As explained by the author in the introduction to the glossary section of his book, the word ‘notes’ in the title is significant: ‘This is not a definitive grammar, lexicon or introduction to Polar Eskimo. It is instead a compilation of notes made in the field. . .’ (page 91). This is the case indeed, and I would add that as we shall see below, the terms ‘some’ and ‘ethnolinguistic’ are equally important when evaluating the contents of Leonard's work.
The book consists of a series of twelve short, 4−12 page chapters on various aspects of the Polar Eskimo dialect (hence PE) of the Inuit language, followed by a bilingual sample of two contemporary and two traditional texts, and by a PE-English glossary of some 3,500 entries. In several ways − e.g. the contents of several chapters as well as the choice of entries in the glossary − the author seems to have written au fil de la plume, i.e. to have jotted down his ideas as they were coming to his mind. This leaves us with an often disorganised and sometimes disappointing book, unless we keep its title in mind: ‘Some notes. . .’, as well as the author's caveat cited above.
In 2010−2011, Stephen Pax Leonard spent a year among the Inugguit (‘Polar Eskimos’) of northwest Greenland, a community of some 770 individuals whose way of life is still characterised by hunting activities and the use of the dog-sledge and who speak their own Inuit dialect. Leonard researched PE − whose phonology and, in a lesser way, lexicon differ from other Greenlandic dialects − and learned to speak it, also immersing himself in the local culture. The book should be considered as a preliminary outcome of the author's year of research, rather than as a more definitive scholarly work. Its value rests on the ethnolinguistic observations on contemporary language usage found throughout the text rather than in a properly linguistic description of PE. The author is aware of this when he states that his work is not a grammar or a dictionary, though it ‘can aid the language learner and be of interest to the speaker of Polar Eskimo’ (page 91).
The twelve chapters of Leonard's book deal, respectively, with the background of Polar Eskimo language and society; the phonology of PE; PE as a written language; questions of orthography; inflectional morphology; derivational morphology; the PE lexicon; stems and affixes; ways of speaking; ways of belonging; oral traditions; and drum-dancing. In my opinion, chapters 9, 10 and 11, on the ways of speaking and their links to local identity and oral traditions are much more interesting than the rest. They provide readers with a good surface ethnography of language use (including the role of silence and the speakers’ belief that PE cannot − and even should not − be written), and of some social and ecological information conveyed by the language (e.g. the names for the 18 different types of wind). Equally interesting is the author's distinction (page 7) between the two varieties of contemporary PE: A, the speech of those under the age of 50 or so, and B, the speech of people over the age of 50 who are originally from northwest Greenland. The former variety is influenced by Standard West Greenlandic − the written language and the only one taught in school − while the latter, now in decline, has more in common with the Inuinnaqtun and North Baffin Canadian Inuit dialects.
The chapters dealing with the pronunciation and structure of PE are much less instructive, and their real usefulness is open to question. The bibliography of the book shows that the author has read most of what has been published on the Inugguit and their language − although the absence of Jean Malaurie's classical The last kings of Thule (Reference Malaurie1985), as well as that of Birgitte Jacobsen's thorough analysis of phonetic changes in PE (Reference Jacobsen1991) are surprising − but he does not seem to know much about other Inuit groups. This leads him to make a number of uninformed statements, for instance when he postulates that the use of the ethnonym Inugguit (‘big or great people’) might be due to an ‘exceptional level of pride to be found among this group’ (page 1). Perhaps, but most Inuit groups outside Greenland define themselves in a similar way: the Alaskan Inupiat (‘super people’), the Mackenzie Inuvialuit (‘big super people’), the western Nunavut Inuinnait (‘genuine people’), etc. Incidentally, over the last two or three decades, the term ‘Inuinnait’ (their language is Inuinnaqtun) has been the official name of those who were formerly called ‘Copper Eskimo’. Using the latter appellation, as Leonard does on pages 3 and 8, should be avoided.
In my eyes, the only real quality of the linguistic chapters is to give some examples of the way contemporary Inugguit speak their language. The latest published accounts of PE phonology, grammar and/or lexicon (Fortescue Reference Fortescue1991; Jacobsen Reference Jacobsen1991) date from some 25 years ago, at a time when the language reflected a stronger influence of variety B speakers. Data found in Some notes . . . thus enable readers to witness the recent evolution of the language and its partial drift towards Standard West Greenlandic, a drift already described by Jacobsen (Reference Jacobsen1991, page 70−71) when it was incipient. Other than that, however, there is not much to learn from these chapters. Chapter 2, for instance, presents a very sketchy description of the phonology of PE, based on a short story written by the author. A basic tenet of linguistics stipulates that research materials must be elicited from native speakers rather than produced by the linguist himself. Resorting to self-generated data is, at the least, strange.
Deficiencies in Leonard's linguistic analysis are numerous. They include an absence of discrimination between phonetical and morphological apocope (pages 17−18); an unclear distinction between the three vocalic phonemes of the spoken language and the five vocalic graphemes of the Greenlandic writing system (page 24); the author's presentation (page 30) of the canonical PE ‘sentence’ (actually, morphological word) as formed by a root + derivational affix + enclitic + inflectional affix (although enclitics usually appear in word-final position); his mistaken distinction (page 37) between the PE words that are ‘Proto-Inuit’, and those that come from Standard West Greenlandic (actually, both PE and West Greenlandic stem from the same ancestral Proto-Inuit language); etc. One can also question the writing conventions devised by the author − which differ from those of Fortescue and Jacobsen − as well as a few apparently idiosyncratic inflectional morphemes (e.g. -huhut/-tuhut, 3rd plural indicative, instead of -hut/-tut, as in Fortescue Reference Fortescue1991, page 174). This means that a large part of the linguistic sketch that constitutes the matter of chapters 2 to 7 is untrustworthy.
By contrast, the Glossary (pages 93−270) can be useful to those interested in communicating with the Inugguit. It comprises ca. 3,500 current PE words (or, more rarely, phrases) in alphabetical order, along with their English translation. Some entries include a short ethnographic or contextual description of the meaning of the word. This glossary thus provides interesting examples of what can be found in the conversations of contemporary Inugguit (e.g. alioqtoqtoq, ‘sees a ghost’; oonaqtuqtoq, ‘drinks tea or coffee’). Its only shortcomings are the apparently haphazard way that has presided to the choice of entries, and the absence of an English to PE word-finder. Those wanting to learn PE more systematically should, thus, use Leonard's glossary in combination with the better structured lexicon (and lists of derivational and inflectional affixes) found in Fortescue's Inuktun (Reference Fortescue1991), even if the latter reflects an older stage of the language.
