218 



"/ barré des Polonais"). This is surely due to a misunder- 

 stauding of Petitol's attempt to describe the Eskimo aspirated /, 

 which is a point consonant. — It is still more unfortunate 

 that Henry seems to have misunderstood the meaning of pk. 

 It is true that he uses the symbol // in his system for a 

 "gutturale sourde" along side of ;^ as the symbol for a "gutturale 

 sonore"*), both sounds being "spirantes continues". The first 

 of these two labels might very well be applied to my uvular \p\ ; 

 the second sound 1 do not know from Greenlandic. Perhaps 

 [^j does really occur in this dialect, though rarely, for instance 

 in the word which Petitot writes kappané (on the top), cf. Gr. 

 [кд^р'апе] (on or by the promontory). But then what becomes 

 of the sound [q\ in Henry's system? If h has the signification 

 of [p\ and [^] of [g], there is no symbol in his system which 

 can correspond to [q\. He seems to have misunderstood the 

 meaning of Petitot's pk and pkp , taking them to be combina- 

 tions of two or three sounds, к and r (in Petitot p) both stand 

 in the same line in his system as "gutturales", the first a "sourde 

 momentanée", the second a "sonore vibrante continue". But this 

 surely does not mean that к in Henry's system stands for the 

 uvular [g]; if that were the case, the usual back-^' would entirely 

 lack a separate symbol in the system. About the r in the system, 

 he says: "Get r n'est autre chose qu'une variation dialectale, 

 un simple renforcement que l'idiome des Tchiglit fait subir à un 

 к primitif". As a conclusive reason for this is mentioned the 

 fact that in other dialects kr is found as simple ^•, for instance 

 M. kpolépk = Gr. kotlîik = Lahr, kullek (a lamp). Hence the 

 whole mistake; for the Gr. and L. orthography here expresses 

 exactly the same thing as the M. orthography (Petitot), but Henry 

 did not know that in all old works (also often in new worksi the 

 symbol к is used at random now for [k\ and now for \q\ ; the 



*) Henry, u. 8. p. 6. He compares these two sounds with the Arabic sounds 

 ghain and 'ain, but I am not sure that he is right. His r he com- 

 pares with Arabic rbayn. 



