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I thought I was done with words from Native American / First Nations languages of North America, only to remember I haven’t covered words from Inuit, Aleut, and Yupik peoples (the latter two also living in northeastern Russia) —for they indeed have given English enough common-enough words for a theme week. [Sidebar: for a discussion of the term Eskimo, see husky.] Starting with the most obvious one:
igloo (IG-loo) - n., a durable, domed shelter constructed of blocks cut from hard snow.
Contrast with tupik, which is a tent-like summer shelter made from animal skins. Although we associate igloos with all Inuit, not to mention Inupiat of Alaska and Yupik of eastern Siberia, they’ve been most commonly built in central Arctic Canada and adjacent northwestern Greenland. [Sidebar: TIL the blocks are not laid down in rings but a rising spiral.] We got the word from Inuktitut iclu, which means a house of any construction—somehow in English it got applied to only a snowhouse, which is icluvijaq in Inuktitut. Inuktitut is, broadly speaking, the main Inuit language of Canada, though it’s better described as a dialect continuum than a single language: across its range, speakers from one band can understand those from neighboring bands but not from further off.
---L.
igloo (IG-loo) - n., a durable, domed shelter constructed of blocks cut from hard snow.
Contrast with tupik, which is a tent-like summer shelter made from animal skins. Although we associate igloos with all Inuit, not to mention Inupiat of Alaska and Yupik of eastern Siberia, they’ve been most commonly built in central Arctic Canada and adjacent northwestern Greenland. [Sidebar: TIL the blocks are not laid down in rings but a rising spiral.] We got the word from Inuktitut iclu, which means a house of any construction—somehow in English it got applied to only a snowhouse, which is icluvijaq in Inuktitut. Inuktitut is, broadly speaking, the main Inuit language of Canada, though it’s better described as a dialect continuum than a single language: across its range, speakers from one band can understand those from neighboring bands but not from further off.
---L.
