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This article is about the Eskimo-Aleut language. For the extinct North-Germanic language, see Greenlandic Norse.
The Greenlandic language is an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken by about 54,000 people in Greenland. It is closely related to the Inuit languages in Canada, such as Inuktitut. The main dialect Kalaallisut or West Greenlandic is the official language of the Greelandic autonomous territory since june 2009. Other dialects are East Greenlandic (tunumiit oraasiaat) and the Thule dialect Inuktun. Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language allowing the creation of long words by stringing together roots and suffixes. Its morphosyntactic alignment is ergative. Nouns are inflected for one of the 8 cases and for possession. Verbs are inflected for one of the 8 moods and for the number and person of its subject and object. Both nouns ad vebs have complex derivational morphology. The language is written in the latin script, and it underwent an extensive orthographic reform in 1973. It is an ongoing debate in linguistics whether Greenlandic has grammatical tense or not; several linguists regard the language as being esssentially tenseless. Another open question is whether the language has Noun incorporation or whether the processes that create complex predicates including nominal roots are rather derivational in nature. Basic wordorder in transitive clauses is Subject Object Verb.
[edit] HistoryThe Greenlandic language arrived in Greenland with the arrival of the Thule culture in the 13th century. It is unknown what languages were spoken by the earlier Saqqaq and Dorset cultures. The first descriptions of Greenlandic date to the 17th century and with the arrival of Danish missionaries in the early 18th century the elaboration of dictionaries and grammar description began in earnest. The first dictionary date to 1750 and the first grammar to 1760, both written by Paul Egede.[2] From the time of the Danish colonization of Greenland in the 18th century to the beginning of Greenlandic homerule in 1979 Greenlandic experience increasing pressure from the Danish language. Especially in the 1950'es Danish linguistic policies in Greenland were aimed at the replacement of Greenlandic with Danish in Greenlandic society. Especially significant has been the fact that all post primary education was conducted in Danish and that Danish was the language of government.[3] From 1851 to 1973 Greenlandic was written in a complicated orthography devised by the missionary linguist Samuel Kleinschmidt, but in 1973 a new orthography was introduced, intended to bring the written language closer to the spoken standard, which had changed considerably since Kleinschimdt's times. The reform was effective and in the years following the reform Greenlandic literacy received a boost.[3] Since 1979 a Greenlandic policy of "greenlandization" has reversed that trend, and monolingual Danish speaking parents in Greenland are now raising bilingual-Danish/Greenlandic speaking children, thanks to a Greenlandic only policy in primary schooling[4]  Before June 2009, Greenlandic shared its status as the official language in Greenland with Danish.[5] Since then, Greenlandic has become the sole official language.[1] This has made Greenlandic a unique example of an indigenous language of the Americas that serves exclusively as an official language of a semi-independent country, yet it is still considered to be in a "vulnerable" state by the UNESCO Red Book of Language Endangerment[6]. Carl Christian Olsen founder of the Oqaasileriffik (The Greenland Language Secretariat), has been credited with an important role in revitalizing and promoting the language as the official tongue. [7] The country has a 100% literacy rate.[8] [edit] ClassificationKalaallisut and the other Greenlandic dialects belong to the Eskimo-Aleut family and are closely related to the Inuit languages of Canada and Alaska. Illustration 1. shows the locations of the different Eskimoan languages, among them the three main dialects of Greenlandic. The most prominent Greenlandic dialect is Western Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), which is the official language of Greenland. The name Kalaallisut is now often used as a cover term for all of Greenlandic. The northern dialect, Inuktun (Avanersuarmiutut), spoken around the city of Qaanaaq (Thule) is particularly closely related to Canadian Inuktitut. The Eastern dialects (Tunumiit oraasiat), is spoken around the towns of Ammassalik and Scoresbysund, and is the most innovative of the Greenlandic dialects, having assimilated consonant culsters and vowel sequences even further than West Greenlandic. Kalaallisut is further subdivided into four subdialects: one spoken arund Upernavik which has certain similarities to Eastern Greenlandic possibly because of a previous migration from eastern Greenland. Another dialect around Uummannaq and the Disko Bay. The central dialect is spoken from Sisimiut in the north, around Nuuk and as far south as Maniitsoq. Southern Kalaallisut is spoken around Narsaq and Qaqortoq in the south.[2] Table 1. shows the differences in the pronunciation of the word for "humans" in the three main dialects. It can be seen that Inuktun is the most conservative, and Tunumiisut the most innovative.
