Nov 17, 2011

Language Study

I have ordered a new DVD to help with our Greenlandic study.  It is called "Greenlandic for Foreigners" and I am eagerly awaiting it's arrival!  You can see their site here.  I tried to order it about a month ago from our local book store to no avail.  It was almost humorous when they told me that I would get it quicker it I ordered it myself rather than waiting on them to order it.

One thing that I really like is that this uses English to teach Greenlandic.  Most of the resources that I have come across use Danish.  Since I am still in the beginning stages of learning Danish, this makes it most difficult to understand what is being taught.

Greenlandic is different than English in that it is a poly-synthetic language.  They take a main word, then add affixes and suffixes to form other words or even sentences.  They have about 420 affixes, so no worries about running out of things to say.

The grammar appears almost backwards from English.  Some of the Greenlaners here tried to explain how the language works and said that instead of just making statements, their language is like looking at a picture or paints a picture.

One example that I showed churches of Greenlandic was an example given in the back of the book "Greenlandic for Travellers."

Atuarfimmukarniaraluapunga means "I had otherwise planned to go to the school."

The word is broken down as such:
 atuar-       school
 -fim         (from 'fik') building (literally 'the place where')
 -mukar-   go to
 -niar-       plan to
 -aluar-     otherwise
 -punga     (present/past tense) I (had)

You might be wondering, did I break this sentence down on my own.  Not at all, I just copied it from the back of the book!  My Greenlandic has a long way to go to understand words like this.  I can recognize a few root words in Greenlandic writings, but only a very few.

Please continue to pray for me, Masey, and our kids as we are working towards fluency with Greenlandic & Danish.

If you would like to read more, you can check out these link:

Greenland Guide - Gives a brief overview of the language and a few example words.

Greenland Guide Audio Phrase Book - You can listen to some Greenlanic here.

Wikipedia article - This gives more technical aspect of the language.

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