Language
The Eskimo population of settlement Сиреники (Sireniki), and a part of the population of the mixed villages nearby used to speak a special variant of Eskimo languages. It has several peculiarities not only among Eskimo languages, but even compared to Aleut. For example, dual number is not known in Sireniki Eskimo, while most Eskimo–Aleut languages have dual, including even its neighboring Siberian Yupik relatives. The peculiarities amounted to mutual unintelligibility even with its nearest language relatives.
Read more about this topic: Sirenik Eskimos
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy flame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations, and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,
In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)