Greenlandic…not…understand…I

My son started learning Greenlandic four years ago and although he can understand a lot, he still doesn’t speak it much. Now, after one week of Greenlandic lessons, I can understand why.

Though the basic Greenlandic vocabulary is quite small, it requires that the many words that don’t exist have to be replaced by descriptions. For example, on a map of Greenland, you’ll find the same place names used over and over: Qeqertarssuaq means the big island, Kangerlussuaq means the long fjord, Narsarsuaq means a big flat area. This descriptiveness also requires that translations of modern, technical terms are far longer than in the original language. For example, telecommunication is translated as nalunaarasuartaatikkut atassuteqarneq (literally, to have connection with the big telegraph). Even the word toilet has no Greenlandic equivalent, so the constructed Greenlandic word means the place where you poo.

If you want something simple about the Greenlandic language, it has only three vowel sounds. But the simplicity ends there. Consonants are much more numerous, some are tricky for western ears, and several sound different from what you would expect. For example, p sounds like b, k like g, and t like d…usually.

Then there are the verbs…ahh, the verbs! In English, there are typically four possible verb endings, for example, talk, talks, talked, and talking. In Greenlandic, the ending of the verb depends on which of the eight types of verb it is, who or what is the subject and the object, whether the subject and the object are singular or plural, and what the last letter of the root verb is.  In theory, this gives around seven hundred possible endings, though in practice it’s only about five hundred. It doesn’t get much better with nouns.

Greenlandic is also a polysynthetic language, which means that words are built up by sticking together a whole bunch of suffixes, sometimes also with a few stuck in the middle. There can be ten or more distinct pieces of the word, though it’s usually three to five. This creates very long words that are more-or-less sentences in themselves. For example:

Meeqqani sianerfiginngisaannarpai means She never calls her children.
sianer – call, figi – to, nngi – not, saanar – ever, and pai tells us that the subject is ‘her’ and the object is ‘them’ (‘them’, in this case, being ‘her children’ – meeqqani).

And getting back to telecommunication, how about this? Nalunaarasuartaatilioqatigiiffissualiulera means They are planning to build a new telegraph tower.

Then there’s the grammatical structure. Unlike a typical English sentence construction of subject, verb, object, Greenlandic is usually constructed as object followed by a single word that combines the verb and subject. For example, instead of I eat cake, Greenlandic would directly translate as cake eat–I. And because the subject comes last, you can’t figure out the meaning until the end of the sentence.

On top of all that, there are three Greenlandic dialects – east, west, and north Greenlandic. North Greenlandic is basically the same language as is spoken in the Canadian Arctic. West Greenlandic is spoken by the vast majority of Greenlanders. And east Greenlandic is spoken by only about three thousand people.

When we first moved here, our son was immersed in Greenlandic language at his kindergarten, where all but one other child were Greenlandic speakers. After some weeks he formed a bond with a little Greenlandic boy. Fantastic, we thought, he’ll soon start speaking Greenlandic. Only later did we realise that the boy was east Greenlandic. Just like our son, this boy couldn’t understand or be understood by the other kids. They were two little aliens, set apart from the others, getting by on key words and body language.