THE LANGUAGE 



annual care to go round at night and spread sacks 

 over the frame, and to take the sacks off and put 

 them away every morning. For this they got a 

 present of a couple of dollars and an armful of green 

 vegetables at the end of the season, and shrill were 

 their cries of "Nakomek," and broad were their 

 grins of happiness, when the time came for them to 

 get their perquisite. 



And this is how we managed to persuade the 

 hardier sorts of vegetables to grow to a moderate and 

 eatable size before the ground froze again in October. 



And among all our other work, we had the 

 language to learn. It is not an easy language, but 

 I have this to its credit : it is beautifully gram- 

 matical, governed by plain, straightforward rules, 

 and the rules are absolutely without exceptions. 

 For this last reason I have even ventured to say that 

 I would rather learn Eskimo again than any of the 

 languages I had to learn at school. The great 

 difficulty is that the learning involves a prodigious 

 feat of memory ; there are so many words for the 

 same thing under different circumstances ; and it is 

 quite the proper thing to build up a word of fifteen 

 or sixteen syllables by sticking all sorts of tags and 

 bits between the unchanging root of a verb and its 

 grammatical and expressive ending. To take a very 

 mild example 



" Tikkipok he comes ; 

 Tikki-niarasuarkor-pok he will probably try to come." 



On the other hand, there are quite short words 

 which express some picturesque idea, such as otok 

 the seal which is basking on the ice in the spring 



sunshine ; and, taken all together, the language is a 



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