321 



Notes. 



1) Is perhaps tlie date of the letter he is Avriting aud is per- 

 haps written first. 



2) Ghosts. Means literally people who on account of shame or 

 resentment have moved away from other people and live as recluses 

 out in the mountains. The Greenlanders have a panic fear of them, 

 about whom there are many tales. 



3) Some of the many monsters of the folktales. There is pro- 

 bably some actuality at the bottom of most of these ideas, for in- 

 stance reminiscences of animals which the Eskimo have known in 

 their earlier home-lands, amaroq is still the word for Avolf in 

 America, but this animal is not found in the inhabited part of 

 Greenland and is therefore never seen, kiliwfaq is the name given 

 by the Point Barrow Eskimo to the mammoth which is now known 

 only in fossil form. (Ray: Point Barrow Expedition p. 54.) 



4) i. e. about the captured sea-animals. 



5) The Eskimo arithmetic is at a very low stage of development. 

 This may be a slip of the pen, but I consider it quite probable that 

 Saka for the moment has got 29 out of 2 -}- 9. 



6) i. e. if that is worth mentioning. 



7) Christianized Greenlanders generally receive in baptism a 

 Danish family name and a Danish (European) Christian name. There 

 are only very few families in Greenland who like this one, bear a 

 pure Greenlandic family-name, inu'sufoq means the young one. 



Sakarias was an old Eskimo and a practised seal-hunter 

 who lived in the settlement Arqittoq on Aulätsiwik Fjord (south 

 of Egedesminde). When 1 was in his house, there dwelt his 

 four married sons and their children, besides his wife and a 

 couple of female relatives. I stayed there for about 14 days. 

 — I received the letter the year after my return from Greenland. 



The orthography in the letter indicates that Saka no doubt 

 remembers the value of the letters of the alphabet from the 

 time when he went to school, but he employs them in his 

 own way for his own original orthography, which is based on 

 nothing else but his own pronunciation. He has either for- 

 gotten or perhaps never learned the arlificial orthography 

 used by the missionaries. That his knowledge of the letters 

 of the alphabet goes a good many years back (about 50 years) 

 may be seen from his use of h instead of p {b has long been 

 out of use in Greenlandic orthography) and the absence of 

 XXXI. 21 



