Language interference

[pne]

Fun when languages interfere… while I was practising Klingon flashcards, the word 'IrneH (maternal uncle—mother’s brother) came up, and my initial instinct was to read it [ɪɴnɛχ]: interpreting the sequence rn as in Inuktitut! (Where the r here stands for a uvular nasal.)

For what it’s worth, I think that in Greenlandic rn is [ɴː]: it may be the only case where the first consonant did not assimilate completely to the second one, but instead the uvular-ness of the /ʁ/ “survived” and was carried over onto the nasal.

The confusion was aided, no doubt, by my knowledge of the Inuktitut word irniq “son”, which starts very similarly to the Klingon word. (Greenlandic spelling would be erneq.)

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In other Inuktitut-related news, it’s always fun to see a bit of Greenlandic and understand it based on the bit of Inuktitut I know so far: recognising the cognates and undoing the sound changes.

Latest example: the Greenland Language Secretariat Oqaasileriffik, which I understood as Uqausilirivik (uqausilirivvik, uqausiliribvik, depending on dialect): uqaq- “speak” + -siq (something like “abstract quality of; -ness”, I think) = “speech” + -liri (something like “to deal with something professionally”, I think) = “linguistics”(?) + -(b/v)vik “place where something is done”—so something along the lines of “linguistics institute”?

Hm, looking it up on Uqailaut, I see that it’s probably -usiq “custom, way, habit” in the middle, not just -siq. And uqausiq is indeed “speech” or “language”.

Anyway, the Greenlandic derives from this straightforwardly by converting the diphthong au into the long vowel aa, spelling u and i as o and e, respectively, before the uvular consonants q and r, and turning geminative (voiced) fricatives into voiceless geminates, which in the case of *vv --> ff is marked in the spelling. (I suppose because the letter f happened to there in the Latin alphabet.)

Comments

[pseudomonas]

I'm trying to imagine/reproduce a uvular nasal. I'm tempted to hypothesize that the phoneme was borrowed into Inuktitut from Pinniped.

[pne]

I'm trying to imagine/reproduce a uvular nasal.

To me, it sounds much like a velar nasal ("ng"), except further back... much like a uvular stop [q] sounds much like a velar stop [k] to me.

[pseudomonas]

Yes, but as the ŋ goes further back, it starts turning into a walrus noise.

[pne]

Well, the Inuit *do* live around walruses....

[pthalo]

how are you going about learning Inuktitut? Do you know of any good online resources?

[pne]

There's Inuktitut Tusaalanga ("Let me listen to Inuktitut!").

I'm relying mostly on photocopies I found of some language courses and a grammar, though.

What I really miss, though, is a dictionary - but I'm not sure whether there are any good Inuktitut dictionaries.

I do have one, which was even republished fairly recently, but it's a reprint of a really old one, meaning that the spelling is completely unstandardised, and not phonemic. So it's hard to guess what a given word is pronounced as.

And there's Spalding, which has an online version, but it's in one direction only. Still, perhaps I should consider getting a copy of the printed version - I see just now that the web page includes a source for obtaining the book.

I also ordered a copy of Inuktitut Essentials: A Phrasebook a while ago, but am not sure it's a great resource for learning the language -- see my review of the book from August.

I think a problem is that a polysynthetic language such as Inuktitut is not really suited to picking it up from a phrasebook; it's not as easy to take a stock of sentences and slot in the thing you want to talk about, or rather, that's possibly but doesn't tell you a lot about the language outside of those phrases.

[pthalo]

Neat, thanks. I'll check out those links.

Wikipedia (and to some small extent, wiktionary), might be a good source for getting various nouns.

[pne]

I think the kind of book you'd really need for Inuktitut is one that teaches you about the common suffixes - not just brief lists with a basic meaning for each one, such as I've found occasionally, but one that goes into detail, with multiple examples of each so that you can get a flavour of what, exactly, each one means.

Not to mention that they'd also need to teach you how the suffix changes shape depending on what's in front of it! That's something that the lists usually don't give, but it's important to know whether, say, the suffix deletes a preceding consonant, modifies the preceding consonant, and/or modifies its own first consonant!

There are even homophonous suffixes which differ in how they change themselves and/or what's in front of them in some cases but are identical in shape in other cases; you can't just tell from the shape of the suffix how it's going to react in different places.

[pthalo]

I agree. And that would be really interesting to read as well, or at least I think so.

It would also be good to have a searchable corpus, where you can search for individual morphemes, not just words.

[pne]

It would also be good to have a searchable corpus, where you can search for individual morphemes, not just words.

Well, the Nunavut Hansard is a bilingual corpus (English, Inuktitut), though it might not be the most exciting of material.

InuktitutComputing.com also made available an aligned version, where the Inuktitut and English sentences were matched one to the other, as far as possible - and you can search their corpus.

That only goes by strings, though, I think, so searching for (say) -tuq- would not find the -juq- allomorph, and vice versa.

Here's an example search (for "*&*", i.e. all words that have an ampersand in them, the common typewriter representation of the letter ł, pronounced [ɬ]).