A language learners’ forum

I fell in love with Inuktitut Syllabics after first seeing them at a Canadian museum (I think it was le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal). So when I became interested in polysynthetic languages, Inuktitut was my initial first choice. Inuktitut has a very good free beginner's resource, tusaalanga.ca, which has 24 lessons in 5 Nunavut dialects (full audio for some dialects).

But, since I was unable to find any comprehensive advanced resources, I gave up on Inuktitut and started learning Navajo instead, which has many excellent resources for learners of all levels and is also a super neat language. But, Navajo is also significantly more difficult for a couple of reasons:

1. Navajo seems to be more fusional than Inuktitut, and it's more complicated to figure out how different morphemes fit together to make a word. With Inuktitut, there are some phonological rules when you stick syllables together, but it is fairly regular and much more lego-like than Navajo which has some very arcane rules.
2. The phonology is much more complex. Inuktitut has only three phonemic vowels and around fourteen phonemic consonants (depending on the dialect). Navajo has twice as many consonants (and many of them are completely alien to speakers of most Eurasian languages), and although there is only one more phonemic vowel, Navajo has contrastive nasalization and tone, which Inuktitut doesn't have.

Inuktitut also has neat feature that Navajo doesn't: it has ergative-absolutive alignment like Basque and Maya. Nominative-accusative alignment marks a direct object as different from the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb, but ergative-absolutive marks the subject of a transitive verb as different from the subject of an intransitive verb or the object of a transitive verb. (A transitive verb is just a verb that can have an object. "Eat" is transitive because you can eat something. "Die" is intransitive because you can't die something.)

But, after Inuktitut came up in my Navajo thread, I have been obsessively trying to track down some resources, and now I have enough resources to get to a high level. So I'm switching to Inuktitut for the time being. I still want to get back to Navajo to finish Rosetta Stone before my subscription expires in September, but there are some major grammatical similarities between the two languages so learning some Inuktitut first should help me grasp Navajo a bit more quickly. My other high priority language is Biblical Hebrew, which I would also like to get to in this coming year.

The first high-level resource I tried to find was Inuktitut: a Grammar of North Baffin Dialects by Alex Spalding (1992), which is one of the main sources that Wikipedia cites. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a single available copy anywhere on the internet. I even tried calling the publisher in Winnipeg, but the number was disconnected (I guess they went under). But, after days of searching, I discovered that the 1992 version was an update of an original 1979 version, called Learning to Speak Inuktitut: A Grammar of North Baffin Dialects. The 1992 edition is more than twice as long and expanded into two volumes, but that doesn't do me any good if I can't find a copy so I guess the 1979 version will do fine. I found a used copy for a very low price... only for my order to be cancelled because that copy doesn't actually exist. So I just ordered a much, much more expensive copy and that should be here in a couple of weeks.

Some other main sources that Wikipedia cites are by Mick Mallon, an Irishman who moved to Nunavut and became an Inuktitut professor. None of his materials are in print anymore (even when they were, they were just spiral-bound books meant for classroom use), but I ended up finding a ton of his materials online for download. First I downloaded Introductory Inuktitut Reference Grammar and an intermediate book of his as well from a very sketchy Russian website using Google Translate. I won't post a link here because it also had at least one book that is still in print available for download, which would violate this forum's copyright rules.

But then, I hit the mother lode. Mallon taught an online Inuktitut course at the University of Washington last year, and his entire course module, including several textbooks and a series of interactive Windows applications with sound, is available to all: https://moodle.llc.washington.edu/cours ... php?id=183. It contains the Intermediate book I mentioned above, as well as Inuktitut - the Hard Way which is meant to be a self-study replacement version of Introductory Inuktitut Reference Grammar.

I now have enough Inuktitut material to last me years, so now the only limit is my attention span! ...which is admittedly unreliable.

ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ (Inuktitut) comprises the Inuit dialects spoken in the northeast of Canada, mainly in and around the Canadian territory of ᓄᓇᕗᑦ (Nunavut). Inuinnaqtun is spoken in the west of Nunavut but is not considered to be a part of Inuktitut; ᐃᓄᒃᑐᑦ (Inuktut) is a term used to describe Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun together. Inuktitut is part of the Inuit dialect continuum that ranges from Inupiaq (spoken in Alaska) in the West to Greenlandic in the East.There is no one standard version of Inuktitut, but North Baffin seems to be the de facto standard that is taught in most learning materials (almost everything I have found teaches either North Baffin alone, or North Baffin alongside other dialects). I think the reason is that is extremely close to the South Baffin dialect that is spoken in Nunavut's capital (and only) city of ᐃᖃᓗᐃᑦ (Iqaluit), but it retains some traits that are common to the other Inuktitut dialects of Nunavut but not South Baffin:

1. South Baffin does not have the lateral fricative /ɬ/(like the Welsh "LL"), which is written "ł" in Inuktitut when the Latin script is used.
2. Combinations of two consecutive consonants in other Inuktitut dialects are often merged into one geminate consonant in South Baffin. For example, the North Baffin word for "house" is one of the two Inuktitut words that you probably already know: ᐃᒡᓗ (iglu). However, it is ᐃᓪᓗ (illu) in South Baffin.

How close exactly is North Baffin to South Baffin? Well, Mallon's Introductory Inuktitut Reference Grammar doesn't mention which dialect it uses, so it took me about 20 minutes to figure out that it was North Baffin. First I noticed that "ł" was used (which does not exist in South Baffin), and then I saw the that the word for "no" was given as "aakka", which is North Baffin. In South Baffin it's "aagga."

Inuktitut can be written in either Latin script or syllabics, but I think syllabics are much more readable. With only 17 phonemes, Latin script quickly becomes long strings of the same letters over and over. The syllabics can actually be learned in an afternoon if you know that each syllable forms either a diamond or a square, and the corner determines the vowel sound. Here is an image of all the symbols used in the Baffin Dialects, plus the "ai" syllables to show the full shapes, but they are not used in Nunavut, only in Nunavik (northern Québec). The ł and ŋŋ (nng) symbols are not used in Nunavik si there is no Unicode "ai" syllable for them.A long vowel is marked with a dot above the syllable (eg, ᐄ, ᐲ, ᑮ, ᒦ, etc). A final consonant is a superscript version of the "a" syllable, as in ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ (Inuktitut). The symbol for "q" is actually a "k" modified with an "r" diacritic to show that it is uvular (the Inuktitut "r" is a voiced uvular approximant like in German or French). The symbol for "ŋ (ng)" is a "g" that is modified with a small ligature of "n" and "g". The "ŋŋ (nng)" adds an extra "n" to the ligature.

Here is a summary of my resources:

• Intruduction to Inuktitut 101 A course module by Mick Mallon, contains several of his textbooks for free:
  
  • Elementary Dialogues v1.2 (1998)
  • Intermediate Inuktitut (1999)
  • Inuktitut the Hard Way: There is no Easy Way (1997).
  • Workplace dialogues (2000)
  • Structure of Inuktitut (downloadable interactive exe files)
• Mick Mallon - Introductory Inuktitut v2.2 (1999).
• Alex Spalding - Learning to Speak Inuktitut: A Grammar of North Baffin Dialects (1979). ISBN 0771401396.
• http://tusaalanga.ca
• Inuktut Uqausiup Aaqqiksuutingit (Inuktut Reference Grammar, available for free at https://uqausiit.ca/grammar-book. Focuses on North Baffin dialect.
• "Inuktitut for Technocrats" by Mick Mallon, available for free at http://www.inuktitutcomputing.ca/Technocrats/info.php
• Inuktitut - A Multi-dialectal Outline Dictionary (with an Aivilingmiutaq base) by Alex Spalding, available for free at http://www.inuktitutcomputing.ca/Spalding/index.php

Edit: I'm also trying to study isiXhosa.

