104 



place and xsidth of articulation adapted to tiie surrounding and 

 especially the following consonants; it is drawn forward in the 

 mouth by a following point consonant, pushed in and back 

 by a back consonant. This becomes especially evident on com- 

 paring the variations which take place in the final vowel of 

 words with vowel-stems when they enter into combination with 

 various suffixes, and also on comparing the individual and 

 dialectal differences in the pronunciation of the vowels in the 

 same words, as far as it has been possible to observe them. 



This often extreme shifting of the resonance conditions of 

 the vowels in Greenlandic is no doubt first of all to be attrib- 

 uted to the dispersedness of the consonant-system, to the 

 large extent of the field of articulation. It is in many cases 

 difficult for the tongue to change position from one consonant 

 to the next, and it is the intervening vowel that is affected by 

 the difficulty. 



Vowel articulations are on the whole looser than the cor- 

 responding consonant articulations. The consonants are the 

 fixed points in the stream of sound; there is traditionally more 

 energy connected with them than with the vowels. The con- 

 sonantal sound is a noise which can be produced in only one 

 place of articulation, but in the case of the vowels, a musical 

 tone asserts itself, which blends with the noise of articulation. 

 This musical tone (natural pitch) can be produced about alike in 

 several places in the mouth, while the tongue assumes various 

 positions (cf. a back a with a front ai, but at each new place, 

 the sound will be differently shaded by reason of the changing 

 unharmonious noise-elements, which accompany it. Still there 

 is for any given vowel in a given word a traditional tendency 

 to articulate it in a certain manner, i. e. to raise the surface 

 of tongue toward certain points on the palate. I am inclined 

 to believe that this tendency is more variable in the Green- 

 landic language than it is as a rule in English and Danish. 



