THE AMMASSALIK DIALECT 
Introduction. 
81. When for the first time a West-Greenlander, the apostle 
of the East coast, Hanserak, in 1884 preached christianity in his own 
language to the natives of this coast they only understood a small 
fraction of his preaching (see G. Holms report in First Part p. 114). 
As already pointed out by Horm there exist not only certain phonetic 
peculiarities in the language of the East-Greenlanders which give their 
dialect a special place within the Eskimo language", but also some 
very characteristic differentiations within the word material (vocabulary) 
of this East-Greenland community. 
$2. Taboo and Language. — The principal cause of the latter 
fact is no doubt the religious taboo-custom that made it compulsory 
to alter a word whenever a person died who bore the same word as 
a name; for the name of the deceased must never be spoken unless 
before his death his name had been given to a person still alive, 
and even then it was better not to mention the name. The new word 
was formed by derivation from another stem with a similar meaning 
or that meant something that could be used as a metaphoric para- 
phrasing of the word tabooed. 
When the two men Umiaq and Inik died, their names that were 
common words for “women’s boat’ and ‘human being’ were tabooed 
and replaced with Aawtaarit and Таад, the former a paraphrase of 
women’s boat, meaning ‘a means of moving by boat from the winter 
residence to the summer place’, the latter meaning literally ‘a shadow’, 
but probably taken from old tradition in the sense of ‘man as he 
appears at a long distance’. Whereafter the entire population ceased 
using the words umiaq and пик (this = WGr. inuk) and adopted the 
new words a'”fta'rit and ta'q with the same meanings. In other cases 
obsolete words, or words of the sacred language of the priests 
(angakkut) seem to have been made use of. 
1 Holm in First Part, pp. 4 and 28; Rink, ibid. рр. 207—208. 
