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The Inuit language, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, has a very rich morphological system, in which a succession of different suffixes are added to root words to indicate things that, in languages like English, would require several words to express. (See also: Agglutinative language and Polysynthetic language) All Inuit language words begin with a root to which other suffixes are added. The language has hundreds of distinct suffixes, in some dialects as many as 700. Fortunately for the learner, the language has a highly regular morphology. Although the rules are many, and sometimes very complicated, they do not have exceptions in the sense that English and other Indo-European languages do. This system makes words very long, and potentially unique. For example, in Nunavut Inuktitut: :ᑐᓵᑦᓯᐊᕈᓐᓇᖖᒋᑦᑐᐊᓘᔪᖓ :tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga :''I can't hear very well.'' This long word is composed of a root word tusaa- – ''to hear'' – followed by seven suffixes (a vowel-beginning suffix always erases the final consonant of the preceding consonant-ending suffix): * ''-tsiaq-'' "well" * ''-junnaq-'' (or ''-gunnaq-'') "be able to" * ''-nngit-'' "negation" * ''-tu(q)'' "indicative third person singular" (in fact a nominal form) * ''-alu(k)-'' "augmentative" → "very" * ''-u-'' "be" * ''-junga'' "indicative first person singular" (itself composed of the indicative morpheme ''-ju-'' and the first person mark ''-nga'') Note the consonant sandhi (see ''Inuit phonology''): The /q/ from -tsiaq- followed by the /j/ from -junnaq- becomes ‹r› , a single consonant taking its point of articulation from /q/ and its manner of articulation from /j/. The /q/ from -junnaq- is assimilated into the /ŋŋ/ of -nngit-, because Inuktitut forbids triple length consonants, and because the morphophonological rules attached to -nngit- require it to delete any consonant that comes before it. This sort of word construction is pervasive in Inuit language and makes it very unlike English. In one large Inuktitut corpus – the ''Nunavut Hansard'' – 92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application of Zipf's law quite difficult. Furthermore, the notion of a part of speech can be somewhat complicated in Inuit language. Fully inflected verbs can be interpreted as nouns. The word ilisaijuq can be interpreted as a fully inflected verb – "he studies" – but can also be interpreted as a noun: "student". Because of the language's rich and complicated morphology, this article can present only a limited and unsystematic sample of its features. It is based largely on the Inuktitut dialects of north Baffin Island and central Nunavut. The morphology and syntax of Inuit language varies to some degree between dialects, but the basic principles will generally apply to all of them and to some degree to Yupik as well. ==Nouns== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Inuit grammar」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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