A couple years ago I took up the Danish duolingo course and got decently far in it. My intent for a long time has been to visit Greenland and I'm saving up for a visit. However, I sank into a deep depression around the time and just lost interest in my travel plans and Danish / Greenlandic culture in general. There's another thread for this so I'll get off this tangent. Anyway, it's 2021 and I am learning West Greenlandic, or Kalaallisut (literally, "of the greenlanders"), which is spoken by a vast majority of the country. It is a daughter of eskimo languages (a purely linguistic term, it's generally seen as a pejorative outside of that context), and is the most commonly spoken language from that family. It's a polysynthetic language, so words are made up on the fly. Thus, it's not really suitable for a duolingo course in the traditional sense, but there are some good courses available on Memrise. I'm using the Memrise course mainly to understand sentence structure and get a feel for pronunciation, but am doing deep dives into textbooks and eskimo dictionaries to understand word synthesis. I'd like to explain a bit, but I'm still a beginner so let the Dunning-Kreuger flow.
Words construction in Kalaallisut is best taught at the morpheme level using phonetic symbols with mostly straightforward joining rules, and are then converted to a modern orthography that, thank the lord, is a subset of the alphabet I've been using my whole life. No special symbols, diacritics, accents... all letters I learned in kindergarten. I'll explain the process a bit with some examples!
"I write"
this is constructed from the first person instrumental singular {vuŋa} and verb "to write", {aglak}.
{aglak}{vuŋa} is joined by appending the two words together to get the phonemic form /aglakvuŋa/. A general rule for consonant clusters is that at the phonemic level, the second consonant gets doubled: /allavvuŋa/. It just so happens that ll and vv are double voiced fricatives, which have their own rules that make these sounds pronounceable by the human mouth. Don't know what a fricative is? Me neither, at least not completely. Anyway, double l becomes unvoiced double ɬ (imagine holding a llllll sound then turning off your vocal chords and letting air flow between your tongue and teeth). Double v also becomes the unvoiced pp sound, or more rarely, ff. Thus, you're at the phonetic level, [aɬɬappuŋa]. Converting to the modern orthography yields ɬɬ = ll, pp = pp, and ŋ = ng. Hence, I write = "allappunga." As you can see, "aglak" is long gone, with the g turning into an l and the k turning into a p. Duolingo isn't designed to teach languages like that, and even the few greenlandic to Danish dictionaries out there don't give you any hint on how words are formed besides memorizing finished words. Good luck learning a language that way!
"I eat"
{niri}{vuŋa} -> /nirivuŋa/ -> [nerivuŋa] .... wait why did i become e? because i before r or q becomes e, that's why
So in the end, you get "nerivunga." This time the v is conserved and you don't get the double p at all. So you might think "niri ends in a vowel so that's why you have vunga instead of ppunga" and that's pretty much right, but that's only for the first person singular case. One more.
"They eat"
{niri}{(v)vut} ... the parentheses generally means that if there is a preceding consonant (like imeq instead of niri), use that consonant instead. However niri ends in a vowel so the phoneme is /nirivvut/. Double vv goes to pp, and ir goes to er, so you end up with "neripput." Despite niri ending in a vowel, the double p is back.
And these are relatively simple examples. Most words are at least 3 morphemes long, so when you do all the joining and spelling rules, you end up with words that are at least 10 letters long. For example, the word for "computer" is "qarasaasiaq" which roughly translates to "artificial brain used as a tool." I mean... yeah that's pretty much what a computer is, so why the heck not?
As complicated as this sounds, it is becoming second nature to me after about six weeks of self study. The real challenge for me now is understanding why morphemes are ordered in the way that they are. Luckily, there is a really cool community of Inuk/Yupik/Kalaallisut speakers on Discord including the author of the book I'm learning from, who frequently puts up with my annoying questions. Anyway, Kalaallisut is a really beautiful language to listen to rather than read my amateurish explanation of it. The most famous Greenlandic band is Small Time Giants, and this is a Christmas song they wrote a couple years back with the choruses sung in Kalaallisut:
Enjoy, and I hope you learned something new, because I sure have been!
I’m happy to report back I’ve decided to take the leap and start learning Swedish. Putting aside the notions of “practicality” allowed me to see what language I really want to learn, so thank you, Lionyx. Not sure how dedicated I can be right now, but it feels good to have officially started a third language. Thanks guys.
Is it possible to get another link perhaps?
