IGLO or IGLOO?

Apologies to the Eskimos* for any confusion that might arise from our use of the expression IGLO, as an acronym for Intercomprehension of Germanic Languages Online. Of course, we were aware when we coined the term that it evokes the famous ice houses of the polar peoples, and being northerners ourselves (though not quite so doughty) we liked that association.

Just to set the record straight, there is no reconstructable relation between the Eskimo language and the Germanic languages. Historical relationships among languages are generally determined on the basis of reconstructed word forms as common ancestors to cognates in the daughter languages. The reconstructed Proto-Eskimo word for the word ‘house’ is

@nglu

(here I use the "at" sign for schwa and "ng" for engma**).

This word has cognates in most of the modern Eskimo-Aleut languages, spoken from the tip of the Siberian peninsula (Sirenik and Siberian Yupik), along the coast of Alaska (Alaskan Yupik), down through the Aleutian Islands (Aleut), and all the way across North America (Canadian Inuit) to Greenland (Greenlandic Inuit) – where Danish is the colonial language, and historically the first point of contact between Eskimo and Germanic (in Old Norse times, it was named Groenaland or ‘Greenland’ by Erik the Red, who settled there; in West Greenlandic the land is called Kalaallit Nunaat (literally, the Land of the Greenlanders).

Here are some modern cognates for @nglu in different Eskimo languages (mostly from Fortescue, Jakobson & Kaplan’s Comparative Eskimo Dictionary, 1994 Alaska Native Language Center). I have written schwa as "@" and engma as "ng," as above, but also crossed i (a high mid vowel) as capital "I," gamma (a voiced velar fricative like the g in Spanish ‘agua’) as capital "G," and belted l (a voiceless lateral fricative) as capital "L."

The organization into language groups here is hypothetical, and basically follows Fortescue et al. I have added the Aleut word for ‘house’ to Fortescue et al’s list without being sure of its provenance. Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian islands, is more distantly related to the other Eskimo languages. The relationship of Sirenik or Sirenikski to the main families, Inuit and Yupik, is also unclear.

Lists like this, of cognates across Eskimo languages, establish beyond reasonable doubt that they are related to each other. That in mind, back to Germanic. Germanic languages have words like English igloo meaning ‘domed house or shelter made of blocks of hard-packed snow.’ So, could we establish a similar connection between Germanic and Eskimo?

It turns out that we cannot. There are indications that igloo is not originally a Germanic word. First, it doesn’t look like a Germanic word. This might seem like an odd thing to take seriously, but the superficial observation is an indication of a deeper fact. Typically, patterns arise in the course of regular sound changes, and these are represented by regular spelling conventions, leading to sets of words like shallow, callow, bellow, fellow, pillow, follow, hollow, etc. or glue, true, blue, flue, clue, etc. There are rather few words in English that sound or look like igloo (though there are a few that end in “oo”: vindaloo, bugaboo, hullaballoo; but a careful investigation will show that these are recent loans). So the fact that igloo doesn’t look Germanic is a good indication that it isn’t.

Furthermore, an examination of the historical record shows that the word does not appear in English texts before 1662, at which point it is reported that iglun is a Greenlandic word, glossed ‘house.’ The first attested use of the word igloo in an ordinary English sentence is from 1864 (according to the Oxford English dictionary), also referring to a Greenlandic house made of blocks of packed snow. Checking the historical record for the other Germanic languages yields a similar result.

You might be convinced at this point that igloo is not a Germanic word originally, but a careful linguist would not assume that the historical record is complete. Some words simply don’t appear in print, even though they are in fact used, and other words might actually appear in print but have been missed by the makers of the Oxford English Dictionary.

The real test to confirm that igloo is a recent loan is to try to reconstruct what its ancestor might have been. We do this by looking at the variants of it in the different Germanic languages, and trying to establish what common ancestor they might have had. The different spellings in the Germanic languages seen in the chart below for the word all approximate the same pronunciation: in phonological parlance, the first vowel is a high front short vowel, and the second vowel is an unstressed high back rounded one. Stress is on the first syllable.

The fact is, the different Germanic languages have undergone such changes in the past 2000 years that no old cognates have such similar pronunciation.

For example, if we take some words that have been established to be cognates, we see the following pattern:

For Norwegian, for example, the word for ‘embers’ (glo) has the same final vowel as the word for ‘house made of snow’ (iglo); and this works for German as well, because the same vowel is observed in the German word for ‘embers’(Glut) and the German word for ‘house made of snow’ (Iglu). But the similarity breaks down for example for English, where the vowel in glow is not the same as the vowel in igloo. Turning to the next column, the vowel in the English word true is the same as the vowel in igloo (though spelled differently), but the German and Norwegian vowels do not line up then (treu vs. Iglu, tru vs. iglo). Once we have constructed proto-forms for all of the words given and explained why the vowels changed the way they did, there is no way for all the words for ‘house made of snow’ to have come from the same proto-Germanic origin. This is strong evidence that the words in the final column are recent loans.

But as Bodil Kappel Schmitt points out to me, the examples above are generally monosyllabic, unlike igloo. She notes that another argument can be constructed on the basis of word stress and vowel quality. If we take a language like Danish, Germanic disyllabic words never have more than one full vowel; the final vowel is reduced to schwa [@] or even to zero. Examples with consonant clusters similar to 'iglo' include (question marks here are glottal stops, colons represent vowel length, and periods mark syllable boundaries):

æble [eb.l@, e:.b@l, e:.bl] (apple)
ugle [ug.l@, u:.gl, u:.l] (owl)
igle [ig.l@, i:.gl, i:.l] (leech)
fugl [fu?l, fu?@l] (bird)

To be sure, there are Danish words with two full vowels, including many with second syllable stress:

parti [par'ti?] (party)
idé [i'de?] (idea)
café [ka'fe?] (café)
bureau [by'ro] (office)
chauffør [sjo'fø?r] (driver)

And there are even some with initial stress:

kano ['ka:.no](canoe)
lasso ['las.so] (lasso)

But in the case of the first set, it is easy to identify cognates in the other modern Germanic languages and to find their historical ancestors in texts, and proto-Germanic forms can usually be reconstructed (I have not yet been able to do so for igle, 'leech'). Here I use capital U, O for u with macron, o with macron. Asterisk means reconstructed form.

æble (Eng. apple, Ger. Apfel, Nor. eple): OE æppel, OHG apful, ON epli; Gmc *aplu-
ugle (Eng. owl, Ger. Eule, Nor. ugl): OE Ule, OLG *Ula, cf. OHG Uwila, ON ugla; Gmc *UwwalOn
igle (Swe. igel, Low Ger. Egel): OE igel
fugl (cf. Eng. fowl): OE fugol, OHG fogal, ON fugl, Goth. fugls; Gmc *foglas

For the Danish words with two full vowels, recent foreign sources can usually be identified. For example, kano is of American Indian origin, via Spanish/Haïtian canoa, and lasso is from Spanish lazo 'lace' via English.

* But any neo-Whorfian language purists who think that my use of the term Eskimo somehow impugns any group of people, living or dead, are welcome to boycott my web page. So there.

** Ugly conventions for special characters are an unfortunate legacy of the fact that Americans, speakers of virtually the only language written in the Roman alphabet without diacritics, invented ASCII, from which html code is ultimately derived.