Greenlandic Grammar Part I - Morphology (Kalaallisut)

Greenlandic aka Kalaallisut is an Inuit language mainly spoken in Greenland (~50.000 speakers). Kalaallisut is a polysynthetic language famous for it’s extremely long ’sentence words’. In part I of this video series we look at the complex but fascinating morphology of the Greenlandic language. Warning: this Greenlandic Grammar video series is intended for true language nerds!

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:45 Origins of Greenlandic
03:13 Fun fact
03:41 Table of contents
04:13 Morphology
05:00 Morphemes
06:11 Polysynthetic language
09:41 Tusaanngitsuusaartuaannarsinnaanngivipputit
10:51 Derivation
13:20 Fun fact
13:58 Summary
14:33 Part II - What to expect?
15:15 The end

I would like to thank all of those who inspired and helped me to make this video. Special thanks to Nanako, Stian and all the wonderful people whom I met during my stay in Greenland.

Background music from Pixabay (royalty free):
Cinematic Documentary by Lexin_Music
Funny Bones by geoffharvey
Joyful Calm Light Entertainment Kids Friendly Music by REDproductions
Playing In Color by 29811401
Joyful Snowman by Grand_Project

[Dimitra.Saltou]

Oh my God!!!! Eventually a greenlandic My favorite language!!!! PLEASE KEEP Thank you for teaching Greetings from Greece ❤❤

[pain]

PLEASE MAKE THE REST OF THE SERIES 😭😭😭

[alexandregb]

I gave up learning Kalaallisut in the past on account of a lack of content to learn, but I found your video. I hope you keep uploading content. I don't know if someday I'll try to learn it again. Maybe your video will revive my interest in learning Kalaallisut. I don't know if you are aware, but there's a book teaching Kalaallisut. The book is An Introduction to Wester Greenlandic by Stian Lybech. It could be a helpful information. I hope you don't give up on this project.

[johnnyrosso]

Excellent content. I'm excitedly waiting for Part 2 :)

[DefinitelyACircle]

I myself am from Greenland, ever since I moved to Denmark, I lost all my memory of the Greenlandic language (to a large degree, I still remember the pronunciation of a majority of the words.) Greetings from an Inuit originally from Ilulissat.

[papaxsmurf]

Please don't stop! This is one of the rare resources kalaallisut learners can snatch. Good work!

[ChristianJiang]

Woah this is crazy!! A word can be verbalised and then nominalised again all in the same construction… It’s like maths!

[loisanderson]

Torrak! Oqaatsit ataasiinnaat naammanngillat :)

[peppermintcase]

This is awesome! Keep up the good work, videomullu taassumunnga qujanarsuaq!!

[DougalBayer]

Mind blown!
My hobby is reading Japanese novels. Your explanation of the morphology continuum shows me exactly how agglutinating Japanese is “just right of center.”
Conversational Japanese for beginners and tourists is like a mirror-image Spanish, synthetic with a short list of postpositions and verb tenses to learn. The first half of sentences can seem as analytic as English, when casual speakers drop those noun suffixes and rely on SOV word order.

But in the written language and in nuanced speech, many sentences end with long words fully comparable to Greenlandic. It’s not unusual for the SO-V “verb” to take up most of a line of text, strung with up to a dozen suffixes for passive, potential, desire, mood, donation, agency, appearance, negation, politeness, tense, and finally speaker attitude (ne? yo! kana?)

Language classes hardly teach this (semi) polysynthetic nature of Japanese. But it smacks you hard you when you dive into a novel and start deciphering these strings.
Through extensive reading and shadowing of audiobooks “above my grade, ” I have tripled my reading rate to about half that of native speakers. Not so much by recognizing more kanji-character vocabulary, as by developing an eye for parsing, at a glance, most of the high-frequency strings of up to a half a dozen affixes.

You explanation of Greenlandic word formation suggests that memorizing Greenlandic vocabulary might be similar: learning the conventionalized meaning of various strings of multiple affixes.

[SofiaeJeromeBQ]

Keep making more of these, I love Greenlandic

[tux_duh]

2:54 love that you can tell from where the language originated just by these names

Human, (generic inuktitut word for person)

Greenlander: of the island

Of the backside: oriented facing their ancestors homeland

[bazyl_ia]

My heart dropped for a second when you mentioned the snow thing. Don’t play with us like that 😭

[alexius]

Greetings from Ukraine! Please, upload more videos!

[phonaesthem]

I loved this! Especially the morpheme breakdowns with etymomogical footnotes. Really gives you a look at polysynthesis from the inside. Please please please continue this series!

[federicoarrighi]

Yes! Finally Someone that Talks About the Greenlandic Language!

[HenrikKleist]

Long time greenlander here. Although I've lived in Denmark for almost 18 years, I'm still fluent in Greenlandic. Some words are lost to me and I sometimes struggle with words.
That's true for both my Greenlandic language and Danish language.

[olivier]

Thank you so much. Finally a video on Greenlandic. Very interesting.

Qsgreenland made me curious and interested

[TheLaxOne]

As someone who's completely new to Eskimo-Aleut languages, this was a very informative video! The polysynthetic grammar of Greenlandic is fascinating! I'm looking forward to the next videos in the series!

[loumof]

Wauw, je bent zo getalenteerd. Goed video, man.