208 H. Rink. 



a change of letters of this kind has been carried out in some of the 

 East Greenlandic words, but not in all. As I have gathered from 

 other Eskimo glossaries, similar variations in the pronunciation are 

 found repeated practically everywhere. They occur even on the 

 West coast of Greenland, and they are shown by various archaic 

 spellings. As far as we can judge at present, they have mostly a 

 local character, holding good of certain districts, tribes, or small 

 communities, and a special expert investigation would be required 

 in order to discover whether they might possibly have greater im- 

 portance for comparative linguistics. The following letters in the 

 West Greenland dialect appear in the East Greenland, in the follow- 

 ing form: 



West Greenland East Greenland 



For ts is often substituted d, gd, or / 



p and f 





b 



t 





d 



s 



— 



I or (rarely) j 



к and q (к) 



— 



g or r 



и 





i 



о 





e 



a 



— 



e 



At any rate, these memoranda from East Greenland, which 

 proceed from native Greenlanders, are of greater value than those 

 from other Eskimo countries, which are generally based on the 

 observations of foreigners. The most striking peculiarity seems 

 to be the change of the vowels, particularly the substitution of i 

 for u, although this latter change also occurs in some places on 

 the West coast. 



On the list which follows below, at the corresponding West 

 Greenland expression has been added (after the sign =), in what 

 other dialects it has also been found by the author, especially if it 

 has been found in them all — that is, missing in East Greenland 

 alone, — in some cases too whether it has not been found elsewhere 

 either. Where the divergences in the East Greenland expressions 

 were only slight, information of this kind was considered to be 

 superfluous. On the other hand, information has been given in the 

 rarer cases in which the East Greenland shows a greatei- resem- 

 blance to remoter dialects than the West Greenland dialect does. 



A good deal of explanatory information has also been given as 

 to the derivation of the words, but it is obvious that a fair know- 

 ledge of the language is required in order to understand the list. 

 A preliminary bird's eye view of the most important results may, 

 therefore, prove of some use. 



