Taissumani, Feb. 19
Inuit Language Pioneer — Otto Fabricius, Part 2
KENN HARPER
(Continued from last week.)
Otto Fabricius made his mark on scientific scholarship of the last 1700s and early 1800s with his publications on the zoology, ethnography and language of Greenland.
He built, of course, on the earlier work of his friend, Paul Egede. His works, in retrospect, share some of the faults of Egede’s works. Like Egede, Fabricius did not distinguish the uvular from the velar consonants — in simple terms, he did not hear, or at least did not record, the difference between the letters “q” and “k.”
This was unfortunate. As any student of Inuit languages knows, this is the most significant difference in the language, and the difference is important in determining meaning in many words.
In addition, he showed no interest in recording dialectal differences. He made no musings in what one would today call comparative philology. Indeed, he confined his language writings to the one language that he studied — West Greenlandic.
This was the language he needed for his own missionary work, for teaching young Greenlanders, and later to teach young missionaries who would follow his example by going to Greenland to teach the Inuit.
Fabricius carried the study of Greenlandic well past the work of Egede. His grammar has been described as “not speculative but faithful and methodical in description, a work of the age of Rationalism.”
In attempting to describe the complex grammar of the language, he wrote that “there are so many forms in the various examples that even those who should best understand the Greenlandic language run the risk of making mistakes in it.”
Yet as one of the great scholar’s biographers, Erik Holtved — a man whom it was my pleasure to meet a number of decades ago when I was quite new to Arctic studies — observed, “It is undeniably very complicated, and yet every Eskimo can speak his language and do so faultlessly.”
Fabricius’s language work falls into two categories. The first comprises translations of the Bible, catechisms, hymns, other church works and textbooks, into Greenlandic. The second comprises descriptions of the language.
His translations were independent works, rather than revisions of the earlier works of Paul Egede. For this he faced bitter criticism from older theologians, and especially from H. C. Glahn, a professor of Greenlandic, who happened to be Paul Egede’s son-in-law.
Glahn felt that Fabricius was “scrapping” the work of Egede, and he resented the fact that a man who had spent only six years in Greenland would do so.
In a perverse echo of Sir Isaac Newton’s famous phrase, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Glahn wrote viciously against him, “If dwarfs would seek to hop upon the giant’s tomb, that would be intolerable to the department.” Yet it was Fabricius who completed the unfinished work of Paul Egede, the complete translation of the Bible.
Fabricius would not relent, but compromised to some extent by agreeing that in the preface to his work, Egede would be given due credit. Erik Holtved felt that “by its clarity and true style his Greenlandic translation signified a great advance.”
Fabricius made two major contributions to the description of the Greenlandic language. In 1791, he published a grammar of Greenlandic which was an improvement on the earlier grammar of Paul Egede.
This volume is extremely scarce, as most copies of it, still undistributed, were destroyed in a warehouse fire in Copenhagen in 1795. (I count myself extremely fortunate to have acquired a copy for my own library from a dealer in Europe eight years ago.) The volume was reprinted in 1801. Even this volume is quite scarce today.
Like Paul Egede, Fabricius also compiled a Greenlandic-Danish dictionary. Published in 1804, Den Gronlandske Ordbog, at 795 pages, was more than double the size of Egede’s dictionary of 54 years earlier. It remained a standard for many years.
Otto Fabricius died in 1822. On his death-bed, he lay correcting the proofs of his Greenlandic translation of the book of Genesis, devoted to his work for the Inuit to the end.
Why should today’s young students of Inuktitut and Greenlandic care about the works of old white men like Poul Egede and Otto Fabricius? They should care, especially about the dictionaries that these men compiled. In them are found many words that have passed out of existence, archaic words that show the richness of the Inuit languages.
Perhaps young native scholars might someday rehabilitate some of these forgotten words and use them to revitalize dialects that continue to face pressure from other languages in a rapidly modernizing world.
Taissumani recounts a specific event of historic interest. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
