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42-416: Greenlandic is a polysynthetic language that allows the creation of long words by stringing together roots and suffixes . The language's morphosyntactic alignment is ergative , treating both the argument (subject) of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb in one way, but the subject of a transitive verb in another. For example, " he plays the guitar" would be in the ergative case as

84-655: A 100% literacy rate. As the Western Greenlandic standard has become dominant, a UNESCO report has labelled the other dialects as endangered, and measures are now being considered to protect the Eastern Greenlandic dialect. Kalaallisut and the other Greenlandic dialects belong to the Eskimo–Aleut family and are closely related to the Inuit languages of Canada and Alaska . Illustration 1 shows

126-561: A defining feature of all indigenous languages of the Americas . This characterization was shown to be wrong, since many indigenous American languages are not polysynthetic, but it is a fact that polysynthetic languages are not evenly distributed throughout the world, but more frequent in the Americas , Australia , Siberia , and New Guinea ; however, there are also examples in other areas. The concept became part of linguistic typology with

168-568: A fierce headache.' From Classical Ainu of Japan, another polysynthetic, incorporating, and agglutinating language: ウサオプㇲペ Usaopuspe アエヤィコツ゚ィマシラㇺスィパ aeyaykotuymasiramsuypa ウサオプㇲペ アエヤィコツ゚ィマシラㇺスィパ Usaopuspe aeyaykotuymasiramsuypa Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa ( lit.   ' Greenland's Radio ' ; officially rendered into English as the Greenlandic Broadcasting Corporation ), also known by its abbreviation KNR ,

210-589: A high degree of morphological synthesis, and which tend to form long complex words containing long strings of morphemes , including derivational and inflectional morphemes. A language then is "synthetic" or "synthesizing" if it tends to have more than one morpheme per word, and a polysynthetic language is a language that has "many" morphemes per word. The concept was originally used only to describe those languages that can form long words that correspond to an entire sentence in English or other Indo-European languages , and

252-542: A second person singular object). Many polysynthetic languages combine these two strategies, and also have ways of inflecting verbs for concepts normally encoded by adverbs or adjectives in Indo-European languages. In this way highly complex words can be formed, for example the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." The word consists of

294-469: A transitive agent, whereas "I bought a guitar " and "as the guitar plays" (the latter being the intransitive sense of the same verb "to play") would both be in the absolutive case. Nouns are inflected by one of eight cases and for possession. Verbs are inflected for one of eight moods and for the number and person of its subject and object . Both nouns and verbs have complex derivational morphology. The basic word order in transitive clauses

336-713: Is Greenland 's national public broadcasting organization. Based in the country's capital city, Nuuk , KNR is an independent state-owned corporation headed by a five-person board. Its activities are funded from a mixture of sources, mainly direct government funding but also limited on-air advertising. In 2012–13, all elements of KNR Radio and TV relocated to a new building in Nuuk. The broadcasts come from various sources, including Naalakkersuisut (the Greenland government), various associations, collaborations with private local broadcasters and broadcasts abroad, especially DR . KNR

378-567: Is ergative-absolutive , but verbal morphology follows a nominative-accusative pattern and pronouns are syntactically neutral. The language distinguishes four persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th or 3rd reflexive (see Obviation and switch-reference ); two numbers (singular and plural but no dual , unlike Inuktitut); eight moods (indicative, interrogative, imperative, optative, conditional, causative, contemporative and participial) and eight cases (absolutive, ergative, equative, instrumental, locative, allative, ablative and prolative). Greenlandic (including

420-418: Is subject–object–verb . The subordination of clauses uses special subordinate moods. A so-called fourth-person category enables switch-reference between main clauses and subordinate clauses with different subjects. Greenlandic is notable for its lack of grammatical tense ; temporal relations are expressed normally by context but also by the use of temporal particles such as "yesterday" or "now" or sometimes by

462-517: Is an associate member of Nordvision , an association of state broadcasters in the Nordic countries . As of April 2022 , a fifth of KNR's positions are vacant due to low salaries; the station has had to reduce its internet and radio reporting. KNR offers two channels nationwide, KNR1 and KNR2 . They are available via digital terrestrial television (DVB-T), and digital cable television (DVB-C). Both channels are also streamed online via YouTube. KNR1

