A common morphological process is to add an affix to a lexical root to change its word class. This morphological process is known as derivation. A few English examples to illustrate this process are how the noun energy can be turned into the verb energize, and how the verb to play can be turned into the noun player using another affix. This process is used extensively within the Greenlandic language (and other language in the Eskaleut language family) to create some really impressive words. An example of this is aliikkuserisuillammaassuaanerartassagaluarpaat, meaning something along the lines of ‘However, they will say that he is a great entertainer, but…’ Impressive indeed, but how do they work?
Greenlandic words typically begin with the lexical root, (alikku– ‘entertainment’ in the example above), followed by a set of optional derivation affixes (all of them marked in bold in the example above), and ending in an inflectional affix (a story for another time). A unique part of Greenlandic grammar is the ability to change the word class several times within a single word!
Taking a closer look at the word above, we can see how this process works. In the following, the different affixes are separate by a hyphen, and the superscript is used to show which part of speech the affix is used to derive: aliikkuN-sersuV-iV-llammaN-ssuaN-aV-nerarV-taV-ssaV-galuarV-paatV. The word begins a noun, then turns into a verb, then turns into a noun again and then finally turning it into a verb. These affixes can have relatively specific meanings, with –sersuV-meaning ‘to provide’ and -llammaN– meaning ‘one good at’. It is the last derivational affix that determines whether the word will function as a noun or as a verb in the sentence, not the word class of the lexical root. This phenomenon, also called ‘Ping-Ping recategorization’, is one of the reasons why West Greenlandic can build such long words!
The attentive reader will have noticed that not all affixes appear to change the word from noun to verb or verb to noun. Some of them simply keep the same class, as -ssuaN– and –ssaV–. Rather than changing the word class, they act as modifiers (in a very board sense), adding more information to the word. For instance, -ssuaN– shows that the noun it modifies is big, and -ssaV– shows that the event will take place in the future.
However, it is important to keep in mind that the language does not have to use such long words. An English sentence like ‘Peter read the newspaper’ will likewise consist of a set of short words in Greenlandic: Piitap aviisi atuarpaa. We should always be aware of and try to avoid exoticizing languages that happen to have different structure than what we find in familiar European languages!
Greenlandic has approximately 500 of these types of affixes, constituting the source of the language’s impressive ability to construct long and complex words. For readers interested in learning more, see Fortescue (2017) for a general overview of the language family, and Dorais (2010) for a book-length introduction to the language family, with a special focus on the Inuit group.
Dorais, L. J. (2010). Language of the Inuit: syntax, semantics, and society in the Arctic (Vol. 58). McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.
Fortescue, M. (2017). The Eskimo-Aleut Language Family. In A. Aikhenvald & R. Dixon (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, pp. 683-706).