modus.irrealis - Inuktitut

[modus.irrealis]

This is my Inuktitut thread for my three month TAC. I found a copy of Introductory Inuktitut by Mick Mallon, but I'm not sure it's made for self-study, so maybe I will try the online lessons at www.tusaalanga.ca to start.

Does anybody know of any very simple texts in Inuktitut that can be found online? I've searched but I haven't found anything at all.I think I would find it more interesting to struggle with a simple text + reference grammar, than to go through the lesson-based approach.

[księżycowy]

http://www.inuitmyths.com/index.htm has some really interesting myths and traditional stories of varying length, some with translations.

[modus.irrealis]

Thanks! That looks like something I would really enjoy trying to read, and with the English translations it's perfect.

[modus.irrealis]

I decided that I don't have the patience to go through any lessons, so I thought I would dive into reading directly about the grammar, using "Introductory Inuktitut - Reference Grammar" by Mick Mallon and "Inuktitut - Eine grammatische Skizze" by Elke Nowak. But I am seriously in over my head with virtually everything, so this should be fun...

My first goal is to get a basic understanding of simple declarative sentences. There seems to be a key difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, but this seems to be more grammatical than semantic. The reference grammar has examples like

1) niuviqtimik takujunga = I see a trader
2) niuviqti takujara = I see the trader

Looking ahead in my grammar I see that niuviqtimik is in the objective case and niuviqti is in the absolute case. There's also an ergative case, so Inuktitut will be the first ergative language I have tried to learn. I sort of understand in theory what ergative and absolute are, but it's unclear to me what this objective case is. This may have something to do with this antipassive, but for now I'll go with thinking that taku- in 1) is intransitive, and taku- in 2) is transitive, and that the difference is not marked for this verb, while it is for other verbs. And then there's a relation between transitivity and specificity (this is not too strange, since I know in Turkish that only specific direct objects are marked with the accusative case). This would mean -mik marks the object of an intransitive verb , but hopefully I'll be able to understand this soon in a way that makes sense.

Anyway, on to the endings. For intransitive verbs, the endings only refer to a subject and they are

1s -junga
1d -juguk
1p -jugut

2s -jutit
2d -jusik
2p -jusi

3s -juq
3d -juuk
3p -jut

And -j- becomes -t- after consonants. There's an alternate series of endings which seem to differ only in the initial consonant, with -v- after vowels and -p- after consonants, but I'm not sure what exact difference there is, so I will just keep this in mind from now on. (There's also a set of "optional" negative endings used with negative verbs, but I will ignore that for now.)

On to transitive verbs, where the endings refer to the subject and object. There's a lot of combinations here, but I can't find most of them. Both books just give the possibilities where the subject and object are both singular. Does anybody know where I can find the other endings?

1s.2s -jarma
1s.3s -jaanga

2s.1s -jagit
2s.3s -jaatit

3s.1s -jara
3s.2s -jait
3s.3s -janga

This doesn't cover reflexive meanings, which seem to be done differently, but I'll leave that for later too.

The endings also don't seem to have a lot of patterns to make them easier to learn. This will be tough for me, I think .

[modus.irrealis]

So I found a list of all possible subject-object suffixes on the French wiktionary: http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/-jarma. This is nice, but it would be even nicer if I could find a book source for these things.

I wanted to ask, though, is there any pattern at all to these suffixes? Or do I just have to learn each suffix separately.

In any case, I will skip the interrogative and imperative forms for now and go on to the participles, since these seem like they'll be more common.