Re: "The Fast Runner" and Inuktitut

At 7:55 PM -0600 3/9/03, Peter Clark wrote:
>        I watched "The Fast Runner" Friday night and thought that others might be
>interested in it. It's a film written, directed, and acted by Inuit,
>completely in Inuktitut. (It's also three hours long and not for the
>attention-span impaired.) I think what I really liked about it was the
>detailed look at the Inuit culture. If you watch the movie, I would suggest
>that you watch the first thirty minutes again, after you finish the movie,
>just so that you have a better idea what happened. The movie unceremoniously
>dumps you into Inuit culture, and there's very little exposition about what's
>going on and who is who.
I heard about the movie on NPR, and I've been wanting to see it ever since. My
understanding is that it is a retelling of a traditional Inuit story; that
might explain some of the lack of expository material for the characters and
the situation.

>        Does anyone have some sources on Inuktitut? I'm not really into polysynthetic
>languages, but after hearing it so much, my curiosity was piqued. I found a
>couple of web sites with the phonology and basic words, but little about the
>grammar.
Siberian Yupik Eskimo has a nice grammar written by Willem de Reuse and published by
the University of Utah Press. It's typologically very similar. Interesting
factoid: it's the only pre-contact language to be spoken in both the Old and
the New worlds, with speaker populations in Siberia (as its name suggests) and
on St. Lawrence Island, just off the Alaskan coast.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson