Re: Native languages of North-Eastern North America

Hi!

Paul Bennett writes:
>...
> They're at http://wiki.frath.net/Talk:Finlaesk if anyone wants to take
> a look.
>...
Just noticed that you say Greenlandic uses progressive assimilation to
resolve conflicts in consonant clusters.  I doubt that.  I suppose you
are talking about the largest (and official?) language on Greenland,
West Greenlandic or Kalaallisut.  I think it allows much less clusters
that Canadian Inuktitut (and other Greenlandic languages), but still,
it also resolves them regressively:

    illu                                 ('iglu'/'house')
    inuk + tut                 > inuttut  (IIRC, simply means 'human')
    inuk + it + lu > **inuitlu > inuillu  ('and humans/men')
    Guuti + p + lu             > Guutillu ('and God' (ergative))
    Nuuk + mi                  > Nuummi   ('in Nuuk')

(The defails are more complicated, so you will not want to mention
them.  Sometimes the vowel becomes long and the endings are often
not simply, say, '-it' (as seen in 'inuk'+'-it').

    inuk + p       > inuup      (ergative of 'inuk', 'human/man')
    Nuuk + p       > Nuup       (ergative of 'Nuuk')
)

Anyway, maybe you had vowels in mind?  E.g. when -ai- is avoided, it
usually becomes -aa-:

    nuna                   'land'/'country'
    nuna + it > nunaat     'lands'/'countries'

But I don't know how the vowels behave in Non-Greenlandic Inuktitut.

**Henrik