Re: FWD [OT but interesting] Arctic people seek common alphabet

Barbara Barrett scripsit:

> The 100,000 speakers of Inuktitut currently use three different alphabets
> - one based on the Roman one used for English, one on Cyrillic, and
> another representing Inuktitut syllables.
This seems pretty strange.  It's generally accepted that although
Inuktitut (spoken east of a line in Western Alaska, and consisting of
a chain of dialects where neighbors are mutually intelligible but
non-neighbors may not be) and Yupik (spoken west of the line, likewise
a chain of dialects) are closely related languages, they are quite
definitely distinct, as much so as Spanish and French roughly speaking.
The Cyrillic-users are in Russia (obviously) and are Yupik-speakers.
The problems with syllabic vs. Latin alphabet users, OTOH, are well
established.

The Ethnologue, which uses pretty exacting criteria for mutual intelligibility
(so they tend to see languages where others see dialects), recognizes
five Inuktitut languages (Greenlandic, Eastern Canadian, Western Canadian,
North Alaskan, Northwest Alaskan) and four Yupik languages (Central
Alaskan, Pacific Gulf, Central Siberian, and Naukan).  Yupik-speakers amount
to about 11,000; Inuktitut-speakers amount to about 66,000.

--
John Cowan   jcowan@reutershealth.com   http://www.reutershealth.com
    "Mr. Lane, if you ever wish anything that I can do all you will have
        to do will be to send me a telegram asking and it will be done."
    "Mr. Hearst, if you ever get a telegram from me asking you to do
        anything you can put the telegram down as a forgery."

Reply