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 [172]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 [173]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 [174]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.” [175](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 [176]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 [178]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.
A Native Chart.
A chart made from memory by Pitsoolak an Eskimo hunter, giving the Sea Coast, Inlets, and Islands of the south coast of Baffin Land. These men are trained from boyhood to remember the coast and routes of travel and know them well.
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.
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 [179]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 [180]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 [181]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;” [182]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 [183]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. [184]