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В am um had a good opportunity to become thoroughly well 

 acquainted with the language, having stayed among the natives 

 eight years in the capacity of missionary. In publishing his 

 large store of material, he has given much attention to distin- 

 guishing between the different speech-sounds, and he operates 

 with no less than about 70 symbols for the consonants (including 

 consonant groups) and 18 symbols for the vowels (and diph- 

 thongs). So one would expect that no essential shade of sound 

 in the language had escaped his observation. Among the many 

 consonants that he gives, there are 3 or 4 symbols intended 

 to indicate "gutturals" (uvularsi, not including, however, the 

 symbol k, which is to be pronounced "as in English" or as in 

 French quart. "This is the most-used letter in the language", 

 he says. He calls his symbol q "the common guttural", and he 

 uses it only before another consonant, as in SWAl. êmaq^pëk 

 (the sea) — Gr. imarpik (the real or the great sea) ; so his q 

 corresponds to my [r]. I presume it is also the same sound 

 that he indicates with an r; but he uses this symbol only after 

 a consonant, as in SWAl. katunrak (son) — Gr. qitornaq (child), 

 or between two vowels as in SWAl. marVyak (mud), where i 

 = [a'i] — Gr. map-aq. 



The sound [q] , on the other hand, he indicates by means 

 of a Ä- that is supplied with a special diacritic mark (here >() ; 

 he speaks of it as "a strong rasping guttural", but he rarely 

 uses it; he has it for instance in the word kiky[tam (p. 270) — 

 Gr. qeqertap (the island's), in the suffix SWAl. -^âtôa (I have) — 

 Or. -qai'poria, e. g. SWAl. uchtny^ätöä (I have a load) — Gr. 

 useqarporia etc. 



It was at this point that I became puzzled and surprised, 

 so much so that I had to give up. In investigating the dialects 

 which I have previously taken up, I never felt any uncertainty 

 because there was no special symbol for the uvular stopped 

 consonant (tenuis) ; I was already so accustomed to the double 

 use of the symbol к in the elder Greenlandic and in the Labra- 



15' 



