Details

General

Description and behaviour

Form and usage:

The meaning of this stem is 'Actor is happy'. The stem is one of a collection of three different stems with related meaning, that often can be difficult to distinguish:

• {nuannarə}V, 'Agent enjoys/is happy about Patient'.
• {nuannaaq}V, 'Actor is happy' (this stem).
• {nuanniq}V, 'Actor is enjoyable'.

All three seem to be derived from a common verbal base *{nua-}, but this does not exist as an independent stem in Kalaallisut. According to the Comparative Eskimo Dictionary [MFSJLK10], it is actually from the nominal stem {nuna}N, 'land', seemingly with a loss of /n/, but how 'land' relates to the aforementioned meanings 'enjoy' is entirely unclear. In any case, these combinations are very old. We therefore record the initial component as unknown here.

The second component is then V{(n)niq}V, V{(n)narə}V, and V{(n)naaq}V, respectively. It generally seem sto be the case that when there exists a lexicalised stem derived with one of these affixes, then there also exist two other lexicalisations derived wit the two other affixes.

Meanings and examples

Search the corpus for further examples.

Tags

• Semantic categorisation / Verbal bases / Being

References

• [MFSJLK10] Michael Fortescue, Steven Jacobson, Lawrence Kaplan (2010): Comparative Eskimo Dictionary (2ED).
• [SK71] Samuel Kleinschmidt (1871): Den grønlandske Ordbog.
• [CWSL58] C.W. Schultz-Lorentzen (1958): Den Grønlandske Ordbog.
• [JP67] Jonathan Petersen (1967): Ordbogêraĸ.
• [CBBJRPIKJR97] Christian Berthelsen, Birgitte Jakobsen, Robert Petersen, Inge Kleivan & Jørgen Rischel (1997): Oqaatsit.