1 Tunngasugit

The dog sleeps under the tree.

In Inuktut, the basic units of meaning are roots, affixes and grammatical endings.

Roots involve basic vocabulary and always appear at the beginning of words in Inuktut. Here are some examples:

niri-	to eat
aullaq-	to depart; leave town
tupiq	tent

Roots that describe nouns (people, places, animals or objects) sometimes appear on their own:

nuna	land
inuk	an Inuk; a person
natsiq	ringed seal

Generally, though, words are built in Inuktut by attaching affixes and endings to a root.  

Here are three simple noun endings:

-mi	in / at a place
-mut	to a place
-mit	from a place

We can add these endings to a noun root to create a word:

sijjami	at the shoreline
sijjamut	to the shoreline
sijjamit	from the shoreline

 

Verb endings are attached to verb roots that describe actions.  Here are three simple verb endings:
 

-tunga	I
-tutit	you
-tuq	she / he / it

 

If we add different endings to the same root, we get different meanings:

aullaqtunga	I depart.
aullaqtutit	You depart.
aullaqtuq	He / she departs.

 

Affixes are pieces of words that appear between the root and the ending.  They can never begin a word.  Affixes add more information about the noun or verb that is described by the root.

For example -lauq- is a verb affix that indicates that an action happened in the past:

aullalauqtunga	I departed.
aullalauqtutit	You departed.
aullalauqtuq	He / she departed.

 

In Inuktut, it is possible to build up very long words by adding a series of affixes between the root and the ending.  We can end up with single words that would take an entire sentence to say in English:

qangatasuukkuvimmuuriaqalaaqtunga I’ll have to go to the airport.

 

Verb roots in Inuktut describe actions or states of being. The verb ending tells us who is performing the action.

takujunga

I see.

 

In the above word, taku- describes the action of seeing and the verb ending –junga describes who is seeing.
By using different verb endings we can talk about different people doing the same action: