About

I have long bemoaned the lack of a true morphemic dictionary for Kalaallisut.
Eventually I realised, that if one were ever to appear, then I would have to make it myself.

MoFo is a dictionary of Kalaallisut (Greenlandic). It is a true morphemic dictionary: its primary purpose is not to list how words are spelt, but to record the underlying morphemic form of bases, affixes, enclitics and particles, using the morphemic notation of An Introduction to West Greenlandic (AITWG). Thus, this dictionary is first and foremost created for people who want to learn Greenlandic, rather than people who already speak the language.

Status and roadmap

MoFo is very much an on-going project. It is far from complete, since building an entire dictionary for a language is time-consuming task. I have therefore decided to focus on recording the information I believe will be most relevant for a learner of Kalaallisut. I believe this to be the affixes and the (so-called) irregular noun stems, since these two groups of morphemes show the greatest variation in their behaviour, when they combine with other morphemes. Thus the prioritized roadmap is to add the following:

• All affixes from the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary (Fortescue et al., 2010)

• All affixes from Fortescue's Manual of Affixes (1983)

• All affixes from my own affix list

• All affixes from Schultz-Lorentzen's dictionary (1958)

• All affixes from the DAKA dictionary (Ilinniusiorfik, 2010)

• All affixes from Nielsen's grammar (2019)

• All irregular noun stems from Bjørnum's grammar (2003)

• All irregular noun stems from Schultz-Lorentzen's grammar (1951)

• All irregular noun stems from Nielsen's grammar (2019)

• All t(ə)-stems (verb stems) from the DAKA dictionary

• All other verb stems with non-obvious constructions

Currently, none of the steps are completed. However, nearly all affixes from the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary have been added, although some still lack an adequate description and examples.

Would you like to contribute?

MoFo is a hobby-project I develop in my spare time and add entries to whenever I have time for it. However, building a dictionary is a slow and lengthy process. Therefore, the more people who want to help adding entries, the sooner we will have a complete morphemic dictionary of Kalaallisut. If you are interested in contributing, please get in touch with me through email or Discord.

Contact and caveats

MoFo is developed by Stian Lybech. It is provided 'as is' without any warranty or guarantees as to the correctness of its entries. Comments, suggestions and corrections are welcome and should be addressed to the author on stianlybech a-jusaq gmail naggat com or though Discord.