THE ESKIMO LANGUAGE
The Eskimo tongue requires a chapter to itself, for although it can
boast of no literature—being until recently an unwritten language—it
should have exceptional interest for the student of comparative
philology. It is the speech of a primitive, untutored folk, yet its
vocabulary is very large, its grammar complete, methodical and perfect,
and its construction capable of expressing subtleties and combinations
by inflection, unlike those of any tongue, springing from the
well-known stocks of human speech. It is euphonic, agglutinative, and
complex.
Europeans find Eskimo difficult to acquire. The writer, like others,
had largely to construct his own grammar when studying it. He spent
many long hours, first with the young folk to get the purity of the
sounds, then with the middle-aged men to arrive at correct idiom and
fluency, then with the ancients to get at the folk lore of the tribe.
Oftentimes their speech was merely a series of long and complicated
gutturals, two hours of it being enough to make a man’s head spin for
the rest of the day. But labour and pertinacity were at length
rewarded; the language was mastered, and the minds of the arctic people
revealed.
The romance of this grammar consists in the fact that it has all been
marshalled and classified, and reduced to a system which will bear
comparison with even the classic tongues. Unless the first missionaries
to the arctic had taken up this virgin and inchoate subject and handled
it by the aid of the centuries of culture to which they were heir,
Eskimo speech must have still remained a sealed book to the
philologist, and—what is of far more importance—presented a Hill of
Difficulty for years to all those who should come after them in the
same ministry. With the aid of the grammars and dictionaries so
patiently and thoughtfully compiled in the dark, unknown and bitter
North, the would-be evangelist to-day may prepare himself for work
among the Eskimo in the merest fraction of the time it took the first
Danish envoys from civilisation.
The original attempt was made by the well-known Danish pastor, Hans
Egede, who went to Greenland with his wife in 1721, and lived there
among the natives for many years. Eskimo was the mother-tongue of their
son, born in the country as one of its own people. In time, this lad
was sent to Denmark to study at the University of Copenhagen. On his
return to Greenland, young Egede applied himself to the scientific
study of the language he knew so intimately, and to the compilation of
a grammar and a dictionary. His example was followed by the teachers
who came after him, some of them being German linguists imbued with the
meticulous love of learning and of intellectual conquest the task
seemed preeminently to require. These tracked down and classified the
many meanings of Eskimo inflection and expression, and perfected their
system of interpretation. Hence, of course, the thoroughly Teutonic
mould into which the syntax of the Eskimo tongue has been thrown.
All this work has formed the basis of study for everybody who has had
occasion to learn the language since, although such an undertaking has
always entailed a new and personal effort to work out the grammar and
compile a local vocabulary. For all students of Eskimo, including the
present writer, find a variety of dialects, although generally it may
be said that the language varies so inconsiderably from one region to
another, that hunters from widely different parts of the arctics can
soon—by mutual questionings—understand each other. Those in Greenland
speak practically the same tongue as those in Alaska.
Apropos of the purely etymological aspect of this little known
language, it is interesting to recall an observation made by Dean
Farrar in a lecture before the Royal Institution, delivered in 1869. “I
hardly hesitate to prophesy,” he said, “the extreme probability that
the final answer to many high scientific problems regarding the nature
and the origin of man may come from enquiries into the languages of
nations such as these (the Chinese, Eskimo and Cherokee) rather than
from any other branch of ... palaeontological research.”
Eskimo has indeed received some measure of study and analysis, and it
is for grammarians to tell us whether or no this prophesy has been to
any extent fulfilled. A French writer, M. Hovelaque, hesitates to
answer any question as to what group of human language the
“hyperborean” tongues should be assigned. His observations should be
recorded here perhaps, by way of a commentary on the exhaustiveness
with which the Germans seem to have gone into the subject: “Au surplus
le nom d’hyperboréennes ou arctiques, sous lequel on réunit ces
differentes langues, ne doit pas donner le change sur le plus ou moins
d’affinité soit entre elles, soit avec autres idiomes. Bien des
hypothèses sont encore permises à ce sujet, mais il est vraisemblable
qu’un certain nombre de ces idiomes résisteront à toutes les tentatives
que l’on pourra faire en vue de les laisser parmi tel ou tel groupe
suffisament connu. Il serait dangereux, en tout cas, d’accorder aux
relations des missionaires sur telle ou telles de ces langues,
notamment sur celles des Esquimaux, plus de crédit qu’il ne convient.
On n’y trouve, le plus souvent, que des rapprochements de mots, des
etymologies; en somme rien de scientifique. Ajutons, d’autre part, que
certains idiomes hyperboréens ont été étudiés avec soin et par des
auteurs compétents, ainsi qu’on peut le voir dans les publications de
l’Academie de Petersbourg.” (La Linguistique. Bibliothèque des Sciences
contemporains.)
