First, we should probably discuss the "Eskimo" issue. This term has gotten some flak recently, and is considered by some to be offensive or disrespectful. This is especially true in Canada, but also with the Alaskan chapter of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. It's often suggested that Eskimo should be replaced by the term Inuit, but as Kaplan explains that doesn't really work, because in Alaska there are two major branches of the Eskimo language family: Inupiaq (a dialect of Inuit) and Yupik. There are four languages included within the Yupik family (or five, if Sirenik is included), three of which are spoken in Alaska: (Central Alaskan) Yup'ik, or Yugtun; Alutiiq or Sugcestun; and St. Lawrence Island Yupik. One possible solution is to replace the term Eskimo with the hyphenated term Inuit-Yupik. Perhaps for the sake of continuity with the first edition, that's not what these authors have chosen to do. For the purposes of this post we'll just use the abbreviation CED to refer to the dictionary.
Anyway, back to the book. The first edition of the CED appeared in 1994, and it was one of the first linguistic books I ever purchased. I was attending graduate school at the time and was studying Yup'ik language. I order a copy of the CED as a cure to my homesickness for Alaska. It arrived with its shiny paperback cover and a Fairbanks return address which actually increased not decreased my homesickness. But it was a joy to read.
A joy to read a dictionary? For those who have never seen or heard of a comparative dictionary, it's essentially a compendium of related words across a family of languages. The cover of the CED illustrates the concept well. It shows a map of the Western Arctic with related words with similar sounds and meaning having to do with 'house'. If one looks at enough words like these one can work out the correspondence in sounds between the different languages and dialects. Then it is possible to reconstruct the original sound from which the sounds in the modern languages evolved. We know languages change through time--anyone who has tried to read Old English from 1000 years ago can see this. The wonder of a comparative dictionary is that it allows us to peer back in time at an older stage of language--a stage before Inuit-Yupik broke up into the individual languages we know today. Comparing all these 'house' words we can reconstruct a Proto-Eskimo word əŋlu for 'house'. (The first symbol there stands for the sound in English uh, and the second sound is pronounced as the ng in English sing.) That's the incredible thing about the CED and comparative linguistics more broadly. Suddenly we discover something about what words people were using one or two thousand years ago and how they were pronounced.
.JPG) |
| Map from the cover of the new CED |
But there's more. Not only do sounds change through time; meanings can change as well. Looking at the house terms we see that in the region of Bering Strait the word means more specifically 'sod house'. This tells us something about the history of Inuit-Yupik people and how people lived in Bering Strait region versus other regions. Also, in Central Yup'ik the meaning shifted even more to mean 'beaver lodge' (englu).
One useful addition to the second edition of the CED is a list of Unangan terms which lack any related form in the Inuit-Yupik languages. It's presumed that Unangan is (distantly) related to Inuit-Yupik, and the CED lists related forms where they exist. But the new CED lists over 400 root forms which appear not to be related to Inuit-Yupik. Crucially, these are just roots; that means there are many thousands of Unangan words which are unrelated to Inuit-Yupik. How did this come to be? Was Unangan influenced by some other unknown language no longer spoken today? Can we really say that Unangan is related to Inuit-Yupik given the volume of unrelated vocabulary? These are very interesting questions for prehistory. The CED doesn't answer these questions, but it does force us to think about them.
Admittedly, diving headfirst into a reference work like the CED is not for the faint of heart. There's a lot of scientific jargon and notation to wade through. I've re-read the introduction several times and still can't figure out what the asterisk following a word is supposed to mean. For example, the reconstructed Proto-word for 'tussock' is given as manəʀ shows up in Western Canadian Inuit as maniq but in neighboring Inupiaq as maniq*. What's that * for? Maybe someone can help me out here. Overall, though, the symbols and layout of the dictionary are clearly explained. There are indexes in Unangan (Atkan), Alaskan Yup'ik, St. Lawrence Island Yupik, Eastern Canadian (Tarramiut) Inuit, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), as well as English.
Using the indexes we can discover some interesting history. For example, if we look up the form for 'dog', we find that it traces back to the Proto-word qikmiʀ and that versions of this word are found in all but one of the Inuit-Yupik languages. This means that dogs have been around for a long time and must have come along with the early ancestors of the Inuit-Yupik people. The one exception in found in Alaskan Yup'ik qimugta, which traces back not to qikmiʀ but rather to an old word meaning 'to pull a sled'. For some reason Yup'ik decided to abandon the old dog word and replace it with one meaning literally 'sled puller'. Traces of the old word persist, though, as in the Nunivak place name Qikmirtaler and the word for 'willow catkin', qikmiruaq, literally 'imitation dog'.
Browsing through the CED like this it is sometimes difficult to distinguish linguistics from history. We humans leave behind all kinds of physical traces of our past, from monuments to stone tools to inscriptions. But all those things are fragile and fade with time. Yet the evidence of our linguistic past survives in the languages spoken today. The authors of the CED have little to say about this directly (other than a single paragraph with some unsubstantiated speculation about dates), but every entry in this massive volume is a window back in time, a glimpse into the world of Inuit-Yupik peoples prior to their great expansion across the arctic. So don't be confused by the word "dictionary" in the title. The CED is a work of history, the storied history of a language family which settled thousands of miles of coastline from the Gulf of Alaskan to the east coast of Greenland.
Fortescue, Michael, Steven Jacobson, and Lawrence Kaplan. 2010. Comparative Eskimo Dictionary, with Aleut cognates. 2nd ed. Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center. ISBN 9781555001094. 696 pages. US$60.
Order from Alaska Native Language Center.
No comments:
Post a Comment