Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Native languages of North-Eastern North America

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Monday, March 19, 2007, 15:15
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