The Angmagsalik Eskimo. 409 
lances preserved in the West Greenland section of the National Museum 
at Copenhagen, which somehow appear to have escaped his attention!. 
A peculiar form of harpoon is used by sealers hunting in couples 
on the ice. This weapon is called by Horm the Ituartit harpoon?, which 
term was generally accepted until Cand. THALBITZER in 1909 chose to 
style it the “Ituartin’” harpoon. Here obviously the linguist must be 
right, and those unversed in the Greenland tongue had perforce to recog- 
nise the new name. In 1914, however, with the publication of Mr. THAtL- 
BITZER’s Work, complications arose. We here find, оп р. 422, among 
“Technical names”, the “ittuarteen, itciarteen harpoon”; the Editor does 
not, however, restrict himself to these technical terms, but uses also 
“ituartit harpoon” (р. 409; р. 412), “ice sealing harpoon (ittuarteq)” . 
(p. 421; p. 433) and “ittuartin” (p. 420). Disregarding the phonetic spel- 
ling, and overlooking the difference between one “t” and “tt” as im- 
material, we have still four different terms remaining. That all four 
are current and correct we do not venture to doubt, since the linguist 
uses them indiscriminately, and we may rest assured that there is some 
valid linguistic reason for the fact that only two of them are included 
under the heading “technical names”. The ordinary reader, however, 
not being a linguist, comes to a standstill here, with the obvious query: 
“What am I to call the thing?” I for my part have thought it. safest 
for the present to keep to the term originally given by Hom: “Ituartit”. 
In his paper published in 1909, Mr. THALBITZER haled forth from 
the Stockholm Museum a couple of ordinary West Greenland tow-line 
toggles, which he showed in illustration as points of ituartit harpoons?; 
in 1914, however, (p. 433) he makes reparation for the error in the fol- 
lowing words: “The whole form of the weapons, however, makes this 
1 The young Danish ethnographer, Kar BirkET Smir, has already, in a 
lecture delivered to “Det Grønlandske Selskab” referred to this point as 
“one of the inaccuracies which have crept into the description of Kommandør 
Horm's collection recently published by the linquist Witt. THALBITZER”. 
Hr. Вавкет Smıtn’s studies in South Greenland, and among the collec- 
tions in the National Museum, had shown him that Mr. THALBITZER was 
but imperfectly acquainted with the Greenland harpoon. He was also 
aware, moreover, that the East Greenland form was derived from the 
original type, whereas that shown in fig. 4 is a variant which later made 
its appearance on the West Coast. He did not, however, — as far as can be 
judged from the text of the lecture as published in Det grønlandske Sel- 
skabs Aarsskrift, 1912 — perceive that Mason’s illustration of the East 
Greenland harpoon agreed with the form of all other East Greenland 
harpoons, and that it was only in his description that any inaccuracy 
existed. Since the above was written a correction has been made in the 
text of the lecture as published (Det Gronlandske Selskabs Aarsskrift, 1914, 
p. 62). 
> Medd. om Grønland, vol. 10, р. 78 and Тнльв. II (i. e. Horn) р. 51. 
# Teas: 1; р; 501. 
