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ShenLong
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02 May 2011, 1:00 pm

I became interested in Inuktitut in the Fall when I was figuring out what I wanted to do as a marine biologist after college. I decided I would try to become a polar biologist, and decided upon trying to get all my things together to increase the chance that I could be hired to do field research around the poles. I started learning Russian, Swedish, and Inuit for this purpose, but Inuit turned out to be the one I liked the most. I am learning how to speak the Baffin Island dialect, which would be the most useful since many of the other dialects are spoken where English is used very commonly, so knowledge of these dialects is not necessary.

Inuit is a really fun language. This is because it has unusual grammar. It's an analytic language in which words are made up of multiple roots and word parts. In fact, many sentences can be composed of one really long word. For instance, "I am from Florida" would be "Vulaaridamiutaujunga".

I stopped learning for a while because of school, but I'm going to be picking back up from where I was. Even if I don't get into polar biology because it's very hard to get a job as a polar biologist compared to getting one in another form of marine biology, I still want to learn the language because it is interesting and different from any of the languages that I have learned before.

Does anyone here have an interest in learning the language? If so check this website out. It has lessons in 5 of the major dialects of Inuktitut. http://www.tusaalanga.ca/



dunbots
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18 May 2011, 12:36 am

ShenLong wrote:
It's an analytic language. For instance, "I am from Florida" would be "Vulaaridamiutaujunga".

According to everything I've read about Inuktitut, and according to that sentence in it, it is polysynthetic, which is pretty much the opposite of analytical...



Mercurial
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18 May 2011, 10:30 am

Yeah, Inuit, like a number of North American native languages, is polysynthetic. I think Shen Long just his/her terms mixed up, No big deal.

I salute anyone wanting to learn a polysynthetic language like this. I think I'd find it very challenging, especially the auditory part of learning it.



SierraBell
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21 May 2011, 12:42 am

Wow! It's nice to know others out there that want to learn this language. 8O
I have been wanting to learn about this language ever since I was 11 years old, due to me writing a story with Inuit elements. I still am rewriting it. I have characters whose names are all in the Inuit language.

Though I am sorry, I don't quite understand the terms of "polysynthetic". What does the word mean?



dunbots
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21 May 2011, 4:14 am

SierraBell wrote:
Wow! It's nice to know others out there that want to learn this language. 8O
I have been wanting to learn about this language ever since I was 11 years old, due to me writing a story with Inuit elements. I still am rewriting it. I have characters whose names are all in the Inuit language.

Though I am sorry, I don't quite understand the terms of "polysynthetic". What does the word mean?

A polysynthetic language is one where many morphemes (root words, prefixes and suffixes) are contained in one word. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic language because one word can be an entire sentence, like ShenLong's example, where "I am from Florida" is expressed as one word, "Vulaaridamiutaujunga". What makes that one word (besides there being no spaces) is that more grammar concepts in polysynthetic languages are expressed as affixes (the majority being suffixes) that must come in a certain order, as opposed to separate words that can be moved around.

"Vulaaridamiutaujunga" breaks down roughly into Vulaarida-miuta-ujunga, which can be translated as "Florida-inhabitant-I". Since you can't rearrange those suffixes of the word, and they can not be used separately (like you can any of the 4 words in the English translation) the word is considered polysynthetic; something like "Vulaarida-ujunga-miutaq" would be ungrammatical, since the suffixes are in the wrong order. In English you could say something like "From Florida I am." and it would be grammatically correct, although it would sound strange to most speakers and is not conventional usage.

(The suffix "-miutaq", which has the final Q deleted here, probably breaks into 2 different parts, but I only learned this after a bit of research, so maybe ShenLong can tell us if it does. I know "-mit" means "from", so "-taq" is most likely a suffix too, but I don't know anything about it.)