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504-573: Is complicated by the fact that morpheme and word boundaries are not always clear cut, and languages may be highly synthetic in one area but less synthetic in other areas (e.g., verbs and nouns in Southern Athabaskan languages or Inuit languages ). Many polysynthetic languages display complex evidentiality and/or mirativity systems in their verbs . The term was invented by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau , who considered polysynthesis, as characterized by sentence words and noun incorporation,

546-524: Is composed of the Greek roots poly meaning "many" and synthesis meaning "placing together". In linguistics a word is defined as a unit of meaning that can stand alone in a sentence, and which can be uttered in isolation. Words may be simple, consisting of a single unit of meaning, or they can be complex, formed by combining many small units of meaning, called morphemes . In a general non-theoretical sense polysynthetic languages are those languages that have

588-434: Is contrastive only in loanwords . The alveolar stop /t/ is pronounced as an affricate [t͡s] before the high front vowel /i/ . Often, Danish loanwords containing ⟨b d g⟩ preserve these in writing, but that does not imply a change in pronunciation, for example ⟨baaja⟩ [paːja] "beer" and ⟨Guuti⟩ [kuːtˢi] "God"; these are pronounced exactly as /p t k/ . The broad outline of

630-527: Is fronted to [ʉ] between two coronal consonants. The allophonic lowering of /i/ and /u/ before uvular consonants is shown in the modern orthography by writing /i/ and /u/ as ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩ respectively before ⟨q⟩ and ⟨r⟩ . For example: The palatal sibilant [ʃ] has merged with [s] in all dialects except those of the Sisimiut – Maniitsoq – Nuuk – Paamiut area. The labiodental fricative [f]

672-419: Is the most innovative by further simplifying its structure by eliding /n/ . The Greenlandic three- vowel system, composed of /i/ , /u/ , and /a/ , is typical for an Eskimo–Aleut language. Double vowels are analyzed as two morae and so they are phonologically a vowel sequence and not a long vowel. They are also orthographically written as two vowels. There is only one diphthong, /ai/ , which occurs only at

714-471: Is the most innovative of the Greenlandic dialects since it has assimilated consonant clusters and vowel sequences more than West Greenlandic. Kalaallisut is further divided into four subdialects. One that is spoken around Upernavik has certain similarities to East Greenlandic, possibly because of a previous migration from eastern Greenland. A second dialect is spoken in the region of Uummannaq and

756-957: Is the only word that is required in a sentence. Since verbs inflect for number and person of both subject and object, the verb is in fact a clause itself. Therefore, clauses in which all participants are expressed as free-standing noun phrases are rather rare. The following examples show the possibilities of leaving out the verbal arguments: Sini-ppoq sleep- 3SG / IND Sini-ppoq sleep-3SG/IND "(S)he sleeps" Angut man. ABS sinippoq sleep- 3SG / IND Angut sinippoq man.ABS sleep-3SG/IND Polysynthetic language In linguistic typology , polysynthetic languages , formerly holophrastic languages , are highly synthetic languages , i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as

798-564: Is the policy of "Greenlandization" of Greenlandic society that began with the home rule agreement of 1979. The policy has worked to reverse the former trend towards marginalization of the Greenlandic language by making it the official language of education. The fact that Greenlandic has become the only language used in primary schooling means that monolingual Danish-speaking parents in Greenland are now raising children bilingual in Danish and Greenlandic. Greenlandic now has several dedicated news media:

840-775: Is the primary channel and most of its programming is in the Greenlandic language ( Kalaallisut ). KNR2 goes on air only to broadcast live from specific events. In 2006, KNR TV installed a complete digital SD-SDI production and editing facility with the infrastructure needed to provide for the local production of talk shows, news, and remote broadcasts. Prior to January 2013, KNR1 also featured programming from Danish television networks DR and TV 2 but when several of DR's channels were made free-to-air in Greenland, KNR decided to focus on original Greenlandic programming. On 21 June 2020, both KNR1 and KNR2 switched to 720p HD resolution. The KNR radio station broadcasts nationwide. It

