Re: THEORY: Inuit

> Date:         Fri, 11 Jun 1999 09:43:16 -0400
> From: Brian Betty <bbetty@...>
> Lars Mathiesen wrote: "This is going by a grammar of West Greenlandic that
> I read half a year ago or so... so no guarantees."
>
> That is a pretty good description, at least by my understanding of Inuit
> [which is about as refined as yours, I would guess].
Thanks.

What I would love to find is a comparative historical treatment of the
whole group. It is fairly clear that a lot of simplification has been
happening not too long ago, at least in West Greenlandic, both in
phonology and inflection. OTOH, I suspect that the now opaque endings
used to be combinations of tense/case endings and agreement particles
--- perhaps never totally agglutinative, but close.

Another interesting thing about these languages, which might inspire
someone's conlang:

There is a strong similarity between the absolutive endings for nouns
and the third-person-absolutive-argument forms of verbs. That is,
between the endings of these pairs (a single word on each side):

        A dog           He hits
        My dog          I hit him/it
        His dog         He hits him/it

This even extends to personal pronouns: "Uvanga" (I) looks like the
root "uv-" (here) with the 1p intransitive verb ending. (But since you
don't find personal pronouns in the 'possessed' role, there aren't any
situations where you'd expect to find the transitive endings).

If it wasn't for the very strong distinction made in the suffix
system, this might tempt some to set up a common category for all
roots. Perhaps that could be made to work in a language without the
suffixes.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)