Michael Fortescue, a specialist in Eskimo-Aleut as well as in Chukotko-Kamchatkan, argues for a link between Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut in Language Relations Across Bering Strait (1998). He calls this proposed grouping Uralo-Siberian. [edit] PhonologyThe Kalaallisut syllable is simple, allowing maximal syllables of (C)(V)V(C), where C is a consonant and V is a vowel and VV is a double consonant or wordfinal /ai/.[9] Consonant clusters only occur over syllable boundaries and their pronunciation is subject to a series of assimilations. In this section letters between slashes // mean phonemic transcription, letters in square brackets mean phonetic transcription and letters in triangular brackets <> mean orthographic rendering.[10] [edit] VowelsGreenlandic has a typical three vowel system with the vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/ Before an uvular consonant ([q] or [ʁ]) /i/ is realized allophonically as [e] or [ɛ] and /u/ as [o] or [ɔ]. This alternation is shown in the modern standard orthography by writing /i/ and /u/ as <e> and <o> respectively when occurring before uvulars (<q> and <r>). For example:
[edit] ConsonantsGreenlandic has consonants at five different points of articulation: labial, alveolar, palatal, velar and uvular. It does not have a phonemic voicing contrast, but rather distinguishes plain stops from fricatives. It distinguishes stops, fricatives and nasals at the labial, alveolar, velar and uvular points of articulation. The palatal sibilant [ʃ] has merged with [s] in all but a few dialects. The labiodental fricative [f] is only contrastive in loanwords. The alveolar stop [t] is pronounced as an affricate [t͡s] before the high front vowel /i/.
*Only found in some local dialects, not in the standard language. [edit] ProsodyGreenlandic prosody does not include stress as an autonomous category, instead prosody is determined by tonal and durational parameters.[12] Intonation is influenced by syllable weight: heavy syllables are pronounced in a way that may be perceived as stress. Heavy syllables include syllables with long vowels and syllables before consonant clusters. In words without long vowels or consonant clusters the antepenultimate syllable is stressed. In words with less than four syllables without long vowels or consonant clusters stress is on the last syllable. In words with many heavy syllables syllables with long vowels are considered heavier than syllables before a consonant cluster. Intonantion in indicative clauses usually rise on the antepenultimate syllable, fall on the penult and rise on the last syllable. Interrogative intonation rise on the penultimate and rise on the last syllable. [edit] MorphophonologyGreenlandic phonology distinguishes itself phonologically from the other Inuit languages by a series of assimilations. Greenlandic phonology allows clusters, but it does not allow clusters of two different consonants unless the first one is /r/. The second consonant in a cluster is always assimilated to the first one resulting in a geminate consonant. Geminate /tt/ is pronounced [ts] and written <ts>. Geminate /ll/ is pronounced [ɫː], /l/ is also devoiced to [ɫ] after r. Geminate /gg/ is pronounced [çː]. Geminate /vv/ is pronounced [fː] and written <ff>. /v/ is also pronounced and written as [f] after r. These assimilations mean that one of the most famous Inuktitut words, iglu ("house"), is illu in Greenlandic, where the /gl/ consonant cluster of Inuktitut is assimilated into an unvoiced lateral affricate. And that the word Inuktitut itself, when translated into Kalaallisut, is Inuttut, for example. Also the Old Greenlandic diphtong /au/ has become assimilated to /aa/. The consonant /v/ has disappeared when occurring between /u/ and /i/ or /a/, in these environments it is neither pronounced or written. This means that affixes beginning with -va or -vi have forms without [v] when suffixed on stems ending in /u/. The vowel /i/ of modern Greenlandic is the result of an historic merger of the Proto-Eskimo-Aleut vowels *i and *ɪ. The fourth vowel was still present in Old Greenlandic as attested by Hans Egede. [13] In modern west Greenlandic the difference between the two original vowels can only be discerned morphophonologically in certain environments. The vowel that was originally *ɪ, called /i2/ in Greenlandic phonological studies, has the variant [a] when preceding another vowel and it sometimes disappears before certain suffixes.[14] The degree to which the assimilations of consonant clusters have taken place is an important dialectal feature separating Polar Eskimo, Inuktun, which still allows some ungeminated consonant clusters from Western and Eastern Greenlandic. Eastern Greenlandic has furthermore shifted some geminate consonants e.g. [ɫː] to [tː]. In Tunumiisut for example the name of the town of Scoresbysund is ittoqqotoormiit which would be illoqqortoormiut in Kalaallisut. [edit] GrammarThe morphology of the language is highly synthetic and exclusively suffixing. It creates very long words by means of adding strings of suffixes to a stem.