{"id":1134,"date":"2010-12-08T10:00:08","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T08:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1134"},"modified":"2010-09-24T09:44:22","modified_gmt":"2010-09-24T07:44:22","slug":"inuktitut-eine-grammatische-skizze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1134","title":{"rendered":"Inuktitut: Eine grammatische Skizze"},"content":{"rendered":"
Inuktitut: <\/strong>Eine grammatische Skizze.<\/strong> By Elka Nowak<\/strong>. (Languages of the world\/materials 470.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2008. Pp. 92. ISBN 9783895861246<\/a>. $65.10.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf<\/strong><\/a>, Chiang Mai University<\/em><\/p>\n

This short grammatical sketch presents an overview of the variety of the Inuit (Eskimo) language spoken in the Baffin region of the eastern Canadian territory of Nunavut. The type of Inuit described by Elka Nowak is a part of the Eastern Eskimo grouping and is very close linguistically to the Eastern Eskimo language (Kalaallisut) spoken in Greenland.<\/p>\n

Ch. 1 discusses the place of Inuktitut within the wider Eskimo-Aleut family and gives a short overview of the sociolinguistic position of Inuktitut as a community language in Nunavut. Its position compares with that of the closely related Greenlandic (Kalaallisut). Ch. 2 provides a brief summary of the history of research in Inuit languages. In Ch. 3, N discusses the development of writing systems for Inuit languages, in particular Greenlandic, and gives a comparative overview of three different phonemic writing systems employed in the linguistic study of Inuktitut and Greenlandic.<\/p>\n

Ch. 4 summarizes the basic polysynthetic characteristics and processes of Inuktitut. N posits that the overriding characteristic of Inuktitut morphosyntax is that the core of the Inuktitut sentence is synthetic complex. The author divides the morphemes of the language into four categories: nuclei (nominal or verbal), affixes, flectional endings, and particles. The distinguishing feature of nominal nuclei is that they can but seldom do occur with a zero-inflectional (absolute case) ending. Verbal nuclei occur only as bound morphemes in a complex formation with an obligatory grammatical ending. Affixes are bound derivational morphemes that form with nuclei stems and then take other affixes to build recursive forms of great complexity. Morphologically complex forms must end with one flectional ending. The last affix is the head of the construction and determines the grammatical category as either nominal or verb. Compound formations of two or more nuclei are not possible. The distinguishing characteristic of particles is that they are not grammatically marked and can occur as free morphemes.<\/p>\n

Ch. 5 is devoted to obligatory grammatical inflectional endings that occur with verbs to indicate transitivity or intransitivity, person, number, and mood. Nominal inflections showing case, number, and possession (relational status) are discussed. This section includes sample paradigms and constructed sentences as examples. A short subsection lists the first and second person pronouns (singular, dual, plural) and some of the various third person demonstrative pronouns, all of which are used primarily as answers to questions and rarely for emphasis. Also included in this chapter are word lists of the four classes of verb nuclei or roots.<\/p>\n

N describes affixal derivation of potentially quite complex stems in Ch. 7. Much of what is subsumed under syntactic arrangements in other languages takes place in Inuktitut in these complex formation of a nucleus (or root) followed by a theoretically unlimited number of affixes, closed by a single (usually verbal) inflectional ending. Ch. 8 deals with argument structure, discourse organization, and various other issues such as causatives, antipassives, and external modification of nominals incorporated into verbal complexes. The final section consists of a short glossed text to illustrate the structure of a coherent discourse or text. The book concludes with a short bibliography of Eastern Eskimo linguistic research.<\/p>\n

This grammatical sketch of Inuktitut is a welcome addition to the growing literature on a language family characterized by its complex morphological structures. It will be of interest to linguists who study Native American languages as well as those interested in typology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inuktitut: Eine grammatische Skizze. By Elka Nowak. (Languages of the world\/materials 470.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2008. Pp. 92. ISBN 9783895861246. $65.10. Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University This short grammatical sketch presents an overview of the variety of the Inuit (Eskimo) language spoken in the Baffin region of the eastern Canadian territory of Nunavut. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1135,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions\/1135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}