A new book delivery...
A very exciting delivery through the post today: The Language of the Inuit by Louis-Jacques Dorais.
From the back cover:“The culmination of forty years of research, The Language of the Inuit maps the geographical distribution and linguistic differences between the Eskaleut and Inuit languages and dialects.”
I’ll definitely review this in a later post. For now I’d just to point out the interesting use of Canadian Inuit syllabic text on the front cover, which reads (symbol by symbol):Â
i-nu-i-tÂ
u-qa-u-si-ngi-t
Meaning of course, “The Language of the Inuit”, or as Dorais describes it: “what the Inuit use for speaking”.Â
In Greenlandic, as I discussed under the word oqaaseq in Text Lesson 4, the equivalent would be inuit oqaasii. Note that u to o before r/q, and a+u to aa, are regular sound changes in Greenlandic, so the word is transparently very similar. As Dorais’ translation suggests, the word oqaaseq word (base form of oqaasii) can be broken down further into oqar- (to speak) and -useq (means of doing).
