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This, one of Igloolik's busy intersections, shows the true
bilingualism of the town.
When written in roman orthography, the Inuktitut syllabics
shown here look something like this:
NU-Q-KA-Q-LU-TI-T (letter-by-letter), but I could be completely
wrong, as I'm just going by the notes scribbled in my journal.
There are basically 15 different syllabics, and depending
on the direction that they face, it tells you what sound or
sound combination the symbol makes. So the same syllabic,
for example "t"(the upside down "U" and the sideways "U" -
or small "c" in the photo), can be "ti", "tu", "ta" or the
final "t".
As Inuktitut is an oral tradition, and the syllabics were
created by white missionaries and are relatively new to the
language.
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