= ar 
Language and Folklore. 135 
person; the reflexive object is the 4" person. In these modes the 
number of the combinations is consequently larger than in the finite 
modes of the verb, but in these also combined personal endings for 
subject and object are used beside the simple ones. As four such modes 
exist beside the three first mentioned, the number of personal verbal- 
suffixes hereby rises to about 300. But there are still more, for 1 
have only herein included singular and plural forms, not the dual 
forms which are less frequent than the others and are not used 
consistently; and I have only considered the pure personal suffixes, 
not their modified forms in the various classes of conjugation among 
which the negative inflection especially is the cause of some peculiar 
forms. The verbal system of the European languages is mere child’s- 
play compared with the highly developed but cumbersome construc- 
tion of this primitive tongue. 
The varieties of the combinations call to mind those of a chess- 
board. It is to be wondered at that the natives never seem to have 
any difficulty about remembering and handling this enormous system 
of conjugation. Several combinations occur rarely and are consequently 
but little practised, but the sustaining power of analogy is great. In 
reality every adult Eskimo on the arctic shores masters all parti- 
culars of the system. It is an astonishing fact to find this suffix system 
kept pure in all details and maintained firm through the tradition 
of centuries so as to be essentially identical in East Greenland and 
West Greenland for far more than 20000 miles, and it is found again 
almost unaltered in Labrador and along the coasts of North America 
westwards all the way to the Bering Straits — out there partly in 
older and less worn forms, but also, partly, in strongly assimilated 
forms Г — therefore round half the world along the arctic circle. 
Still the East Greenland is a dialect by itself, peculiar, different 
from and easily recognizable among all the other Eskimo dialects. 
This applies to the dialect as a whole, as well as to each of the 
constituents of its structure, in casu to the verbs. 
$ 44. Phonetic outcrop in East Greenland conjugation. — In the 
Ammassalik dialect the phonetic tendencies discussed in the preced- 
ing paragraphs have caused a multitude of elisions and contractions 
within the verb-endings. One of the most striking is the change of 
1° person -wona to -woa, -pona to poa, e. 5. likip'oa ‘I have arrived’, 
in WGr. tikip-onga. Further, the passing of $ to J, of г to ¢ and of 
u (0) to i (e) changes the character of the language, e. g. the passing 
of -soya ‘I who am —’ (intransitive participle) to -loa or more fre- 
1 Cf. my Phon. Study (1904) pp. 266—268. 
