THE SUN GOES AWAY FOR THE WINTER 101 



autumn had moved away except the same bearded Ob- 

 lutok whom I have described, his wife, daughter and son- 

 in-law, Sitsak. None of these spoke English to any extent 

 but they used instead a sort of "pidgin" which has grown 

 up among the Eskimos for a peculiar reason. 



There are probably few languages in the world more 

 difficult to learn than Eskimo. If you want to get along 

 well, you have to use every day a vocabulary of ten or 

 twelve thousand words. This is a vocabulary three or 

 four times as large as that used by the average European 

 when speaking a European language. In addition, the 

 inflections are so complicated that Greek or German would 

 be easy in comparison. The white men who come in con- 

 tact with the Eskimos are ordinarily not of the scholarly 

 type. They may try when first they come to the country 

 to learn Eskimo but they soon give it up as being hope- 

 lessly difficult and drop into the general habit of using 

 "jargon" or "pidgin." 



This jargon itself has been developed because of the 

 difficulty of learning the real language. It is an artificial 

 tongue, comparable to the pidgin English that is used by 

 Europeans in dealing with Chinamen. The Mackenzie 

 River jargon consists of three or four hundred words, 

 according to which whaler or which Eskimo you talk 

 with. In addition to the regular jargon nearly every in- 

 dividual invents a few special words of his own which 

 are known to him and those he deals with. Where the 

 real Eskimo is highly inflected, this jargon is not inflected 

 at all. 



It is a curious thing that many white men, even those 

 who have lived for long periods with the Eskimos, have 

 mistaken the jargon for the real Eskimo language. Ex- 

 amples of that were all the police who were in the vicinity 