[15] There are few compound words, but lots of derivations. It uses a mixture of head and dependent marking - head-marking agreement both agent and patient on the verb, with possessor on nouns, but using dependent marking to inflect nouns for case. The morpho-syntactic alignment of Kalaallisut is ergative. Greenlandic distinguishes two open word classes: nouns and verbs. Each category is subdivided by intransitive and transitive words. The language distinguishes four persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 3rd reflexive), two numbers (singular and plural; no dual as in Inuktitut), eight moods (indicative, participial, imperative, optative, past subjunctive, future subjunctive and habitual subjunctive), ten cases (absolutive, ergative, equative, instrumental, locative, allative, ablative and prolative; for some selected nouns: nominative and accusative). Verbs carry bipersonal inflection for subject and object (distinguished by person and number). Transitive nouns carry possessive inflection.[16] In this section examples are written in Greenlandic standard orthography except that morpheme boundaries are indicated by a hyphen. [edit] NounsNouns are obligatorily inflected for case and number and optionally for number and person of possessor. Singular and plural numbers are distinguished and 8 cases: absolutive, ergative (relative), instrumental, allative, locative, ablative, prosecutive (also called vialis or prolative), and equative.[17] Case and number is marked by a single suffix. Nouns can also be derived from verbs or from other nouns by a number of suffixes. e.g. atuar- "to read" + -toq becomes atuartoq "student" or atuar + -fik "place" becomes atuarfik "school". [edit] Pronominal systemGreenlandic has a pronominal system with switch reference: there is a special so-called fourth person used to mark when a third person subject of a subordinate verb or the possessor of a noun is coreferent with the third person subject of the matrix clause. Kalaallisut does not distinguish between dualis and plural numbers as some canadian Eskimoan languages do, instead only plural and singular number is distinguished. Below are given examples of the difference between third and fourth person:
[edit] Case and grammatical relationsThe Greenlandic language uses case to express grammatical relations between participants in a sentence. Nouns are inflected with one of the two core cases or one of the 6 oblique cases. Greenlandic is an ergative language, this means that instead of treating the grammatical relations as in european languages where grammatical subjects are marked with nominative case and objects with accusative the grammatical roles are defined differently. In Greenlandic instead the ergative case is used for agents of transitive verbs and for possessors. Absolutive case is used for patients of transitive nouns and subjects of intransitive nouns:
The instrumental case is versatile. It is used for the instrument with which an action is carried out, for oblique objects of intransitive verbs and for secondary objects of transitive verbs:
It is also used for the meaning of "give me":
And for forming adverbs from nouns
It is also used with numerals and the question word qassit to express time of clock, and to mean "per"
The locative case describes location in a space:
The ablative case describes movement away from something or the source of something:
The prosecutive case (also called vialis or prolative) describes movement through something, also the medium of writing or a location on the body. It is also used to describe a group of people, for example a family.
The equative case describes similarity of manner, or quality. It is also used for languages:
[edit] PossessionIn Greenlandic possession is marked on the noun which agrees with the person and number of its possessor. The possessor is in the ergative case. There are different possessive paradigms for all of the different cases. Table 4. gives the possessive paradigm for the absolutive case of illu "house". Below are given examples of the use of the possessive inflection, the use of the ergatve case for possessors and the use of fourth person possessors.
[edit] VerbsGreenlandic verbs are morphologically enormously complex. The two main processes are inflection and derivation. Inflectional morphology includes the processes of obligatory inflection for mood, person, and voice (tense/aspect is not an obligatory inflectional category[18][19][20]). Derivational morphology includes processes of adverbial modification of verbs by a large number of different suffixes (numbering in their hundreds). The Greenlandic verb word consists of a root + derivational suffixes + inflectional suffixes. Tense and aspect is marked by optional suffixes that appear between the derivational and inflectional suffixes. [edit] InflectionGreenlandic verbs inflect for agreement with agent and patient, for mood and voice. It distinguishes 8 moods, four of which are used in independent clauses and four of which are used in subordinate clauses. The four independent moods are: indicative, interrogative, imperative, optative. The four dependent moods are causative, conditional, contemporative and participial. Verbal roots can take either transitive or intransitive inflections and all the mood suffixes have both transitive and intransitive forms. They also have a separate negative form. This gives a total of 24 different inflectional paradigms. The inflectional system is further complicated by the fact that transitive suffixes encode both patient and agent in a single morpheme, requiring 48 different suffixes to cover all possible combinations of agent and patient for each of the eight transitive paradigms.
