Johannes Balle’s Tunumiisut (East Greenlandic)

Johannes Balle’s Tunumiisut (East Greenlandic)

Jose Andres Alonso de la Fuente

The work examines the Tunumiisut (East Greenlandic) wordlist gathered by Johannes Balle (1889-1965) sometime in the first half of the 20th century. This little-known vocabulary, which includes equivalents in Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) and translations into Danish, offers valuable data from a time when information on Greenlandic dialects was scarce and difficult to obtain.

The present publication is a pioneering study. There is no previous scholarship on the wordlist, which exists in two copies held at the Royal Danish Library and the Danish Arctic Institute (Arktisk Institute). The author describes the historical context of Johannes Balle's life and the peculiarities of the linguistic data as presented in the wordlist. The main part of the study is the Tunumiisut wordlist re-arranged according to English keywords for historical and comparative purposes. Extensive indices arranged in the more traditional alphabetical order allow the reader to navigate easily through Tunumiisut, Kalaallisut, Proto-Inuit-Yupik and Proto-Inuit reconstructions, all of them cross-referenced with the English keywords.