Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 August 12

= August 12 =

"Inuit" in Inuktitut
A long time ago, I watched on Postcards from Buster that Inuit means "person" in Inuktitut. Now, I'm thinking, if that means "person", then do the Inuits have a specific word for their own ethnic group, or is every human on the planet an Inuit in Inuktitut? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 03:09, 12 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Not an answer, but it's possible they only refer to specific tribes or to "everyone", and lack a word that lumps all of their tribes together, but excludes outsiders. StuRat (talk) 03:20, 12 August 2017 (UTC)


 * As usual, non-experts have no idea; while trolls don't even read our articles. The letter t is the plural ending in most Eskimo-Aleut languages (s in some), and whaaoe: Inuit says the word Inuit means "people" (pl.) and Inuk is "person".  Inuktitut refers to the language. μηδείς (talk) 04:00, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Of course, trolls don't read Wikipedia articles. They don't exist. They are a class of beings in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 04:28, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
 * The entry on Inuk (the singular of Inuit) at our sister project Wiktionary suggests that the word is used with an uppercase initial letter for members of the ethnic group and a lowercase initial letter (inuit) for human beings. This would work in Greenland, but I can't see how this would work in Canada, where Inuktitut syllabics are used (AFAIK it has no equivalent of the uppercase/lowercase distinction). Matt's talk 04:09, 12 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Of course there are all sorts of qualifications, like the English to welsh on a bet of scotch. In my native language, nemets means "mute", Nemets means German, both referring to the fact that as non-Slavs they don't speak ponashomu, or, literally, "by us".   can say a lot more than I based on my superficial decades-old studies.  The curious might also look at Uralo-Siberian languages for the -q/k/t number marking of definite nouns, common also to pre-Finnish and Hungarian. μηδείς (talk) 05:16, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
 * What, your native language isn't Greek? —Tamfang (talk) 07:06, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I realize you are kidding, Redbeard, but for the others, I am of primarily Ruthenian descent, and my ancestors spoke (in the Russian orthography)по-руськый or "po-rus'ky" in ours.
 * Wikipedia uses the neologism "rusyńskÿj" to make the autonym distinct from that for Russian proper. By us we say Rusyky, by Moscow they say Russky. The difference is indistinguishable to monolingual anglophones; the closest one can come to it is the difference in the esses of soup and super, when the latter is pronounced as "syoopah" to American ears.
 * My screen name and signature were chosen for anonymity (I was stalked off-wiki and outed under an older name) and distinctiveness--I can find a few Greek letters in a Latin text with greater ease than using the Roman alphabet. μηδείς (talk) 16:29, 12 August 2017 (UTC)


 * This only applies to Canada and I can't really speak to anything outside of that. In English there is no s at the end of Inuit. It is also a dialect thing.


 * If you go to the Inuktitut Living Dictionary and search for Inuit, pick the first entry, the definition is "name that the Inuit use to mean themselves as a people." For people living east of Cambridge Bay Inuit will only mean the Indigenous peoples. This will refer to all of them, including Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Russia no matter if the people of certain area don't want to be called that.


 * From Cambridge Bay to the west, Inuktitut syllabics (used in Nunavik and most of Nunavut) are not used and the Latin script is used instead. So, for example, in Inuinnaqtun which is spoken in only three communities the word for the people is Inuinnaq (page 174 and search for "person") and inuit means all people. The Inuinnaq are in turn part of the Inuvialuit which means "the real people". I see that this says that Inuinnat is singular and Inuinnaq is plural which looks backward. I'm pretty sure something like this came up before. Take a look through the archives. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 07:30, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
 * BTW, you could ask your question, not only about "Inuit" which means "people" in Inuktitut, but also about "Bantu" which means "people" in Bantu. If I remember well, there are some other "exotic" languages whose names mean "people" in those languages, but right now I can't recall what they are. HOTmag (talk) 07:26, 13 August 2017 (UTC)
 * The use of "bantu" is not that similar - as a white person living and working in the Congo there was never any hint that I was not included in that term. There were distinct names for each tribal group, and also for distinguishing black people and white people (baindo and mindeli where I lived)- but "bantu" was always used of human beings in general, rather than of any particular sub-group. Wymspen (talk) 12:13, 13 August 2017 (UTC)