Indicative mood is used in all independent expository clauses. The interrogative mood is used for posing questions. Questions with the question particle imaqa "maybe" cannot use the interrogative mood.
In table 5. is given the intransitive indicative inflection for patient person and number of the verb neri- "to eat" in indicative and interrogative moods (question mark marks interrogative intonation - questions have falling intonation on the last syllable as opposed to most indo-european languages in which questions are marked by rising intonation). Both the indicative and the interrogative mood have both a transitive and an intransitive inflection, but here only the intransitive inflection is given.
Imperative and Optative moods Imperative mood is used to issue orders it is always combined with the second person. Optative is used to express wishes or exhortations and is never used with the second person. There is a negative imperative form used to issue prohibitions. Both optative and imperative exists in transitive and intransitive paradigms. There are in fact two transitive positive imperative paradigms, a standard one and one which is considered rude and is mostly used when adressing children.
Conditional mood The conditional mood is used to construct subordinate clauses with the meaning "if" or "when".
Causative mood The causative mood is used to construct subordinate clauses with the meaning "because" or "since" or "when", it is also sometimes used with the meaning of "that". Often the causative is used as a main clause, but it then implies some underlying cause.
Contemporative mood The contemporative mood is used to construct subordinate clauses with the meaning of "being x" or "x ing". It is only used if the subject of the subordinate clause is coreferent with the subject of the matrix clause. If the two clauses have different subjects the participial mood or the causative mood is used. It can also be used to form complement clauses for expression verbs.
Participial mood The participial mood is used to construct a subordinate clause with the meaning "that", "when" or "as". It is used when the matrix clause and the subordinate clause have different subjects. It is often used in appositional phrases such as relative clauses.
[edit] DerivationVerbal derivation is extremely productive and Greenlandic employs many hundreds derivational suffixes. Often a single verb will use more than one derivational suffix, leading to very long words. Below are given some examples of how derivational suffixes can change the meaning of verbs. -katap- "be tired of"
-ler- "begin to/be about to"
-llaqip- "be proficient at"
-niar- "plans to/wants to"
-ngajappoq- "almost"
-nikuu-nngila- "has never"
-nnitsoor- "not anyway/afterall"
[edit] TenseIt is an open discussion among specialists in Greenlandic whether the language should be considered to have tense or not. This is because the way the language refers to time grammatically is so different from how most European languages do it, that it becomes a question of whether the Greenlandic way of doing it qualifies as being the same thing as what is usually referred to as tense in European languages. Proponents of classifying Greenlandic as a tenseless language hold that since time is not a part of the Greenlandic inflectional system and most verbal forms can be interpreted as either past, present or future according to context, Greenlandic does not have grammatical tense.[18][19] Other scholars hold that since Greenlandic is perfectly capable of constructing verbs that have only one possible temporal reading by using different derivational affixes related to time, it does have grammatical tense[20]. The examples below illustrate how Greenlandic expresses temporal relations. All verbs can take past readings with the simple indicative or interrogative moods, some verbs can also take present readings. Whether a verb can take present readings or not is determined by their semantics: verbs that describe a change of state take past readings whereas verbs that describe states can take either past or present readings depending on context. Verbs can be fixed in time by using different derivational affixes expressing pastness, presentness or futurity of time, or by using temporal expressions like "today", "yesterday" or "tomorrow" in the clause.
The derivational suffix -ssaa- is used to express events that are predicted to take place in the future:
The derivational suffix -sima- is used to express events that concluded at some moment in the past or which one has been told about, it is often translated with the perfect past or with a hearsay marker. The derivational suffix -reer- is used to express events that happened and which were supposed to happen, it is often translated with "already" The derivational suffix -ler- expresses events that are just about to begin or which have just begun.
