Languagle #30: Greenlandic
Silarsuaq
silarsuaq
"The world. Literally, "the great sila.""
What it means
Greenlandic builds long words out of small pieces. Here "sila", which means the weather, the world outside, and consciousness itself, all on one word, takes the ending "-suaq", meaning great or vast. So the word for the world is the weather, and the mind, made enormous.
How to say it
si-lash-SHU-aq
The q is a k said from deep in the throat. The r before s isn't said as an r: it turns the s into a long, hushed sh sound.
Word by word
- sila SI-la: weather, the world outside, mind
- -rsuaq -shu-aq: great, big
Where it was found
A single word rather than a proverb. The breakdown of its parts comes from Wiktionary.
How to recognise Greenlandic
Greenlandic words are famously long, because a single word can carry a whole sentence. Look for lots of q's, double letters like ll, ss, tt and nng, and words ending in -q, -t or -mik. It has only a, i and u as main vowels, with e and o appearing next to q and r. The Inuit languages of Canada are usually written in syllabics instead.
About the Greenlandic language
Greenlandic, or Kalaallisut, is an Inuit language spoken by around 50,000 people, the official language of Greenland. It is famously polysynthetic: suffixes are added one after another to a root, so a single long word can carry the meaning of a whole English sentence. It is related to the Inuit languages of Canada and Alaska, but where those often use a syllabary, Greenlandic is written in the Latin alphabet.
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