1 Answers
The Inuit languages, like other Eskimo–Aleut languages, exhibit a regular agglutinative and heavily suffixing morphology. The languages are rich in suffixes, making words very long and potentially unique. For example, in Nunavut Inuktitut:
This long word is composed of a root word tusaa- – to hear – followed by seven suffixes :
Note the consonant sandhi : The /qa/ from -tsiaq- followed by the /j/ from -junnaq- becomes ‹r› , a single consonant taking its point of articulation from /qa/ and its manner of articulation from /j/. The /qa/ from -junnaq- is assimilated into the /ŋŋ/ of -nngit-, because Inuktitut forbids triple length consonants, and because the morphophonological rules attached to -nngit- require it to delete any consonant that comes before it.
This sort of word construction is pervasive in Inuit languages and makes it very unlike English. In one large Inuktitut corpus – the Nunavut Hansard – 92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application of Zipf's law quite difficult.