The predicate may be a verb with no complement, a predicate noun with a copula, or a verb with a preceding direct object in the absolutive case and/or an oblique term or local complement. The anaphoric third person refers to a proceeding term, specified by being marked in the relative case or from context. Linguistic experts have been reaching out to the Aleut community in attempts to record and document the language from the remaining speakers. At the same time, linguist Melville Jacobs picked up several new texts from Sergey Golley, an Atkan speaker who was hospitalized at the time. All dialects show lexical influence from Russian; Copper Island Aleut has also adopted many Russian inflectional endings. Vowels within a word are separated by at least one consonant. John P. Harrington furthered research into the Pribilof Island dialect on St. Paul Island in 1941, collecting some new vocabulary along the way. However, as the historical events and factors transpired, Aleut's falling out of favor has brought upon a necessity for action if the language is to survive much longer. vs qáda 'eat'. The details of the extensive syncopation characteristic of the Eastern Aleut dialect are described below. Krauss, Michael E. (2007). [4], Voiceless approximants and devoiced nasals are preaspirated. In Atkan, the final syllable of a word form may be clipped off in fast speech. The two high vowels are pronounced with the same vowel quality regardless of vowel length. Eastern and Atkan Aleut are classified as "critically and severely endangered" and have an EGIDS rating of 7.
The derivational suffixes may combine in strings of up to about six components, some belonging together to form composites. Word-final nasals /m/ and /n/ are frequently deleted before an initial consonant other than /h/. Aleut Language (Unangan, Aleutian, Atkan) Language: Aleut is an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken along the Aleutian Island chain of Alaska and islands off the coast of Siberia.
A French-Aleut grammar was also produced by Victor Henry, entitled "Esquisse d'une grammaire raisonnee de la langue aleoute d'apres la grammaire et le vocabulaire de Ivan Veniaminov" (Paris, 1879). Aleut vowels contrast with their long counterparts /iː/, /aː/, and /uː/. A postbase may be nominal or verbal, yielding nouns derived from nouns or verbs, or verbs derived from verbs or nouns, or from nominal phrases. The Aleut use Russian, Scandinavian or English surnames. In some cases the negation will be followed by the enclitic subject pronoun. Stress underlies the distinctive syncopation characteristics of Eastern Aleut. The result will be a sequence of vowels or full contraction: Open word classes in Aleut include nouns and verbs, both derived from stems with suffixes. Nouns are obligatorily marked for grammatical number (singular, dual, or plural) and for absolutive case or relative case (some researchers, notably Anna Berge, dispute both the characterization of this feature as "case" and the names "absolutive" and "relative". For example, qankudim hatix̂ 'forty'.[4]. Jochelson collected his ethnographic work with the help of two Unalaskan speakers, Aleksey Yachmenev and Leontiy Sivstov. Attuan labial fricative /v/ is pronounced voiced or devoiced. In: 1: The Inuit language 'family' is a continuum of dialects, 2: Some linguists classify Sirenik as under a separate branch, This page was last edited on 4 October 2020, at 01:02. Aleut surnames . Jochelson discovered much vocabulary and grammar when he was there, adding to the scientific knowledge of the Aleut language. Within the Eastern group are the dialects of the Alaskan Peninsula, Unalaska, Belkofski, Akutan, the Pribilof Islands, Kashega and Nikolski. in 1804 and 1805, the czar's plenipotentiary, Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov collected some more. As enclitics they function as subject markers. Stress may also be expressive, as with exclamations or polite requests. The preaspiration of approximants causes very little friction and may pronounced more as a breathy voice. Attuan was a distinct dialect showing influence from both Atkan and Eastern Aleut. Fewer than 500 people still speak the Aleut language today. [12], Evidence suggests a culture associated with Aleut speakers on the Eastern Aleutian Islands as early as 4,000 years ago, followed by a gradual expansion westward over the next 1,500 years to the Near Islands. Each cell indicates the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representation of the phoneme; consonants existing only in loanwords are in parentheses. During an expedition from 1791 to 1792, Carl Heinrich Merck and Michael Rohbeck collected several word lists and conducted a census of the male population that included prebaptismal Aleut names. [16][17], Due to colonization by Russian colonizers and traders in the 18th and 19th centuries, Aleut has a large portion of Russian loanwords.
2 x10 for 'twenty'). The preaspiration feature is represented orthographically with an