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As some of you may know, I'm writing a Water Tribe Zuko AU and i recently posted the first part on ao3

For the second part that I have now started to write, we have interactions between Zuko, Sokka and Katara. With this, I want to show some kind of culture and language differences since the Water Tribe is based on Inuits and the Fire Nation is based on the Chinese (i think).

For the Water Tribe, I have references to Greenlandic and Alaskan Inuit cultures and Kalaallisut (Greenlandic language) as the language used for certain words by the Tribe people.

I think I'll be using mandarin Chinese since that's the one I speak (a little) so it'd be easier for me if I did that.

This does mean words like "mum" or "dad" or even "Gran Gran" will be changed to the Kalaallisut equivalent words to thus reinforce the language differences. (In dialogue only i think tho)

And obviously the same for Zuko and Iroh but with Chinese.

#leo rambles #ao3 #atla #zuko doesn't hunt the avatar #avatar the last airbender #atla zuko #uncle iroh #katara #sokka #inuit #chinese #ao3 fanfic #kalaallisut

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).

#linguistics #kalaallisut #greenlandic #slovenian #i will also say that german looks really good when not every noun and anything that dreams of being one is capitalised #and the typeface of the book is really pretty too #but i think i just kinda like old grammars .-.

City of Nuuk, Greenland, looking from Old Nuuk east across to the newer town, and in the background the hills of Quassussuaq (left) and Ukkisissat (right), also known as Lille Malene and Store Malene.

Nuuk means promontory / headland.

#greenland #greenlandic #kalaallisut

Today starts my journey of studying the Kalaallisut and Inuktitut languages. I am currently working on Inuktitut syllabics. I can sound out words slowly while using my notes as an aid, and I downloaded the Inuktitut iPhone keyboard. Below I (hopefully) wrote “Inuktitut” and “Nunavut.”

ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ

ᓄᓇᕗᑦ

If you have any resources or advice regarding Inuit languages, or if you are learning any as well, please reach out! I made a tumblr account for the first time just for this purpose lol

#inuktitut #language learning #greenlandic #kalaallisut

this post is meant to be a directory of every resource I come across for Greenlandic, specifically Kalaallisut or West Greenlandic. it will be a continuous work in progress so thank you for your patience! if you have any issues or things to add, please reply to this post!

info

arctic languages: an awakening [pdf]

glottolog

introduction by @ayearinlanguage

learning profile

omniglot

playlist of samples

the endangered languages project

wikipedia

world atlas of language structures

#o #greenlandic #langblr #greenlandic language #grønlandsk #kalaallisut #west greenlandic #greenlandic inuit

Discord - Inuit-Yupik-Unangan

Aluu, If you want to talk more about the Eskimo-Aleut languages and/or Greenlandic in more specific, you are heartily welcome to our discord server on Inuit-Yupik-Unangan. We have voice chats, practice channels, general discussions and we share resources, media and videos and experiences, and also native speakers that are willing to help you with your questions. If you are interested, please pay us a visit. :)

https://discord.gg/r3trTtM

#greenlandic #kalaallisut #eskimo #aleut #eskimo-aleut #inuit #yupik #unangan #inuit-yupik-unangan #eskaleut #discord #language #linguistics #learning #practice

Language facts I just made up #1: Inuits can distinguish 100+ liquors by their ice cubes

It’s an all-known fact that Inuit languages have around 100-400 different words for snow and ice. A new study conducted in 2017 by Ole Pjanknavn also confirmed suspicions about the cognitive reality of these distinctions. Not only do have Inuit peoples a more distinct perception of different forms, matters and kinds of ice and snow, they also process these finer senses in adjacent semantic realms. Meaning, in the experiments conducted, they were able to distinguish around 100 liquors just by the slight way they altered the ice cubes that swam in them for about 10 minutes. Some linguistics now see this as another evidence for linguistic relativity, i. e., Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the influence of a language on the cognition of its speaker. While Ole Pjanknavn and its co-author Birgitte Begriberikke urge caution, they also point out that these findings in fact do align to other results, showing that Inuit people often experience heavy losses in their active language production during snowfalls, thought to be due to the overpowering in processing all the different forms of snowflakes. MRI scans also showed in previous studies that when confronted by words like “ice tea” or “iced coffee”, Inuit people showed beyond average activity in the Wernicke’s area of the brain. The conductors of this study thought of it as a sign for a linguistic in-put overload because of the massive different associations when translating the words “ice tea” and “iced coffee” into their mother tongue.

#made up language facts #eskimo #inuit #inuktitut #kalaallisut #greenlandic #greenland #canada #alaska #words for snow

I FOUND A BOOK ON GREENLANDIC OUTSIDE OF THE INTERNET

#Greenlandic #Kalaallisut #I was legitimately agape when I found this

#kalaallisut

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