46 



On the whole, all information about the language outside 

 of those places which have been visited by the missionaries is 

 very incomplete and must be employed with the greatest care. 



If I think, notwithstanding, that I have been able to get 

 some certain results out of comparisons between Greenlandic 

 words and those specimens of the language spoken on the 

 northernmost coasts of the American continent which mission- 

 aries and arctic explorers have written down, then it is because, 

 aside from those accidents of orthography which are due to 

 misunderstanding or inaccuracy, I And that the specimens 

 show certain consistent deviations which are without doubt 

 peculiar to certain parts of these coasts and characteristic of 

 the dialects there. The partial agreement of orthography in 

 the specimens of the different explorers with respect to these 

 deviations indicates that all the explorers have heard them. 

 Moreover since it seems very uncertain whether these dialects, 

 being so difficult of access, will ever be subjected to compe- 

 tent treatment by specialists in linguistics who will be willing 

 to make the long journey necessary for investigating them 

 at firsthand, we must be content for the present to make the 

 best of the material at hand. 



(127°) he writes: "wenn mir ihre Ausdrücke unbekannt waren, halfen 

 sie sich durch Zeichensprache . . . Die Sprache dieser Leute weicht etwas 

 ab von der anderen Eskimos an dieser Küste. Sie verstanden mich 

 sehr gut, mir hingegen wurde es im Anfang schwer Alles zu verstehen". 

 Also among the Eskimo on the coast of Prince Albert's Land (72° N. lat. 

 118° W. long.) mutual comprehension seems to have been brought about 

 without difficulty. These Eskimo live one and a half times as far from 

 Labrador as the inhabitants of Upernavik are from Cape Farewell on 

 the coast of Greenland. That Miertsching was able, partially at least, 

 to understand the distant Eskimo and they him, distinctly indicates that 

 there must be great homogeneousness both in the structure of the 

 language and in the single sounds of the language all the way from 

 Labrador to Point Barrow. Unfortunately Miertsching says nothing about 

 the nature of those differences of pronounciation which often caused 

 the difficulty in understanding. 



