My wife had a little adventure recently when she ordered some outerwear from a well-known outfitter in Maine. The thing didn’t come and didn’t come, and no one at either the retailer or the shipper seemed to know where it was. So they canceled the order and sent her a new one. You surely can guess what happened next: both packages arrived, possibly on the same day.
But the good news is that she was happy with her purchase. “Do you like my new anorak?” she asked, modeling it in the living room. And then (finally) the words part of this story occurred: “Anorak, that’s an Inuit word, isn’t it?” she asked.
Yes, indeed. We got the word from the Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) word annoraaq or anoraq. Most sources list the word as entering English in the 1920s, which is the date of the first cite in the OED. However, Merriam-Webster antedates the word to 1877, but with a frustrating lack of citations, so we’ll have to take their word for it.
Researching the word anorak got me curious about what other terms we got from Inuit. The OED lists 30 terms whose etymology references Inuit. Most of them are pretty obscure, but a handful are common(er). Not surprisingly, the words refer to technologies—clothing, shelter, tools—that were adaptations to the cold climate of the Inuit homelands; when we encountered these technologies, we borrowed the names for them as well. Here’s a list of relatively common English words that come from Inuit besides anorak:
The word Inuit is also an Inuit word. As is not unusual for endonyms (or autonyms, i.e. “self-name”), in Inuit, the word Inuit means “the people,” and the singular inuk means “person.”
I should note that Inuit is not a single language, but a set of dialects or languages that are spoken by groups of people who live across a huge swath of land, from Greenland west across Canada and into Alaska.
An observation about Inuit in Wikipedia caught my eye:
[T]here are no clear criteria for breaking the Inuit language into specific member languages since it forms a dialect continuum. Each band of Inuit understands its neighbours, and most likely its neighbours’ neighbours; but at some remove, comprehensibility drops to a very low level.
This struck me because it’s similar to how dialects work in, say, the Iberian peninsula. (Or at least how they did historically.) You start in one town and go to the next, and they talk a little different, and then you go to the next town, and you again find some differences. The people in neighboring towns understand one another just fine. However, if you go far enough and pass through enough towns, you realize that you started by hearing what people call Spanish and ended up hearing what people call Catalan (or Portuguese or Galician). It’s not like there’s a line somewhere and on one side they speak Spanish and on the other side they speak Catalan. Anyway, that’s how the Inuit dialects or languages seem to work.
Let’s also talk for a moment about the word Eskimo, which is the word that we used when I was young to refer to the indigenous people of the polar regions. It’s not known where exactly the word Eskimo comes from, but a widespread theory is that it was a name given to the Inuit people by neighboring Algonquin tribes. This makes Eskimo an exonym, a name given to you by foreigners, as we saw recently with gypsy and bohemian. Understandably, Inuit people don’t want to be known by what other people called them.[1] In addition to now being considered pejorative, the word Eskimo is imprecise, because it was applied generically to any people who lived in the northern regions, including to people who had no ethnic or linguistic connections to one another.
As an aside to all this, when I was looking up anorak, I discovered that the word is also British slang for someone whose interests do them no social favors. As it says in M-W, an anorak is “a person who is extremely enthusiastic about and interested in something that other people find boring.” Which Douglas Harper explains: “on the notion that that sort of person typically wears this sort of coat.”
I might decide to accidently forget to mention this definition of anorak to my wife.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] As a fun aside, I was amused to find in the OED the word Qallunaaq, which is an Inuit word meaning a non-Inuit person. That is, it’s an Inuit exonym for Europeans. [^]
I’ve heard the British usage of “anorak” in exactly two contexts:
– trainspotters, who traditionally wear that kind of coat to go out in the weather and watch the trains
– extremely knowledgeable Doctor Who fans, of which I was one about a decade ago (though, being from this side of the Atlantic, I just called myself a nerd)