Harry Krause wrote:
Jim Carter wrote:
"Harry Krause" wrote:
"Inuit" people of the far north, is like calling a black man the " N " word.


No, I didn't know that. Noted. Thanks. I would spell it Innuit, though.

Except... that isn't true. (Innuit is an older spelling that has
lost favor to Inuit since development of a modern orthography.)

Are you sure about this? Because "Eskimo" is a native American
word of Algonquian origins:

That is true, but what follows has been known wrong for 25 years
or so. I makes a good story, so everyone remembers it, and good
stories die hard.

("EskIm@U) [a. Da. Eskimo (Sw. Eskimå), ad. F. Esquimaux pl.,
from some Algonquian Indian language; cf. Proto-Algonquian *a_k-
raw, *-imo eat, Abnaki askimo (pl. askimoak), Eskimo, eaters of
raw flesh.]

Actually there are two lines of thought on what it means. Ives
Goddard (at the Smithsonian, and a linguist who studies Algonquian
language) says it means "snowshoe netters". I've never seen his
justification for that, but it is becoming the popular etymology.

However, Jose Mailhot, an anthropologist from Quebec (who
publishes in French, and is therefore little known in the US or
on the Internet) who speaks fluent Cree did a definitive study
some years back. No part of the study has ever been refuted, so
I tend to accept it as fact. She says it simply means "people
who speak a different langauge".

Mailhot, Jose, L'etymologie de *esquimau' revuew et
corrigee. In: Etudes/Inuit/Studies 2(2): 59-69.

See http://linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-300.html for more
discussion.

and there are references to a language of the same name:

Any of the several languages of this people, of which one set of
dialects or languages, also called Inupik, is spread from Norton

It should be spelled Inupiaq. They call themselves Inupiat.

Sound, Alaska, to Greenland, and another set, also called Yupik,
is in southwest Alaska and the eastern tip of Siberia. These
languages, together with those of the Aleut, form the
Eskimo-Aleut, -Aleutian family.

But I don't want to offend a fine people in any way. It's not as
if they are neoconvicts.

Rephrase:

Well, she was planning to sell Sterno to the Inuit, but she
drank it, instead.

Don't say that to anyone in Alaska, because the might laugh at
you. Even the Inupiat people (who actually are Inuit) don't use
the term Inuit.

--
Floyd L. Davidson http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)