129 



On account of the whole character of the language (all 

 conceivable combinations of long and short sounds possible; 

 the stress bound to the quantity and vice-versa*); continual 

 quantitative changes on account of the varying suffixes), it 

 presents great rhythmical irregularity and a number of 

 types of rhylmical combination. The long words are scarcely 

 ever alike in structure. Therefore one of the chief features of 

 the phonetical character of the language is its uneven heavy 

 rhythm. This character of the rhythm is closely connected not 

 only with the quantity of the sounds, but also with the mode 

 of articulation (the intermittant coming and going of the voice 

 in the succession of voiced and unvoiced sounds), and is thus 

 in part mechanically determined. 



In short words, as we have seen, the expiratory stress is 

 most frequently laid on the last syllable and is strongest there, 

 a circumstance which is most noticeable in words of two syl- 

 lables ending in q; in the long words, where several suffixal 

 endings are piled up, a central word-stress or a dynamic syn- 

 thesis is entirely lacking. Some suffixes, when added to words, 

 cause them to change their stress, some do not. The added 

 suffixes themselves often become centres of stress or cause 

 the expiratory stress to be evenly distributed to several parts 

 of the word (just as in a sentence in our languages). 



Change of stress and quantity does not take place in 

 any word without an accompanying change of the meaning of 

 the word, and this in turn occurs only through some change 

 of suffix. 



I shall give some selected examples of these frequent 

 changes of stress in the Greenlandic Eskimo language. 



') 1 do not maintain that it is nljsolutely impossilile for the stress of 

 a syllable in a Greenlandic word to be strengthened without any 

 lengthening in the quantity of the succeeding consonant; but such 

 cases are rare. 

 XXXI. 9 