882-464: Is usually only marked for agreement with the subject (e.g. Spanish hablo "I speak" where the -o ending marks agreement with the first person singular subject), but in many languages verbs also agree with the object (e.g. the Kiswahili word nakupenda "I love you" where the n- prefix marks agreement with the first person singular subject and the ku- prefix marks agreement with

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924-613: The Disko Bay . The standard language is based on the central Kalaallisut dialect spoken in Sisimiut in the north, around Nuuk and as far south as Maniitsoq . Southern Kalaallisut is spoken around Narsaq and Qaqortoq in the south. Table 1 shows the differences in the pronunciation of the word for "humans" in the two main dialects and Inuktun. It can be seen that Inuktun is the most conservative by maintaining ⟨gh⟩ , which has been elided in Kalaallisut, and Tunumiisut

966-423: The Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq . tuntu reindeer -ssur -hunt -qatar - FUT -ni -say -ksaite - NEG -ngqiggte -again -uq - 3SG . IND tuntu -ssur -qatar -ni -ksaite -ngqiggte -uq reindeer -hunt -FUT -say -NEG -again -3SG.IND "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer." Except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of

1008-404: The 1700s. Greenlandic's first orthography was developed by Samuel Kleinschmidt in 1851, but within 100 years, it already differed substantially from the spoken language because of a number of sound changes . An extensive orthographic reform was undertaken in 1973 and made the script much easier to learn. This resulted in a boost in Greenlandic literacy , which is now among the highest in

1050-492: The Greenlandic National Radio, Kalaallit Nunaata Radioa , which provides television and radio programming in Greenlandic. The newspaper Sermitsiaq has been published since 1958 and merged in 2010 with the other newspaper Atuagagdliutit/Grønlandsposten , which had been established in 1861 to form a single large Greenlandic language publishing house. Before June 2009, Greenlandic shared its status as

1092-505: The Greenlandic grammar is similar to other Eskimo languages, on the morpholological and syntactic plan. The morphology of Greenlandic is highly synthetic and exclusively suffixing (except for a single highly-limited and fossilized demonstrative prefix). The language creates very long words by means of adding strings of suffixes to a stem. In principle, there is no limit to the length of a Greenlandic word, but in practice, words with more than six derivational suffixes are not so frequent, and

1134-491: The average number of morphemes per word is three to five. The language has between 400 and 500 derivational suffixes and around 318 inflectional suffixes. There are few compound words but many derivations. The grammar uses a mixture of head and dependent marking . Both agent and patient are marked on the predicate, and the possessor is marked on nouns, with dependent noun phrases inflecting for case. The primary morphosyntactic alignment of full noun phrases in Kalaallisut

1176-765: The eastern Tunumiisut variety) is the only Eskimo language having lost its dual. Verbs carry a bipersonal inflection for subject and object. Possessive noun phrases inflect for both possessor and case. In this section, the examples are written in Greenlandic standard orthography except that morpheme boundaries are indicated by a hyphen. Greenlandic distinguishes three open word classes : nouns , verbs and particles . Verbs inflect for person and number of subject and object as well as for mood. Nouns inflect for possession and for case. Particles do not inflect. Oqar-poq say- 3SG / IND Oqar-poq say-3SG/IND "(S)he says" Angut man. ABS Angut man.ABS "A man" Naamik No Naamik No "No" The verb

1218-425: The ends of words. Before a uvular consonant ( /q/ or /ʁ/ ), /i/ is realized allophonically as [e] , [ɛ] or [ɐ] , and /u/ is realized allophonically as [o] or [ɔ] , and the two vowels are written ⟨e, o⟩ respectively (as in some orthographies used for Quechua and Aymara ). /a/ becomes retracted to [ɑ] in the same environment. /i/ is rounded to [y] before labial consonants. /u/

1260-466: The first Greenlandic dictionary in 1750 and the first grammar in 1760. From the Danish colonization in the 1700s to the beginning of Greenlandic home rule in 1979, Greenlandic experienced increasing pressure from the Danish language. In the 1950s, Denmark's linguistic policies were directed at strengthening Danish. Of primary significance was the fact that post-primary education and official functions were conducted in Danish. From 1851 to 1973, Greenlandic