See also my previous isiXhosa log.

isiXhosa Resources:

• Udemy: "isiXhosa for Beginners" by Ron Endley. He has three other isiXhosa courses that I might buy depending on how much I like this one. https://www.udemy.com/course/isixhosa-for-beginners/
• Ubuntu Bridge: "Confident isiXhosa". I haven't bought this yet but I'm planning on getting it. http://www.learnxhosa.co.za/product-cat ... materials/
• Teach Yourself Xhosa
• Patricia Schonstein Pinnock - Xhosa: A cultural grammar for beginners. ISBN 1874915032
• J.C. Oosthuysen - The Grammar of isiXhosa. ASIN B07XPCN5YZ. I got the Kindle edition but the formatting is abysmal; unfortunately I couldn't find any physical copies for sale so that's what I'm stuck with. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07XPCN5YZ
• Memrise - Xhosa - an Intro
• UNISA - Learn to Speak an African Language. https://www.unisa.ac.za/sites/corporate ... n-Language
• J.S. Claughton - "The Tonology of isiXhosa." https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11985212.pdf
• XhosaKhaya (YouTube channel)

Edit: Tabling isiXhosa for now and working on French.

Levantine Arabic Phonology

I'm around halfway through the FSI phonology course and really enjoying it. My original intention was just to help me learn the pharyngeal sounds that I would need for Biblical Hebrew, but there are a lot of features that are helpful for many languages. The extensive long vs short vowel and consonant drills will help me very much with Inuktitut.

isiXhosa

I've been thinking about what I would do in the car after I'm done with Levantine Arabic Phonology, particularly since there are no Inuktitut resources I can use in the car. But I think a solution has presented itself. I stumbled upon this really terrific page with a bunch of Xhosa resources, including an audio course from Ubuntu Bridge. It's fairly expensive (comparable price to Pimsleur), but I should be able to do it in the car and it will give me some much needed speaking practice; Xhosa is basically the final boss of phonology and I still haven't quite wrapped my head around even all of the non-click consonants.

Here is the list of Xhosa resources:
https://mikesxhosachallenge.wordpress.com/resources/

I've had Teach Yourself Xhosa for a while, but the format just never clicked (I'm so sorry) with me. It's a bit on the informal side. I prefer more of a grammar format: they teach you a feature, and then you can use it. Then they teach you another feature, etc. With that in mind, I bought a couple of grammars from Mike's list.

I'm hoping that I will be able to study Inuktitut and Xhosa concurrently. They complement each other fairly well: Inuktitut has a very simple phonology with crazy grammar, while Xhosa has a crazy phonology with a highly synthetic but also straightforward grammar. I guess we'll see how it goes.

There is a uTalk Xhosa course, but I don't think I'll use it. It's very expensive to buy outright (rather than use a subscription), and it's just a bunch of vocabulary. But we'll see; if I finish my other materials and could use a bunch of extra vocabulary with sound, or if I get tired of entering things into Anki and want something prepackaged, maybe it will be worth it. But it's really expensive for what you get.

isiXhosa Resources:

[Moved to the end of the first post]

ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ

I went through the first two lessons of Mike Mallon's INUK101 course. There are exercises, but unfortunately they are only available to UW students. Without the exercises, the lessons are very short. However, I already like them much better than tusaalanga.ca, because they teach one grammatical feature at a time, explained simply and clearly. In lesson one I learned several noun roots, including the names of arctic animals like polar bear (ᓇᓄᖅ, nanuk) and walrus (ᐊᐃᕕᖅ, aiviq); it definitely sets the mood! I also learned the eight noun endings, which basically act like cases, e:, ᓄᓇ (nuna) is land or the land, ᓄᓇᐅᑉ (nunaup) is "the land's", ᓄᓇᒥ (nunami) is "on the land", ᓄᓇᑐᑦ (nunatut) is "like the land", etc.

