Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:
From http://www.alaskan.com/docs/eskimo.html
Shame on them for spread untruths... :-)
Eskimo
The Eskimo are the native inhabitants of the seacoasts of the Arctic
and sub-Arctic regions of North America and the northeastern tip of
Siberia. Their habitation area extends over four countries: the United
States, Canada, the USSR, and Greenland. Of the more than 90,000
Eskimo in this region, the greater part live south of the Arctic
Circle, with approximately 28,000 on the Aleutian Islands and in
Alaska; 17,000 in Canada; 1,500 in Siberia; and 45,000 in Greenland.
The word Eskimo is not an Eskimo word. It means "eaters of raw meat"
I've posted facts and a couple cites on this in another message.
That is not the actual etymology of the word, though it makes
a good story so people like it.
and was used by the Algonquin Indians of eastern Canada for these
hardy neighbors who wore animal-skin clothing and were adept hunters.
The name became commonly employed by European explorers and now is
generally used, even by Eskimo. Their own term for themselves is Inuit
(the Yupik variant is Yuit), which means the "real people."
Yuit just means a group of people. Yupik means "Genuine people".
Another word that is actually the same as Yupik is Yupiaq.
The Eskimo inhabit one of the most inclement regions of the world.
Their land is mostly tundra--low, flat, treeless plains where the
ground remains permanently frozen except for a few inches of the
surface during the brief summer season. Although some groups are
settled on rivers and depend on fishing, and others follow inland
caribou herds, most Eskimo traditionally have lived primarily as
hunters of maritime mammals (seals, walrus, and whales), and the
structure and ethos of their culture have always been fundamentally
oriented to the sea.
That is quite accurate.
One of the most striking aspects of traditional Eskimo culture is its
relative homogeneity across more than 8,000 km (5,000 mi) of the vast
expanses of the Arctic. The main institutional and psychological
patterns of the culture--religious, social, and economic--are much the
same. There are some differences in traditional kinship systems,
however, especially in the western regions, and the language is
I don't know what they mean by "especially in the western regions".
Not that I know of...
divided into two major dialectical groups, the Inupik speakers
(Greenland to western Alaska) and the Yupik speakers (southwestern
Alaska and Siberia)
And that is accurate too.
The Inupiaq (that is the what it is called in Alaska) language
broke away from Proto-Eskimo perhaps 1500-2000 years ago, and
rapidly spread from the Bering Straits area eastward to
Greenland. Today the Inupiaq language presents a continuum from
west to east, though at the fringes there are some significant
variations (influence by Yupik in the west and ritual word
replacement in Eastern Greenland). Otherwise they can easily
communicate with each other.
Yupik on the other hand has been in place for several thousands
of years, and in some cases even relatively close villages speak
dialects so different that they cannot understand each other.
It actually took study by linguists to discover that it was one
language with several very distinct dialects as opposed to just
several languages.
Note that occasionally you'll see the word "Yup'ik", which is
pronounced exactly the same as Yupik, but it is used to refer
to the Central Alaskan Yupik people or language.
--
Floyd L. Davidson http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)