1302-586: The head noun with agreement morphemes. There are some dependent-marking languages that may be considered to be polysynthetic because they use case stacking to achieve similar effects, and very long words. An example from Chukchi , a polysynthetic, incorporating , and agglutinating language of Russia which also has grammatical cases unlike the majority of incorporating polysynthetic languages: t- 1S . SUBJ meyŋ- great levt- head pəγt- hurt rkən 1S . PRES t- meyŋ- levt- pəγt- rkən 1S.SUBJ great head hurt 1S.PRES 'I have

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1344-441: The locations of the different Inuit languages, among them the two main dialects of Greenlandic and the separate language Inuktun ("Avanersuaq"). The most prominent Greenlandic dialect is Kalaallisut, which is the official language of Greenland. The name Kalaallisut is often used as a cover term for all of Greenlandic. The eastern dialect ( Tunumiit oraasiat ) , spoken in the vicinity of Ammassalik Island and Ittoqqortoormiit ,

1386-428: The morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative, and except for the morpheme tuntu "reindeer", none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. Another way to achieve a high degree of synthesis is when languages can form compound words by incorporation of nouns, so that entire words can be incorporated into

1428-483: The official language in Greenland with Danish. Since then, Greenlandic has become the sole official language. That has made Greenlandic a unique example of an indigenous language of the Americas that is recognized by law as the only official language of a semi-independent country. Nevertheless, it is still considered to be in a "vulnerable" state by the UNESCO Red Book of Language Endangerment . The country has

1470-435: The other morphemes can appear in isolation. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have a very high ratio. There is no generally agreed upon definition of polysynthesis. Generally polysynthetic languages have polypersonal agreement , although some agglutinative languages that are not polysynthetic, such as Basque , Hungarian and Georgian , also have it. Some authors apply

1512-422: The term polysynthetic to languages with high morpheme-to-word ratios, but others use it for languages that are highly head-marking , or those that frequently use noun incorporation . Polysynthetic languages can be agglutinative or fusional depending on whether they encode one or multiple grammatical categories per affix . At the same time, the question of whether to call a particular language polysynthetic

1554-733: The use of derivational suffixes or the combination of affixes with aspectual meanings with the semantic lexical aspect of different verbs. However, some linguists have suggested that Greenlandic always marks future tense . Another question is whether the language has noun incorporation or whether the processes that create complex predicates that include nominal roots are derivational in nature. When adopting new concepts or technologies, Greenlandic usually constructs new words made from Greenlandic roots, but modern Greenlandic has also taken many loans from Danish and English . The language has been written in Latin script since Danish colonization began in

1596-441: The verb word, as baby is incorporated in the English verb babysit . Another common feature of polysynthetic languages is a tendency to use head marking as a means of syntactic cohesion. This means that many polysynthetic languages mark grammatical relations between verbs and their constituents by indexing the constituents on the verb with agreement morphemes, and the relation between noun phrases and their constituents by marking

1638-406: The word is still most frequently used to refer to such "sentence words". Often polysynthesis is achieved when languages have extensive agreement between elements verbs and their arguments so that the verb is marked for agreement with the grammatical subject and object. In this way a single word can encode information about all the elements in a transitive clause. In Indo-European languages the verb

1680-489: The work of Edward Sapir , who used it as one of his basic typological categories. Recently, Mark C. Baker has suggested formally defining polysynthesis as a macro-parameter within Noam Chomsky 's principles and parameters theory of grammar. Other linguists question the basic utility of the concept for typology since it covers many separate morphological types that have little else in common. The word "polysynthesis"

1722-530: The world . Greenlandic was brought to Greenland by the arrival of the Thule people in the 1200s. The languages that were spoken by the earlier Saqqaq and Dorset cultures in Greenland are unknown. The first descriptions of Greenlandic date from the 1600s. With the arrival of Danish missionaries in the early 1700s and the beginning of Danish colonization of Greenland, the compilation of dictionaries and description of grammar began. The missionary Paul Egede wrote

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1764-434: Was written in a complicated orthography devised by the missionary linguist Samuel Kleinschmidt . In 1973, a new orthography was introduced, intended to bring the written language closer to the spoken standard, which had changed considerably since Kleinschmidt's time. The reform was effective, and in the years following it, Greenlandic literacy has received a boost. Another development that has strengthened Greenlandic language

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