Greenlandic in comparison

• Published in: Historiographia Linguistica
• Main Author: Plank, Frans
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: John Benjamins Publishing Company 1990
• Subjects: algonkin; eskimo*; greenlander*; greenlandic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/hl.17.3.04pla; http://www.jbe-platform.com/deliver/fulltext/hl.17.3.04pla.pdf

Summary The first descriptive grammar of Greenlandic Eskimo was published in 1760 by Paul Egede, continuing the work of his father, Hans, and his missionary collaborator, Albert Top. Curiously, however, the comparative study of Greenlandic had already been inaugurated in 1745, when Marcus Wöldike (1699–1750), professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen, read a remarkable paper to the Kiøbenhavnske Selskab af Lœrdoms of Videnskabers Elskere, published next year in the proceedings of that Society. Based on information obtained from the Egedes, Wöldike presented a grammar of Greenlandic in summary form and compared Greenlandic to about two dozen other languages on some sixty phonological, morphological, and syntactic criteria. As it turned out, Greenlandic was rather similar to Hungarian, sharing with it a great many features (especially such as Hungarian did not share with European languages such as Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, English, German, Irish, Welsh, Breton, Latin, Italian, French, Ancient Greek, and Slavonic) and showing preciously few differences. American languages, represented by Tupi, Carib, Huron, Natick, and Algonkin, were found to differ considerably from Greenlandic; and Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish did not much better. Lapp and Finnish came out as close structural relatives of Hungarian – which amounted to the first published demonstration of the Finno-Ugric hypothesis, antedating Saj-novics’s of 1770 and Gyarmathi’s of 1799. For Wöldike the large-scale agreements especially between Greenlandic and Hungarian were no inexplicable chance coincidences. The explanation he suggested was not typological, drawing on necessary correlations of the structural features shared, but historical. Rather than positing a common Ursprache, as was and continued to be the fashion, however, he invoked diffusion within a Sprachbund, localized, somewhat vaguely, in Tartary, from where the Greenlanders and Hungarians (and Lapps and Finns too) had supposedly migrated to their present habitats.