[edit] Noun IncorporationIt is also an ongoing debate in the linguistc literature whether Greenlandic has noun incorporation or not. This is because Greenlandic does not allow the kind of incorporation common in many languages in the world where a noun root can be incorporated into almost any verb to form a verb with a new meaning. On the other hand Greenlandic does often form verbs that include noun roots.The question then becomes whether to analyse this verb formation as incorporation or as denominal verbal derivation. Greenlandic has a number of morphemes that require a noun root as their host and which form complex predicates that correspond closely in meaning to what is often seen in languages that have canonical noun incorporation. Linguists proposing that Greenlandic does have incorporation argue that these morphemes are in fact verbal roots that must obligatorily incorporate nouns in order to form grammatical clauses. [21][22][23] [24][25][26] This argument is supported by the fact that the many morphemes that require a nominal work almost syntactically identically as canonical noun incorporation and allow the formation of words that express what is an entire sentence with verb, subject and object in English. Other linguists maintain that the morphemes in question are simply derivational morphemes that allow the formation of denominal verbs. This argument is supported by the fact that the morphemes cannot occur without being latched on to a nominal element.[27][28] [29] The examples below illustrate how Greenlandic forms complex predicates including nominal roots. qimmeq "dog" + -qar- "have"
illu "house" + -'lior- "make"
kaffi "coffee" + -tor- "drink/eat"
puisi "seal" + -niar- "hunt"
allagaq "letter" + -si- "receive"
anaana "mother" + -a- "to be"
[edit] SyntaxBasic wordorder in transitive clauses is SOV.
An appositional phrase appears after its head noun.
An appositional phrase to an incorporated noun appears after the verb:
[edit] Coordination and SubordinationSyntactic coordination and subordination is done by combining predicates in the superordinate moods (indicative, interrogative, imperative, optative) with predicates in the subordinate moods (conditional, causative, contemporative and participial). [edit] VocabularyGreenlandic vocabulary is mostly inherited from the proto-Eskimo-Aleutian mother language, but it has also taken a large number of loans from other languages, especially from Danish. Early loans from Danish have often become acculturated to the Greenlandic phonological system, for example the Greenlandic word palasi "priest" is a loan from the Danish "præst". But since Greenlandic has an enormous potential for derivation of new words from existing roots many modern concepts have Greenlandic names that have been invented rather than borrowed, e.g. qarasaasiaq "computer" which literally means "artificial brain". This potential for complex derivations also means that Greenlandic vocabulary is built on very few roots which combined with affixes come to form large word families.[2] For example the root for "tongue" oqaq is used to derive the following words:
[edit] OrthographyIn contrast to most Eskimo-Aleut languages in Canada, Greenlandic is written with the Latin alphabet and not with the Inuktitut syllabary. A special character, kra (Κʻ / ĸ), was used until the spelling reform of 1973 replaced it with the letter q. [30] In addition, vowel and consonant gemination were indicated by means of diacritics on the vowels (in the case of consonant gemination, the diacritics were placed on the vowel preceding the affected consonant). For example, the name Kalaallit Nunaat was spelled Kalâlit Nunát. This scheme uses an acute accent ( ´ ) to indicate vowel gemination (i.e., á, í, ú modern: aa, ii, uu), a tilde ( ˜ ) or a grave accent ( ` ), depending on the author, indicates gemination of the consonant following (e.g., ãt, ĩt, ũt or àt, ìt, ùt, modern: att, itt, utt), while a circumflex accent ( ˆ ) indicates a sequence of a geminated vowel followed by geminated consonant (e.g., ât/ît/ût, modern: aatt, iitt, uutt). The letters ê and ô, used only before r and q, are now written er/eq and or/oq in Greenlandic. (The vowels e and o are position-dependent phonemic variants of i and u, as described in the discussion of vowels above.) The spelling system of Nunatsiavummiutut, spoken in Nunatsiavut in northeastern Labrador, is derived from the old Greenlandic system. The alphabet for Greenlandic is: A E F G I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V. To spell loanwords from other languages, especially from Danish and English, the additional letters b, c, d, h, x, y, z, w, æ, ø and å are used.[31] Greenlandic uses the symbols ›...‹ and »...« for quotation marks. [edit] Sample TextInuit tamarmik inunngorput nammineersinnaassuseqarlutik assigiimmillu ataqqinassuseqarlutillu pisinnaatitaaffeqarlutik. Silaqassusermik tarnillu nalunngissusianik pilersugaapput, imminnullu iliorfigeqatigiittariaqaraluarput qatanngutigiittut peqatigiinnerup anersaavani. "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." (Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) [edit] See also[edit] Notes
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links Greenlandic language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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