Up to within recent times the Eskimo had no system of writing. But
another patient evangelist, inspired by the necessity of delivering the
message of Christianity in a more permanent form than by oral teaching
only, invented what is known as the Syllabic Character for the benefit
of the Indians, at a post called Norway House. This was the Rev. James
Evans, a minister of the Canadian Methodist Church. The Syllabic
Character, which is a sound (and not a letter, or alphabetical)
writing, similar to shorthand, was designed for the Cree, but proved to
be easily adaptable to represent the Eskimo speech. Without such a
method, it is difficult to imagine how restless and roving tribes, at
this post to-day and gone to-morrow, could ever have been taught to
read. By this means, however, an ordinarily intelligent individual can
learn in eight or nine weeks.
The principle of Mr Evans’ characters is phonetic. There are no silent
letters. Each character represents a syllable; hence no spelling is
required. As soon as the series of signs—about sixty in number—are
mastered, and a few additional secondary signs (some of which represent
consonants and some aspirates, and some partially change the sound of
the main character), the native scholar of eighty or of six years of
age can begin to read, and in a few days attain surprising accuracy.
Such results as these, such gifts of pure intellectual effort, are
surely among the greatest blessings civilisation has to confer on the
few primitive peoples still left in the world.
Of late years the British and Foreign Bible Society have taken charge
of the work, and now the Gospel in Cree, Syllabic and Eskimo is widely
spread.
The Syllabic Character is known far and wide to-day in the arctics. It
has not been spread solely by white men, for the people teach each
other as they travel from tribe to tribe. The Eskimo freely write
letters to their friends and hand them over for delivery to anyone
taking a journey in the desired direction. The letters always reach
their destination, because the postman at his first sleeping place
invariably reads them all through from first to last; so that if, as
often happens, one or two should get lost, the addressee receives the
missive by word of mouth; and incidentally the postman knows
everybody’s business and is altogether the most glorious gossip who
could ever drop in and enliven the circle round the igloo lamp of a
winter’s night.
Pen, ink and paper, it may be noted, are innovations of the new
civilisation. Prior to the advent of the white man the only idea and
the only means of calligraphy the Eskimo had was the etching on ivory
or bone. Many vigorous and spirited drawings exist of hunting or other
scenes, scratched on blade or handle, and sharply bitten in, black and
clear, by rubbing with soot from the lamps. It is not remarkable that a
knowledge of writing and reading should have spread among the people in
this way, for the Eskimo are avid of instruction, and eagerly avail
themselves of any opportunity of being taught. Where Christianity
itself has gained a footing it has been largely through the
instrumentality of some among them who have come in contact with
missionaries, and passed on to others all they had seen and heard.
One of the most puzzling aspects of Eskimo is its “agglutinative”
character. The words all run together. All the parts of speech may be
joined to the verbal root and then conjugated in its various moods and
tenses, so that the word finally produced by this process may be sixty
or more syllables long. Students find the principal difficulty, not so
much in building up and saying these peculiar words, but in correctly
understanding what the natives say.
The following lengthy remark will illustrate three things: first, a
characteristic mood and tense of the verb “to flee”; secondly, the
phonetic characters used; and, thirdly, the composite nature of the
word.
1. Kemâyomaneangelara = I shall not wish to flee from him.
2. ᑭᒪᔪᒪᓂᐊᖏᓚᕋ
3. Ke-mâ-yo-ma-ne-â-ng-ge-lâ-ra.
The Eskimo tongue has a full complement of the parts of speech. There
is no definite article, but the numeral adjective one, attousik, takes
its place; e.g., attousik angoot, a man, i.e., one man.
There is no form to express gender. Sex is distinguished by the word
“man” or “woman” (really male or female) added to another noun; as
kingmuk, a dog; arngnak, a woman; angoot, a man. Kingmuk arngnak, a
female dog; kingmuk angoot, a male dog.
In many cases where English admits of only one word for an animal,
Eskimo has several. A deer is a deer in English all the year round; in
Eskimo it has a different name for its growth or habits at certain
seasons, as in the fawning period, etc.
The noun plays an important part in the sentence on account of the
various affixes which may be attached. It is inflected for number, and
for no less than nine cases (rendered by prepositions in translation);
it draws possessive pronouns and some adjectives to itself as a magnet
draws iron filings; it has moreover a transitive and an emphatic form.
At the risk of writing a chapter which might be taken from an Eskimo
Primer, we venture to give examples of some of these intricacies of the
snow folks’ strange speech, since whatever else it may be, this can
scarcely be called a hackneyed subject! So the transitive form of the
noun is used when it is the subject of a transitive verb:—
Ernipta nagligevâtegoot = our son, (he) loves us.
The emphatic form:—
Angootib erninne nagligeva = the man loves his own son.
There are three numbers—singular, dual and plural:—Noonak, a land;
noonâk, two lands; noonât, lands; and each of these is declined with
different endings to express eight cases translated by the nominative
and vocative, and then “of,” “to,” “in,” “through,” “from,” and “like”
a land. We feel we are getting on to firm ground somewhere when it is
possible to note down such a rule as this: “Nouns in the singular end
either in a vowel or in the consonants k and t. The dual always ends in
k, and the plural in t.”
