Details

General

Morphemic form: {paaq}N
New orthography: paaq, paat
Old orthography: pâĸ, pât
Sources: [MFSJLK10], [SK71], [JP67], [CWSL58], [CBBJRPIKJR97]
Combinations: View list
Right sandhi: /aq/ drop
Inflection sandhi: Weak stem, Default/none, p-declined
Stem type: q-stem

Description and behaviour

Form and usage:

The meaning of this stem is: 'opening (of Possessor)', or 'entrance' or 'mouth' etc. It can denote e.g. the mouth of a fjord, but also the opening hole of a sleeve, and the (tunnel) entrance to an old Inuit house.

Etymology and form
According to the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary [MFSJLK10], the reconstructed historical form of this stem is {paðə}. It is not explained why the stem ends on /q/ in Kalaallisut. Thus, we could have recorded the stem as /paəq/, assuming that /ð/ dropped at some point. However, according to Kleinschmidt [SK71] the stem drops its final /aq/ before vowel-initial endings, which suggests that the final vowel actually is /a/, and not /ə/. Thus, it is not clear how the Kalaallisut form has arisen from the historical form, but we record the vowel as a long /aa/ to make the form consistent with its right-sandhi behaviour.


Right sandhi:

According to Kleinschmidt [SK71], the absolutive 3sg/sg possessive form is paa. Thus, the stem has aq-drop, at least with vowel-initial endings.


Inflection

Inflection pattern:

Stem type: q-stem
Inflection sandhi: Weak stem, Default/none, p-declined
Sources: [JP67]

Stem before consonant Stem before vowel Notable forms
New orthography paa pa paaq, paap, paat
Old orthography pâ pa pâĸ, pâp, pât
Phonemic orthography paa pa paaq, paap, paat

Notes on inflection:

The stem inflects as an ordinary weak q-stem with p-declension. As this is entirely regular, we do not record a full inflection paradigm here.


Meanings and examples


Search the corpus for further examples.


Tags

References