Lesson two introduced "noun chunks", which you can use to modify nouns. ᐅᒥᐊᖅ (umiaq) means "boat". ᐅᒥᐊᖅᔪᐊᖅ (umiaqjuaq) means ship (big boat), and ᐅᒥᐊᖅᓕᒃ (umiaqlik) is a boat owner.

The straightforward simplicity of INUK101 is really making me realize how much I dislike the format of tusaalanga. It takes the opposite approach from INUK101. Lesson one teaches tries to teach basic greetings and conversational words (they would be phrases in other languages but in Inuktitut each one is just one word), but they don't tell you how each word is constructed.

For example, one of the first vocabulary words is ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑑᓲᖑᕕᑦ? (inuktituusuugnuvit?, meaning "Do you speak Inuktitut?"). This is made up of slightly modified form of the word ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ (Inuktitut), plus three extra morphemes. But none of these three morphemes are explained in this lesson.

The last morpheme, ᕕᑦ (vit), is not explained until grammar note 4, which is in lesson 2. There are subject endings that can be added to a verb to indicate the person and number of the subject; the singular, dual, and plural endings for the first, second, and third person are taught in lesson 1. They are not in a table format, which would have been easier to digest; instead, it is given as a list, in a strange order, attached to the root ᓂᕆ (niri, meaning "eat"). ᕕᑦ is not on the list in lesson 1, because different subject endings are used when you are asking a question. ᕕᑦ is the 2nd person singular interrogative subject ending.

ᖑ (ngu) is explained in grammar note 3. Lesson 1 ends on grammar note 2 and lesson 2 starts on grammar note 4, so you will only see grammar note 3 if you look for it specifically. ᐅ (u) means "to be", but it becomes ᖑ (ngu) after two vowels (I guess this includes doubled vowels). So ᐅᕕᑦ (uvit) or ᖑᕕᑦ (nguvit) mean, "are you?"

ᓲ (suu) is not covered in either lesson. Luckily, I checked the "grammar" tab for suffixes and there is an explanation for the suffix ᓲᖅ (suuq).

-suuq is added to roots to express the idea of

• someone who is able to do something
• someone who does something frequently, or as a matter of habit.

[...]

A couple of points to note:

1. –suuq is often followed by the verb -ngu- (a variation of -u-) which means “to be”.
   
   • sukaq + li + suuq + ngu + viit = sukalisuunguviit?
     Do you take sugar?
2. When using -suuq- in the third person (it, he, she, they), the verb –ngu is dropped as a short cut:
   
   • inuktitusuuq an Inuktitut speaker
   • inuktitusuut people who speak Inuktitut
3. When -suuq- is added to a stem that ends in a consonant, it deletes the final consonant:
   
   • miqsuq + suuq = miqsusuuq
     someone who sews

https://tusaalanga.ca/node/1126

This grammar note, plus the explanation of interrogative subject endings, would have explained the word ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑑᓲᖑᕕᑦ? (inuktituusuugnuvit?) very well. Unfortunately, they chose to present it in lesson one with no explanation as a single seven-syllable word to be memorized with no thought of how it's constructed.

The only thing I still don't understand is: why does the final /u/ become long in ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑑ (inuktituu)? The /u/ does not become long in many similar words in the grammar note on ᓲᖅ (suuq), so there is a major discrepancy.

Don't get me wrong, tusaalanga is a great resource, but I don't think it's organized in a way that is conducive to learning. I think I will get much more out of it once I am more familiar with the grammar through other resources.

I ended up deciding on Inuktitut for my 2020 challenge language, so I'm cheering you on and also tuning in for the resources you are posting - wow! I'm going to start with South Baffin and go through the resources on tusaalanga and if I reach the end of that, I'll probably pick up North Baffin dialect. I like the sensible layout you found of the syllabics. I knew that I needed to make one like that but hadn't taken the time to do it yet, and I'd only really seen a full grammar as it's laid out at tusaalanga.

