Europeans find Eskimo difficult to acquire. The writer, like others, had largely to construct his own grammar when studying it. He spent many long hours, first with the young folk to get the purity of the sounds, then with the middle-aged men to arrive at correct idiom and fluency, then with the ancients to get at the folk lore of the tribe. Oftentimes their speech was merely a series of long and complicated gutturals, two hours of it being enough to make a man’s head spin for the rest of the day. But labour and pertinacity were at length rewarded; the [[172]]language was mastered, and the minds of the arctic people revealed.
The romance of this grammar consists in the fact that it has all been marshalled and classified, and reduced to a system which will bear comparison with even the classic tongues. Unless the first missionaries to the arctic had taken up this virgin and inchoate subject and handled it by the aid of the centuries of culture to which they were heir, Eskimo speech must have still remained a sealed book to the philologist, and—what is of far more importance—presented a Hill of Difficulty for years to all those who should come after them in the same ministry. With the aid of the grammars and dictionaries so patiently and thoughtfully compiled in the dark, unknown and bitter North, the would-be evangelist to-day may prepare himself for work among the Eskimo in the merest fraction of the time it took the first Danish envoys from civilisation.
The original attempt was made by the well-known Danish pastor, Hans Egede, who went to Greenland with his wife in 1721, and lived there among the natives for many years. Eskimo was the mother-tongue of their son, born in the country as one of its own people. In time, this lad was sent to Denmark to study at the University of Copenhagen. On his return to Greenland, young Egede applied himself to the scientific study of the language he knew so intimately, and to the compilation of a grammar and a dictionary. His example was followed by the teachers [[173]]who came after him, some of them being German linguists imbued with the meticulous love of learning and of intellectual conquest the task seemed preeminently to require. These tracked down and classified the many meanings of Eskimo inflection and expression, and perfected their system of interpretation. Hence, of course, the thoroughly Teutonic mould into which the syntax of the Eskimo tongue has been thrown.
All this work has formed the basis of study for everybody who has had occasion to learn the language since, although such an undertaking has always entailed a new and personal effort to work out the grammar and compile a local vocabulary. For all students of Eskimo, including the present writer, find a variety of dialects, although generally it may be said that the language varies so inconsiderably from one region to another, that hunters from widely different parts of the arctics can soon—by mutual questionings—understand each other. Those in Greenland speak practically the same tongue as those in Alaska.
Apropos of the purely etymological aspect of this little known language, it is interesting to recall an observation made by Dean Farrar in a lecture before the Royal Institution, delivered in 1869. “I hardly hesitate to prophesy,” he said, “the extreme probability that the final answer to many high scientific problems regarding the nature and the origin of man may come from enquiries into the languages of [[174]]nations such as these (the Chinese, Eskimo and Cherokee) rather than from any other branch of … palaeontological research.”
Eskimo has indeed received some measure of study and analysis, and it is for grammarians to tell us whether or no this prophesy has been to any extent fulfilled. A French writer, M. Hovelaque, hesitates to answer any question as to what group of human language the “hyperborean” tongues should be assigned. His observations should be recorded here perhaps, by way of a commentary on the exhaustiveness with which the Germans seem to have gone into the subject: “Au surplus le nom d’hyperboréennes ou arctiques, sous lequel on réunit ces differentes langues, ne doit pas donner le change sur le plus ou moins d’affinité soit entre elles, soit avec autres idiomes. Bien des hypothèses sont encore permises à ce sujet, mais il est vraisemblable qu’un certain nombre de ces idiomes résisteront à toutes les tentatives que l’on pourra faire en vue de les laisser parmi tel ou tel groupe suffisament connu. Il serait dangereux, en tout cas, d’accorder aux relations des missionaires sur telle ou telles de ces langues, notamment sur celles des Esquimaux, plus de crédit qu’il ne convient. On n’y trouve, le plus souvent, que des rapprochements de mots, des etymologies; en somme rien de scientifique. Ajutons, d’autre part, que certains idiomes hyperboréens ont été étudiés avec soin et par des auteurs compétents, ainsi qu’on peut le voir dans les publications de l’Academie de Petersbourg.” [[175]](La Linguistique. Bibliothèque des Sciences contemporains.)
Up to within recent times the Eskimo had no system of writing. But another patient evangelist, inspired by the necessity of delivering the message of Christianity in a more permanent form than by oral teaching only, invented what is known as the Syllabic Character for the benefit of the Indians, at a post called Norway House. This was the Rev. James Evans, a minister of the Canadian Methodist Church. The Syllabic Character, which is a sound (and not a letter, or alphabetical) writing, similar to shorthand, was designed for the Cree, but proved to be easily adaptable to represent the Eskimo speech. Without such a method, it is difficult to imagine how restless and roving tribes, at this post to-day and gone to-morrow, could ever have been taught to read. By this means, however, an ordinarily intelligent individual can learn in eight or nine weeks.
The principle of Mr Evans’ characters is phonetic. There are no silent letters. Each character represents a syllable; hence no spelling is required. As soon as the series of signs—about sixty in number—are mastered, and a few additional secondary signs (some of which represent consonants and some aspirates, and some partially change the sound of the main character), the native scholar of eighty or of six years of age can begin to read, and in a few days attain surprising accuracy.
Such results as these, such gifts of pure intellectual [[176]]effort, are surely among the greatest blessings civilisation has to confer on the few primitive peoples still left in the world.
Of late years the British and Foreign Bible Society have taken charge of the work, and now the Gospel in Cree, Syllabic and Eskimo is widely spread.