There was, at the beginning of the latest European Union ban on seal products, an ad campaign in Nunavut that featured a young Inuit couple and, to me, a very interesting phraseology:
Nattit Piunngittuunngittut.
An English translation would not really suffice so I'll try and break the second part down to its morphemes:
piu + nngit + tut + u + nngit + tut
good not they is not they
Literally, it means "they are not a bad thing" (see, I said that it didn't translate well).
There are a few features in Inuktitut syntax that do not express the same way that English (or any other language) does.
The pronoun (with an embedded verb mood - statement, question, or command) occurs at the end of the phrase, but you'll also notice that it can be in the middle of a phrase as in [good not they are not they]. This fact, though, is less important than the fact that the pronouns seem to have a strong affinity for the 'negative' affix, -nngit-.
This 'tiering' of valiancy ('negative' to pronoun, for example) is systemic - ie, it serves a syntactic purpose. Positive statements/states of being can be made into their antonyms:
pisuktunga 'I am walking'
pisunngittunga 'I am not walking'
quviasuktunga 'I am happy'
quviasunngittunga 'I am sad'
The most used exchange in Inuktitut today must be:
qanuippit? 'how are you?'
qanuinngittunga 'I am fine'
-the last two examples actually have a root qanuit- that means 'not physically well' such that its antonym indeed means 'well'; the question asks: 'are you unwell?' so the response is 'I am not unwell'.
The use of antonymy in Inuktitut is different from English in that binary treatment of 'states of being', such as emotions and current conditions, are easily understood and accepted as syntactically well-formed:
quviasuktunga 'I am happy'
quviasunngittunga 'I am sad'
numaasuktunga 'I am sad'
numaasunngittunga 'I am not sad (ie, happy)'
uirngaqtunga 'I am sleepy'
uirnganngittunga 'I am wide awake'
The rule of thumb to remember is that the 'negative' morpheme is a relatively productive element in Inuktitut syntax and is normally inserted between the stem (everything before, but excluding the pronoun) and the pronoun to affect an "opposite" effect.
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Most Inuktitut dictionaries are in the present tense, '3rd person, singular' [-juq/-tuq] pronoun, as in:
aanniajuq 'sick;in pain (he is...)'
aitsiqtuq 'get [it]/someone (he goes to...)'
(taken from: Inuktut Glossary | Inuktut Tusaalanga)
and are usually in the positive/affirmative sense.
Using the pattern described above, I may express the antonyms of the two phrases as:
aannianngittuq 'sick;in pain (he is not...)', and
aitsinngittuq 'get [it]/someone (he does not go and...)'.
I can go a step further in this exercise by varying the pronoun endings using this verb table for "to be":
|
1 |
2 |
3+ |
|
-junga/tunga ‘I am’ |
-juguk/-tuguk ‘we (2) are’ |
-jugut/tugut ‘we (3+) are’ |
|
-jutit/-tutit ‘you are’ |
-jusik/-tusik ‘you (2) are’ |
-jusi/-tusi ‘you (3+) are’ |
|
-juq/-tuq ‘s/he, it is’ |
-juuk/-tuuk ‘they (2) are’ |
-jut/-tut ‘they (3+) are’ |
and the basic verb phrases from the online resource (I believe it was developed by Pirurvik) into something like this:
aanniajuguk 'sick;in pain (we (2) are...)'
aannianngittuguk 'sick;in pain (we (2) are not...)'
kaapituqtut '[drinking] coffee (they (3+) are...)'
kaapitunngittut '[drinking] coffee (they (3+) are not...)'
Panniqtuumiitutit 'you are in Pangnirtung'
Panniqtuummiinngittutit 'you are not in Pangnirtung'.
Go through a few "...(he, she, it...)" verb entries from the online dictionary as we just did and vary the pronouns and then express their antonyms.
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In the next installment, we will go through tenses, antonymy, the "to be" pronouns and introduce the pronoun forms that denote questions/queries.
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