#greenlandic

[illustratus]

Midnight at the Coast of Greenland by Carl Rasmussen

[tinyuglyworld]

Greenlandic women in traditional wear

[folkfashion]

Greenlandic Inuit drumer, Greenland, by Guide To Greenland

[diemelusine]

Kaiser Franz Joseph Fjord, Northeast Greenland. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jerzystrzelecki

[specialagentartemis]

Native American Words in English

A series of common English words with Native language origins!

Kayak

Language of Origin: Eastern Inuit (Inuktitut or Greenlandic)

Place of Origin: Eastern Canada and Western Greenland

From Inuktitut or Greenlandic qayaq ᖃᔭᖅ "small boat" or "hunter's boat." Initially describing the small, narrow boat made of sealskins used by Inuit people in northern Canada and Greenland. Attested in 1719 in Danish (kajak), 1765 in German (Kajak), 1767 in English (kaiak). By the mid-1800s the spelling had settled as kayak and by 1931 the word had expanded to include boats made of synthetic materials in the same shape.

[deep-down-in-drowsy-town]

Yeah yeah Trump wanting to buy Greenland is funny and all, but did you know the island and its indigenous population have been fighting for independence and self-determination from the Denmark colonial force for half a century?

And that Greenlandic parents in Denmark, raising their kids in the Greenlandic language, often have their children taken away after “failing” a so-called “parent competency test?”

And that they are among the most threatened countries by climate change? And the only reason Trump wants to take Greenland is its rich mineral resources- the exploitation of which leads to more climate change?

And that there’s a really great documentary on all of this, and specifically the 70s rock band Sumé, who dared to sing in the kalaallisut language and accidentally kicked off a nationalist revolution?

Look beyond the headlines and hahafunnies, people. Support 🇬🇱, listen to its people, fight Trump and colonialism and climate change.

[creatreasurebox]

[ina-shumelim]

I’m sick so here’s grammar

As I am currently continuing last year’s trend of falling ill much more than I used to, I ended up trying once again to read Samuel Kleinschmidt’s 1851 grammar of Kalaallisut, that is, West Greenlandic (Grammatik der grönländischen sprache mit theilweisen einschluss des Labradordialects). In doing so I stumbled across the following note:

… the dual (zweiheitsform) is commonly used only if what is named or mentioned is to be labelled explicitly as twoness (zweiheit); wherever twoness is understood, — as, e.g., the twofold limbs of the human or animal body — the plural (mehrheitsform) is used quite pervasively. (Kleinschmidt, Grammatik, 1851: § 14; my awkward translation attempts to render the to modern eyes and ears curious language of the original.)

This was rather surprising to me because when I had encountered the dual as a nominal category before, it had often been as a vestige, reduced to those things appearing naturally as two. Thus in Akkadian (at least from the second millennium on) as well as in Ancient Greek where one would usually speak of their (two) eyes in the dual, while for two amphoras of the drink of choice (be it šikaru or woinos), the plural would likely have been preferred. This inclination of the dual towards twofold body parts seems to have lexicalised in many Arabic dialects in which some of these body parts form a plural looking remarkably like a “pseudo-dual”, while innovating a new dual suffix to express actual “twoness” (cf. Haim Blanc, Dual and Pseudo-Dual in the Arabic Dialects, 1970).

But, as Kleinschmidt rightfully points out, these naturally twofold objects do not actually require marking because their “twoness is understood”; from this perspective, dual marking makes sense especially for those items that could appear in any number, not just two. And we find a case similar to the one described for 19th century Kalaallisut in modern Slovenian: Nouns that typically appear in pairs tend to not take the dual here; in fact: “When these nouns are used in their dual form, a possible interpretation is that the two items are not the pair of body parts belonging to the same person” (Franc Marušič & Rok Žaucer, Dual in Slovenian, in The Oxford Handbook of Grammatical Number, 2021: 438). While in Slovenian, however, the word “two” requires the dual of whatever is counted, Kleinschmidt remarks: “Even with the numeral mardluk (two), which in itself is a dual, the plural is not uncommonly used for that very reason, e.g. inuit mardluk two people” (Kleinschmidt, ibd.). The Kalaallisut dual was already uncommon in the 19th century, and today it has fallen out of use in the central dialect completely, being limited to only the Northern dialects (cf. Michael Fortescue, West Greenlandic, 1984: 2.1.1.8).