Etymology of Greenlandic âTulukâ- an alternative hypothesis
So a little while ago I posted this extract from a Greenlandic dictionary tool (Qimawin), which purported to show the etymology of the Greenlandic word tuluk Englishman, British person:
The Danish text says: âThe word is generally assumed to be from English âdo you lookâ, which Greenlanders accordingly may appear to have heard especially often on board English ships.â
Now, the trouble is that I thought about this some more and didnât really buy it. I mean, âdo you lookâ (and much less âdo lookâ), are not really typical English phrases, and I canât think of a good reason why they would be used so much on board English ships that Greenlanders there (travelling for what reason, where?) would have assumed that this phrase was a suitable one to apply to the whole British people.  So while in discussion on the Inuit/Yupik/Aleut Discord forum I came up with a rather flippant solution - maybe one of these ships had a âCaptain Tullockâ or some such.
On a whim, I then searched for him, and blow me, he actually existed:
OK, not so fast though. This guy doesnât seem to be in the right part of the world. But then Tullock appears to be a variant spelling of Tulloch, which is a Scots name, and Scotland is as close to Greenland as you can get. So hereâs another Captain Tulloch from the right part of the world:
OK, this is getting interesting. Is Tulloch a common name up in the North of Scotland? Yes it is, here in descending order are where the most Tullochs are found on a sample genealogy website:
So a hefty number from Shetland and Orkney. So where next? Well it turns out there is a very old connection between the whaling industry and the people of Shetland and Orkney. Â Commercial whaling started from the UK in various locations from 1600, and many whaling ships (from Hull, Dundee, Peterhead or other locations) would stop off in Shetland and Orkney en route to pick up additional hands, presumably due to lower cost.
This fascinating article: The fiddle at sea: tradition and innovation among Shetland musicians in the whaling industry goes into some detail on the Shetland connection:
The Arctic whaling industry began in the early 1700s when ships started travelling to the Davis Straits off the Greenland coast in order to hunt down the whales. Leaving in the spring, a whaling season tended to last between four and five months. Greenland was the centre for the industry in the late 1700s, after which time attention was drawn to areas further west such as Hudson Bay and the Bering Straits. Figure 5 is a map showing the routes taken by ships employed in the industry. In 1851 American whalers introduced the practice of âwinteringâ. Vessels became frozen into the ice and the crew members were forced to live off the land. This required them to depend on the Inuit for food and clothing, and trading became established, which resulted in interdependence between indigenous populations and the whalers.
The article also speculates on the importance of the Shetland fiddle on these long journeys:
Due to its portability, it was often taken aboard sailing ships and other vessels for musical entertainment. The necessity of music among whalers was described by David Proctor as follows:
âThe men who undertook expeditions to Polar regions were perhaps those who needed music most, in order to maintain their morale during the long dark hours of winter when their ships were caught in the ice or they were living in huts, separated by vast distances from their homelands. This was especially true in those periods when wireless communication and aircraft, that might bring relief, did not exist.â
âEach Greenland ship used to carry a fiddler, sometimes a Southerner, sometimes a Shetlander, to play to the men while at work to enliven them. And sometimes the fiddlers from several ships would meet and try their skill. And I think I have heard of a Shetland fiddler competing with the Dutch from a buss or ship. No wonder that tunes are so abundant. Several of them are fairy tunes, and are likely very old; many are of Norse origin and many Scotch; and many of them must have been learned from the sources indicated above. There is even a Yaki, i.e. Eskimo tune.â
âThe influence of the fiddle was not only confined to crew members working aboard whaling ships, but extended to the indigenous populations in Arctic Alaska, Canada, and Greenland with whom whalers came into contact. Dan Worrall noted that anthropologists and musicologists of the early twentieth century âremarked upon the frequent use of fiddles, concertinas, and accordions by Inuit and Aleut people, as well as upon the proportion of European and American dance music that they playedâ.â
One Shetland tune preserved to this day is fitting called âDa Merry Boys oâ Greenlandâ:
So where does this involve the Tullochs? Well, we can tell from old records which ships went for whale and seal to Greenland, like this ship log from the Dundee registered âErikâ in 1881:
And who do we find in the crew list itself?:
Not just one, but two Tullochs (John and William), both from Bressay in Shetland.
Now, these records would appear to be too late to prove an etymology, as Greenlandic tuluk for British person already appears to be established in Samuel Kleinschmidtâs Den GrĂžnlandske Ordbog of 1871:
And not only that, but it also appeared in Otto Fabriciusâ Den GrĂžnlandske Ordbog of 1804 (at least in the plural form TulluĂŻt (modern Tuluit):
So the next major Greenlandic dictionary before that is Danish missionary Poul Egedeâs Dictionarium grönlandico-danico-latinum of 1750:
There is no reference for tuluk. Now, this doesnât prove that the word wasnât in use at this time, because the dictionary might not be comprehensive, but since the heyday of the British whaling trade near Greenland was the 1700s, it may well have taken some time for enough visits to be made before the native Greenlanders saw enough Brits - to distinguish them from Danish colonists who had only started arriving in the 1720s (in search of the lost Norse colonies - thatâs another story) - to give them a distinct name. But they clearly did have a distinct name by 1804 at least, when tuluk/tuluit formally entered the dictionary.
British whaling ships from Hull, Dundee and elsewhere started plying their trade in the waters near Greenland by the 1700s.
These ships took on many people from Shetland and Orkney en route to Greenland.
Shetland fiddlers would have been welcome and memorable shipmates, bringing a popular and portable form of entertainment for all.
Many of these Shetlanders would have been of the Tulloch family name, as the 1881 records show.
Tulloch is originally a Scots Gaelic name, meaning hillock. It would be pronounced /âtulÉx/ and a similar pronunciation may well have been used by non-Gaelic Scottish shipmates from Dundee; and possibly Northern England shipmates from Hull may have been more like /tÊlÉk/. Iâm not sure what the Shetlanders of the time would have said - possibly there may have been a Norn language influence to pronunciation. Either way, the closest analogue in Greenlandic pronunciation to either would be tuluk (Greenlandic does not allow final fricatives). Nouns ending in -k form their plurals in -it, hence tuluit plural. (NB Tuluit Nunaat - the country of the British = UK, England)
The whaling ships clearly had enough contact with native Greenlanders to register as a different form of foreigner than the Danes (who became Qallunaat:Â those with big eyebrows, a generic eastern Inuit term for âWhite Europeanâ, which may have already been established at the earlier Norse contact)
Maybe - and this is clearly a much higher underpant-gnome level of speculation - the Greenlanders who made contact were very taken with the fiddlersâ music, and possibly they kept hearing the crewmates shout âTulloch, another tune!â, that they eventually assumed âtulukâ was a form of address among these seafaring folk, and internalised it into their vocabulary.
Any thoughts at all are welcome.Â
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