10 



observations are bul few, and I have tried U) nse uniy sncli 

 sources as there is reason to beUeve are reliable. 



It is by no means surprising to meet witii a complete 

 confusion of various orthographical systems in those descriptions 

 of the Eskimo language which have hitherto been published. 

 Fur tlie authors have belonged to difîerent nations, and each 

 one has of course started out from his own language, and 

 made his own native pronunciation and orthography the basis 

 of his auricular impression and his manner of spelling this 

 strange literatureless language. It is natural that each one as 

 far as possible operates with the alphabetical characters of his 

 own language, and only few of them seem to realize how purely 

 accidental it is if these happen to correspond to the sounds of 

 the new language, and how improbable it is that the sound- 

 systems of the two languages will in any way cover each other. 

 Danish and German authors have described the dialects in 

 Greenland and in Labrador; French, English and Russian 

 authors have described the western dialects. They are men who 

 themselves have traveled through Eskimo territory, often men 

 who have made long stays among the natives, but they have 

 always lacked scientific linguistic training and too often also 

 natural linguistic talent. The specimens of the language given 

 in their works are therefore spelled according to the most 

 varied principles. . For a philologist it is not uninteresting to 

 compare the many different reproductions of the same word in 

 these different works, (among other reasons because they give 

 an insight into the national differences in the impressions 

 conveyed by the common alphabetical symbols!; general com- 

 parisons between the stocks of words and between the meanings 

 of words in the different dialects may no doubt be easily under- 

 taken ; but a scientific comparison with a view to clearing up 

 such phonetical differentiations as may indicate something of 

 the relations between the Eskimo dialects and of the history of 

 the language can only be undertaken with great difficulty and 



