Le rôle de l’environnement physique arctique sur l’évolution du Tunumiisut, la langue inuit de la côte est du Groenland au xixe siècle

For many years, Pierre Robbe and Bernadette Robbe have been developing an encyclopedic dictionary of tunumiisut, the Inuit language of the east coast of Greenland, one of the dialects spoken today by the Inuit people from the Bering Strait to the east coast of Greenland.Compared to all these dialect...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Revue d’ethnoécologie
Main Authors: Robbe, Pierre, Robbe, Bernadette
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:French
Published: Laboratoire Éco-anthropologie 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:http://journals.openedition.org/ethnoecologie/9130
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Summary:For many years, Pierre Robbe and Bernadette Robbe have been developing an encyclopedic dictionary of tunumiisut, the Inuit language of the east coast of Greenland, one of the dialects spoken today by the Inuit people from the Bering Strait to the east coast of Greenland.Compared to all these dialects, and mainly to the one that is spoken on the west coast of Greenland, Kilaamiusut – the country's official language, to which is close to it - the Tunumiisut lexicon has profoundly evolved during the 19th century.Many words have been replaced with descriptive or metaphorical lexemes, foloowing the pattern that shamans used to not directly name potentially dangerous entities.Leaning on the linguistic history of the Inuit, on archeology, on the study of animal life in relation to the climate, and on the many stories and testimonies that were collected, the authors suggest that understanding this particularism, which certainly results from cultural factors, is nevertheless closely linked to the ecological conditions of this Arctic area (climate, ice, fauna), conditions that fluctuate over time, with prosperous periods and catastrophic phases for animal life and therefore for that of humans, whose existence depended directly on it. Depuis de nombreuses années, Pierre Robbe et Bernadette Robbe élaborent un dictionnaire encyclopédique sur la langue inuit de la côte est du Groenland, le tunumiisut, l’un des 16 dialectes que compte la langue parlée aujourd’hui par le peuple Inuit du détroit de Béring à la côte orientale du Groenland.Par rapport à tous ces dialectes et principalement à celui de la côte ouest du Groenland, le Kilaamiusut – la langue officielle de ce pays dont il est historiquement proche – le lexique du tunumiisut a profondément évolué au cours du xixe siècle. De nombreux mots ont été remplacés par des lexèmes descriptifs ou métaphoriques selon le modèle que les chamanes utilisaient pour ne pas nommer directement des entités potentiellement dangereuses.En s’appuyant sur l’histoire linguistique de l’inuit, ...