Sedge wrote:I ended up deciding on Inuktitut for my 2020 challenge language, so I'm cheering you on and also tuning in for the resources you are posting - wow! I'm going to start with South Baffin and go through the resources on tusaalanga and if I reach the end of that, I'll probably pick up North Baffin dialect. I like the sensible layout you found of the syllabics. I knew that I needed to make one like that but hadn't taken the time to do it yet, and I'd only really seen a full grammar as it's laid out at tusaalanga.

Well I didn't find the syllabic layout in fact, I just put it together in a spreadsheet. Glad you liked it!

One bonus for studying South Baffin on Tusaalanga is that once you're done with the 24 lessons, there are around 30 bonus dialogues that seem to only be available in South Baffin.

Awesome finds for both Inuktitut and Xhosa!

I'll certainly be following your progress with both!

ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ

My copy of Learning to Speak Inuktitut came!
Flipping through it, it seems very comprehensive but I prefer the format of INUK101. I think I'll go through the book after INUK101 and Tusaalanga but before going through Mallon's other books, which are a bit tougher to navigate.

I'm going through the vocabulary and grammar slowly but steadily. I'm trying to keep up with my Anki decks. I have one for INUK101 and one for the subject verb suffixes (declarative and interrogative) that I got from Tusaalanga. INUK101 has moved on from nouns to verbs so it'll probably cover them soon anyway.

Mick Mallon is pretty funny and likes to slip in subtle dry jokes when he can. He also couldn't resist a not-so-subtle reference. There is a noun chunk ᕕᓂᖅ (viniq) meaning "ex-". Although he had only given Arctic animals as vocabulary, he had to throw in the word for parrot, ᐅᖃᓲᖅ (uqasuuq, literally "the talker") so that he could teach us to say ex-parrot: ᐅᖃᓲᕕᓂᖅ (he doesn't specify, but I think the "q" at the end of "uqasuuq" might get deleted when you append "viniq")

Also:

Years later I was teaching Inuktitut in Iqaluit. A young Inuk woman was assisting me. I asked her:

“Gina, the word uiviniq means ‘ex-husband’, right?"

"Yes," she replied.

"Does he have to be dead?”

She paused for thought, and then answered:

"It depends on what he did.”

isiXhosa

I've been reading the excellent paper "The Tonology of isiXhosa" by J.S. Claughton and I think I'm starting to understand why I've been struggling to recognize isiXhosa tones, while I've had a much easier time with Navajo. As it turns out, isiXhosa is a tone terracing language. With Navajo, a high tone is a high tone and a low tone is a low tone, but things aren't that simple with isiXhosa.

A series of high tones in Xhosa will all be at the same level, but each low tone makes the high tones progressively lower. There can also be a phonemic downstep, where a high tone will be lowered even if there is no low tone between it and the previous high tone (it may represent a low tone that used to be there but was deleted).

It is very hard to find a comprehensive list of isiXhosa words with tones written. There is a small list of common and tonologically significant words listed at the end of Claughton's paper, and it may be useful to memorize then at some point but I'm not sure that I could even make sense of it at this point. Also, there is both lexical and grammatical tone, and with my limited knowledge of grammar there are a lot of charts that would just be gibberish to me. While getting the lexical tone wrong might change one word into another, getting the grammatical tone wrong could change the person, tense, or mood, for instance.

According to Claughton, tone in isiXhosa has a similar level of importance to stress in English. There aren't many cases where misusing it would cause you to say a completely different word (one famous tonal minimal pair in isiXhosa is that íthanga means pumpkin but íthangá means thigh), but getting it wrong will make it much harder for a native speaker to understand you.

