suffixes working as roots in Inuktitut?

zangtai
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Joined:2012-12-06, 17:49
suffixes working as roots in Inuktitut?

Postby zangtai » 2015-07-06, 1:43

Hi!

I've been trying to translate the title of a Canadian poem by Shane Koyczan, "We are more". I have asked a few native Inuktitut speakers, but it seems the sense of the sentence is not that easy to translate, as all the options I've been given have to do with "more" being interpreted as "more in numbers, more numerous", whereas the poem's sense is "more than the sum of our parts, more than what others may narrowly define you as", so it's a qualitative sense of more instead of a quantitative one.

Could a suffix/affix such as niqsaq (more), as in takiniqsaujunga (I am taller) be used as a root, say, *niqsaujunga (I am more) or *niqsaqtugut (we are more)? Or is there another way to express this?

Thanks!

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