition of the following:
8, differing from k by its being formed in the remotest p. 15 part of the mouth, and sounding as something
between gh, rk, and rkr.
r , sounding like a very guttural German ch. [The letter r is sometimes, but not necessarily, marked with
an apostrophe, or headed by a comma, to make it sound like a very guttural German ch. {from the
errata}]
ss, like the French j.
ng and rng, nasal sounds.
The pronunciation of the vowels is often modified by the next consonants. The letter a is often heard as
in the English word at. The accents ´ ^ ~, which show whether the syllable is to be pronounced sharp,
long, or long combined with sharp, are of the greatest importance as to the sense of a word. Otherwise,
the letters have mostly the same power as in German and the Scandinavian tongues.
Greenlandish likes simplicity in its syllables, preferring those composed of one vowel and one consonant.
More than one consonant in a syllable is not allowed, if any harshness should arise. No word can end
with other consonants than 8, k, p, and t, nor begin with others than these, and m, n, and s. All the
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