The Syllabic Character is known far and wide to-day in the arctics. It has not been spread solely by white men, for the people teach each other as they travel from tribe to tribe. The Eskimo freely write letters to their friends and hand them over for delivery to anyone taking a journey in the desired direction. The letters always reach their destination, because the postman at his first sleeping place invariably reads them all through from first to last; so that if, as often happens, one or two should get lost, the addressee receives the missive by word of mouth; and incidentally the postman knows everybody’s business and is altogether the most glorious gossip who could ever drop in and enliven the circle round the igloo lamp of a winter’s night.

Pen, ink and paper, it may be noted, are innovations of the new civilisation. Prior to the advent of the white man the only idea and the only means of calligraphy the Eskimo had was the etching on ivory or bone. Many vigorous and spirited drawings exist of hunting or other scenes, scratched on blade or handle, and sharply bitten in, black and clear, by rubbing with soot from the lamps. It is not remarkable that a knowledge of writing and reading should have spread [[178]]among the people in this way, for the Eskimo are avid of instruction, and eagerly avail themselves of any opportunity of being taught. Where Christianity itself has gained a footing it has been largely through the instrumentality of some among them who have come in contact with missionaries, and passed on to others all they had seen and heard.

A Native Chart.

A chart made from memory by Pitsoolak an Eskimo hunter, giving the Sea Coast, Inlets, and Islands of the south coast of Baffin Land. These men are trained from boyhood to remember the coast and routes of travel and know them well.

One of the most puzzling aspects of Eskimo is its “agglutinative” character. The words all run together. All the parts of speech may be joined to the verbal root and then conjugated in its various moods and tenses, so that the word finally produced by this process may be sixty or more syllables long. Students find the principal difficulty, not so much in building up and saying these peculiar words, but in correctly understanding what the natives say.

The following lengthy remark will illustrate three things: first, a characteristic mood and tense of the verb “to flee”; secondly, the phonetic characters used; and, thirdly, the composite nature of the word.

The Eskimo tongue has a full complement of the parts of speech. There is no definite article, but the numeral adjective one, attousik, takes its place; e.g., attousik angoot, a man, i.e., one man.

There is no form to express gender. Sex is distinguished [[179]]by the word “man” or “woman” (really male or female) added to another noun; as kingmuk, a dog; arngnak, a woman; angoot, a man. Kingmuk arngnak, a female dog; kingmuk angoot, a male dog.