Easier said than written

MISSIONARIES in northern Canada saw themselves as spreading the “three Cs” among the region’s Inuit peoples: Christianity, commerce and civilisation. But in translating the Bible and other religious works into Inuktitut, the Inuit language, they accidentally left behind a fourth: confusion. Today Canada’s 59,500 Inuit have nine different writing systems, which makes it hard for them to communicate with each other and to keep their language alive. Their leaders want to adopt a single way of setting down the language, but finding agreement on just how to do that is proving difficult.

In the western Arctic and on the Labrador coast missionaries moonlighting as linguists used the Roman alphabet to capture Inuktitut in written form, but each had his own system for doing so. Sounds denoted by one combination of letters in one region are expressed by a different assortment in another. “You” can now be rendered as “ibbit”, “ivvit” and “illit”. In northern Quebec and the eastern Arctic, the proselytisers eschewed Roman letters in favour of phonetic symbols based on the Pitman shorthand system (see picture).