223 



Point Barrow Eskimo has been given by Ray in the report 

 of the international polar expedition to this place in 1885. As 

 in many of the later American works containing specimens of 

 the native languages of the new world, the words in this list 

 are spelled in accordance with the standard alphabet recom- 

 mended by the Bureau of American Ethnology (Smithsonian 

 Institution) for use in recording Indian languages*). 



Ray employs the symbol g', as for instance in pe^qsu (drift- 

 ing snow) to designate the uvular fricative [r] , cf. Gr. perso-. 

 The uvular stopped consonant [q] is not indicated in any other 

 way but by the usual /c — for I cannot believe that this sound 

 does not occur in this dialect; the ^-symbol undoubtedly covers 

 both this sound and the usual back stopped consonant**). 

 Therefore 1 think I am justified in reading it in such words as 

 N. Al. kâkogo (when, in the future), каЫип (eyebrow) and perhaps 

 also in nksuk (fat), which in form almost, in meaning, quite 

 correspond to Gr. qaquqo, qdwÅo (plur. -ut), orsoq, and on the 

 whole in all the many-; words where it is to be expected in 

 accordance with the Greenlandic and the Mackenzie dialects. 

 He seems to use the symbol it partly to indicate an indistinct 

 a, which is sometimes a short uvularized a, partly in all pro- 



*) This alphabet is unfortunately rather deficient as a means of designating 

 the sounds of the Eskimo language. It lacks special symbols for three 

 of the unvoiced fricatives, namely for [p Å (p\. Its symbol q has to 

 represent two different sounds, namely the two consonants in German 

 ich and ach; my [/], lies between both these sounds. There is no 

 symbol for the corresponding voiced baclc fricative (;-). Nor is there 

 any sxmbol for the uvular stopped consonant \q\ in my work; the 

 symbol X indicates the Arabic ghain, which is the voiced(?) uvular [r] ; 

 the symbol r is used both for the English (point) r and the French 

 (back) r. Ü indicates the vowel in Euglish but; there are no special 

 symbols for [ø] and [ö] and other vowel-shades. 

 **) As was customary also in the Labrador and Greenlandic orthography all 

 the way down to Kleinschmidls time (about 1850). -- In Wells and 

 Kelly's Vocabulary from NW. Alaska, there is the same ambiguity in 

 the letter /c, but here, however, the reader's attention Is especiall> called 

 to this double use of the letter ("k takes the place of 7" p. 60) 



