The East Greenland dialect. 207 



Irom Greenlandic-Danish to Danish-Greenlandic, namely in order to 

 show how the several ideas for which the East Greenlanders have 

 special words, are expressed in other dialects. I also deemed it 

 best, in accordance with the methods of American ethnographers, 

 to group these ideas under certain main headings, and then 

 arrange them alphabetically in each. The headings are , as will 

 be seen: — 



I, Earth, Vegetable Kingdom, Water, Ice. 

 II, Space, Air, Light, Sky. 



III, Parts of the Body. 



IV, Animals. 



V, Men and the Spirit World. 

 VI, Men's Work and Productions. 

 VII, Miscellaneous. 



In the Greenlandic dictionary, as we know, the alphabetical!}^ 

 arranged root words form the headings under which all the other 

 words which are derived from it are grouped. In the list which is 

 to follow^ the arrangement takes regard only to the meaning, whether 

 the words fall under the same root-word or not. The chief diffi- 

 culties encountered in the work were firstly that the endeavour was 

 to discover not only whether a given word occurred in a certain 

 dialect, but, strictly speaking, also whether it was probable that a 

 word like this was realh' missing in given cases, secondly that this 

 had regard not only to the root-words but to the derivations. When 

 these aims are held in view, it must be admitted that the. list is 

 very incomplete, and that a tacit 'as far as the author is aware' 

 must constantly be understood where we find such expressions as 

 'occur' or 'do not occur'. All the same I believe that the conclu- 

 sions that may be drawn from it with a certain degree of certainty 

 will not be lacking in ethnographical interest. 



As to difficulties in the etymological explanation of the words, 

 the East Greenlandic dialect seems to have a number of peculiar 

 formations of words, by sound changes, contractions and to some 

 extent by affixes, which are not to be found in Kleinschmidt's dictio- 

 nary. Moreover, in these notes, the words are not always given in 

 their normal form, but sometimes with suffixes (e. g. meaning 'his, 

 mine'), and in the plural. As a general rule, everything has been 

 given in the list just as it is, and the West Greenland explanation 

 given in conformity. 



The most striking and obvious difference in a dialect is, of 

 course, that certain sounds are pronounced differently, and are 

 therefore usually transcribed with other signs. In the written notes 



