115 



The deep [a] forces the under lip still farther down and the 

 distance between the lips (and the jaws) is considerably increased. 



In the pronunciation of [eg^'eg^], I noticed that the corners 

 of the mouth were very much drawn back and that the mouth- 

 opening was narrow. 



AU the rounded sounds are pronounced with a narrower 

 passage between the lips than in the case of the i- and e-sounds. 



In a word like [wy«], there seems to occur no other 

 change between [w] and [a] than a wider opening of the lips; 

 the lips are not drawn back ; the и-Ше element is not so 

 much due to any rounding of the lips as to the strongly 

 retracted position of the tongue. Occasionally, however, I ob- 

 served both marked rounding and marked pouting of the lips, 

 as in [o-wa] [to'S'ùt] (о- and у with «53^''), and there is no 

 doubt that some rounding, even if ever so little, always takes 

 place, narrowest in the case of [м]; but as a rule the differ- 

 ence between the rounding and the slip-shaped position of 

 rest is remarkably small. The inner rounding which occurs in 

 the innermost part of the mouth in the pronunciation of those 

 vowels that are influenced by r and q gives them a more 

 closed character than they would get from the rounding of the 

 lips alone. The long [o-] therefore sounds more closed (and 

 has a deeper natural pitch) than in English all, law or in 

 French mort, although the lip-opening in all these cases is 

 about the same. But the short [э] before r often sounds more 

 open in Greenlandic. The two [o]'s of [гр-гдтвищ] are not 

 quite similar. 



The result, if any result at all can be reached, is some- 

 thing like this: when the Greenlander talks, his lip-movements 

 are more tardy and vague than one would expect from the 

 liveliness of his voice and his tongue. His li[)s move relatively 

 less forward and backward than up and down, in certain 

 words or certain sound-groups, he is satisfied with a mere 

 approach to labialization. 