We must not part with the noun unceremoniously. Its possibilities are
not easily exhausted. It must have cost a good deal of thinking,
originally, to get it into grammatical harness. For nouns of different
kinds have different terminations, which add all sorts of ideas to
their isolated meaning. For instance, kut, a family; innuk, an Eskimo;
innukut, the family of an Eskimo. Vik, time or place, and kooveasook,
rejoicing; hence kooveasookvik, a place of rejoicing. Again, katte, a
companion, and nerre, to eat; hence nerrekattega, my table companion,
ga being the possessive pronoun.
The possessive pronouns, indicated by inflection, include “our two,”
“your two,” and “their two.” There is also a possessive emphatic form
of the noun, his “own” son.
The Eskimo have names for the numerals up to six, after which figure
they use a system of addition and multiplication to express number.
Seven, for instance, is six and one; nineteen is ten and eight and one.
The figure ten is arrived at as being the count of a man’s fingers on
two hands; twenty includes his toes. Eighty is translated by “Men four,
their extremities finished.” It must indeed have been a matter of some
mild philological exhilaration to the first translators when they
arrived at such a conclusion as this!
Then there are the verbs. This part of speech may be almost called the
whole of the Eskimo tongue. It annexes both subject and object, and can
express through various particles a sentence which would require in
English half a dozen or even ten words. There are two kinds of verbs,
transitive and intransitive; three Voices, active, passive, and middle;
the usual Moods, of which one—the subjunctive—lends itself to an
interesting inferential sort of meaning. When the person addressed can
form some idea of what the speaker wants or means, without the use of
the principal verb, this moods comes into play: “Because there are no
partridges,” is the sentence; “I didn’t get any,” is the inference.
“Because I am very hungry” leaves it to be inferred “therefore I want
some food.” When this is confined to the obvious, well and good; it
would scarcely be so clear, “Because the house is very warm” therefore
“you must make it cooler,” unless the conversation took place in a snow
house where conviviality was having a disastrous effect on the roof and
the walls.
The verb has participles and tenses, which have many modifications of
meaning with no equivalent except an entire sentence in English. In
narration, there is an extraordinarily graphic past, not adequately
rendered by “When So-and-So lived;” but “in So-and-So’s own time of
being in the world.” There are impersonal verbs, and irregular verbs,
and all sorts of particles; potential (I can do a thing), optative (I
wish to do it), negative (I do not do it), the proper “sorting out” of
which is half the battle of learning Eskimo. Time is expressed by time
particles placed between the verb and the verbal termination; there are
also verbal and adverbial particles which have fixed rules as to
position, always preceding the time particle. Thus, a word may be
elaborated, such as Tikkenarsuakpok, “He-endeavours-to-arrive,” or
Tikkenarsuatsinakpok, “He-endeavours-always-to-arrive;” and
“I-indeed-hear-you,” or “I-indeed-hear-only-you.”
It would be perhaps superfluous to offer further notes on the Eskimo
tongue, since the foregoing will suffice to give some idea of its scope
and complexity. The syntax falls under two headings, the formation of
compound words and the arrangement of these into sentences. The
position of words in a sentence, particularly a short one, may be
changed without altering the sense. It is no part of the present
writer’s purpose to do more, here, than to sketch the briefest outline
of one whole section of his subject. To do justice to this language
would require very considerable space. Again, there is no particular
object in adding a chart of the syllabic characters, which are purely
arbitrary, have no history beyond that already given, and belong in no
sense to the genius of the Eskimo themselves. The only recommendation
they might have—if the general reader could pronounce them—is that they
far more nearly give the sounds of what is really a flowing and not
unmusical tongue than the barbaric conglomeration of outlandish
consonants and double vowels which, as a poor expedient, represent to
the eye only, Eskimo words in our inadequate letters. It is for this
reason that we have so often given, in the foregoing pages, only the
translation and not the Eskimo words themselves. In Roman characters
they convey a hideous idea to the eye, and a still worse idea to the
ear.
It is for the future to reveal whether or no the newly found gift of
writing will lead these people on to extensive literature. The
Moravians have published some well known books, such as “Christie’s Old
Organ,” etc. If so, by the analogy of every literature in the world, it
will begin with verse, by the enshrining of the folk tales immemorially
dear to every nation, and by the composition of some sort of Eskimo
saga. The Greenland Eskimos composed long songs in honour of Fridtjof
Nansen before he took leave of them, after the first crossing of their
icy continent. It may be that these Eskimo poems, printed in his book,
together with Dr. Rink’s collection of “Tales and Traditions of the
Eskimo,” and Dr. Boas’ similar collection of the fables of this people
(“The Central Eskimo”) and the present writer’s contribution to the
same subject, constitute so far the bulk of the offering made by these
children of the arctic to the literature of mankind.