I don't think it's possible for me to systematically learn isiXhosa tones at this point, given their high level of complexity and the difficulty in looking up the exact tones for any given word. I have a lot of different beginner resources with audio. I'll just need to do my best to imitate the native speakers as well as I can, and when I have reached a higher level I will try to learn the tones more systematically.

ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ

I think a lot of INUK101's value comes from the exercises, which aren't accessible to the general public. For example, it teaches noun endings and chunks, but not how to put them together. So I think it makes sense to abandon it in favor of Mallon's textbooks. Inuktitut the Hard Way: There is no Easy Way (available for free on the INUK101 site) seems to cover the same material but it's self-contained and more comprehensive, so I think I'll switch to that. It was intended for self-teaching.

I should also probably try to keep up with Tusaalanga.ca even though I hate that it introduces grammatical constructions with no explanation, because it is my best source of native audio. Skipping native audio would make me more likely to fossilize pronunciation errors.

isiXhosa

There is a dizzying number of resources and it's tough to know where to start. I like the Memrise course so I'll start with that. When I'm back to work after the holidays I think I'll buy the Ubuntu Bridge course and try to do it in the car. I hope it has some phonology drills because there are a lot of difficulties in speaking and understanding isiXhosa.

From this thread:

Deinonysus wrote:But, after days of searching, I discovered that the 1998 version was an update of an original 1979 version, called Learning to Speak Inuktitut: A Grammar of North Baffin Dialects. The 1998 edition is more than twice as long and expanded into two volumes, but that doesn't do me any good if I can't find a copy so I guess the 1979 version will do fine. I found a used copy for a very low price... only for my order to be cancelled because that copy doesn't actually exist. So I just ordered a much, much more expensive copy and that should be here in a couple of weeks.

From your Navajo thread:

Deinonysus wrote:

Also, I just spent half an hour looking for an out-of-print Inuktitut grammar and I'm blaming you.

Good.

It took me a hell of a lot more than half an hour but I did get my hands on that grammar! (it's the one by Alex Spalding that I mentioned in my Inuktitut log; it came in the mail today).

The expanded edition was published in 1992--this is what both Worldcat and my copy of the first volume say. The first volume is actually exactly the same thing as the 1979 grammar textbook, with the same lessons and the same affixlist, wordlist and answers at the end.

I happened to get the first volume for a low price just in January this year, out of luck I guess, but I haven't managed to secure a copy of the second volume at all, at any price, which is where all the extra content is.

Ser wrote:From this thread:

Deinonysus wrote:But, after days of searching, I discovered that the 1998 version was an update of an original 1979 version, called Learning to Speak Inuktitut: A Grammar of North Baffin Dialects. The 1998 edition is more than twice as long and expanded into two volumes, but that doesn't do me any good if I can't find a copy so I guess the 1979 version will do fine. I found a used copy for a very low price... only for my order to be cancelled because that copy doesn't actually exist. So I just ordered a much, much more expensive copy and that should be here in a couple of weeks.

From your Navajo thread:

Deinonysus wrote:

Also, I just spent half an hour looking for an out-of-print Inuktitut grammar and I'm blaming you.

Good.

It took me a hell of a lot more than half an hour but I did get my hands on that grammar! (it's the one by Alex Spalding that I mentioned in my Inuktitut log; it came in the mail today).

The expanded edition was published in 1992--this what both Worldcat and my copy of the first volume say. The first volume is actually exactly the same thing as the 1979 grammar textbook, with the same lessons and the same affixlist, wordlist and answers at the end.

I happened to get the first volume for a low price just in January this year, out of luck I guess, but I haven't managed to secure a copy of the second volume at all, at any price, which is where all the extra content is.

Oh, Spalding had an Inuktitut dictionary that came out in 1998. I got them confused. I'll correct the post, thanks!

I'm glad to know that my book is the same as volume 1 of the 1992 set so if I ever find a copy of volume 2 I'll have everything.

Are you willing/able/does it conform to forum rules to share ISBNs for the language books you are using?