Source: Spalding's Inuktitut: A Multi-dialectal Outline Dictionary (1998) — direct full-text check; Uqailaut morphological analyzer — attempted, unusable
- Author: Alex Spalding, "with the cooperation and help of Thomas Kusugaq"; published online by Nunavut Arctic College via the National Research Council of Canada's Inuktitut Computing project
- Publication: Inuktitut: A Multi-dialectal Outline Dictionary (with an Aivilingmiutaq base), © 1998 Nunavut Arctic College, hosted online at inuktitutcomputing.ca; the same site's Uqailaut Inuktitut Morphological Analyzer (originally developed at Canada's National Research Council by Benoît Farley, drawing on lexical data from Ken Harper, Alex Spalding, Lucien Schneider, Mick Mallon, and Louis-Jacques Dorais)
- Date accessed: 2026-09-07
- URL: https://www.inuktitutcomputing.ca/Spalding/index.php?lang=en ; https://www.inuktitutcomputing.ca/Uqailaut/index.php?lang=en ; https://www.inuktitutcomputing.ca/Uqailaut/Demo/info.php?lang=en
- Type: primary (a genuine, named, print-published multi-dialect Inuktitut dictionary, distinct from Thibert's, reproduced online with the copyright holder's permission). Neutral (a reference work with no editorial stance on untranslatability claims).
Extract
- Found via web search, not a guessed URL — a genuinely new primary Inuktitut-language lexicographic source for this project, and the first such source this project has been able to read in full, unlike Thibert's dictionary (still blocked by HathiTrust/Internet Archive access restrictions, see other sources on file).
- The entire dictionary is served as a single large HTML page (fetched directly via
curl, ~1.95 MB), with headwords tagged as named HTML anchors and cross-references via in-page JavaScript navigation (go2('word')). This made a direct, exhaustive text search possible — not merely a sampled read. - The dictionary explicitly covers multiple named Canadian Inuktitut dialects, tagged inline per entry/variant: South Baffin, Ungava, East Coast Hudson Bay (ECHB), Natsilik, North Baffin, and West Coast Hudson Bay (WCHB) — the last being the dictionary's own stated base dialect (Aivilingmiutaq). It is explicitly labeled an "Outline Dictionary," i.e. not claimed to be exhaustive.
- A full-text search of the fetched page (8,375 distinct headwords/variant forms found via its own internal anchor tags) for "iktsuarpok" and for the root fragment "iktsu" returns zero matches. A further search for headwords beginning "ikts-" or "iktu-" turns up unrelated entries (e.g. ikturpallartuq, iktulaurtuq, iktariktuq) with no semantic connection to "going outside to check for an arrival" found in their (unexamined in full) glosses. Also checked: headwords containing the root "-siu-" (a candidate root fragment from the skeptic-blog morphological guess already on file, "-siurpuq," 'look for, hunt') turn up roughly two dozen unrelated entries, none glossed as "going outside" or "checking for an arrival."
- Uqailaut Morphological Analyzer, attempted separately: the tool's own documentation describes a web-form interface for submitting any Inuktitut word for automated decomposition. Directly fetched, the analyzer's main page (
Uqailaut/index.php) is a bare template with no visible input form in its rendered HTML. Its "Demo" page only supports a fixed, pre-selected list of demonstration words via URL parameter (Demo/demoword.php?...&demoword=<word>); submittingdemoword=iktsuarpok(not one of the pre-selected demo words) returns a technically valid page with an empty results section — no analysis, no error message. This tool cannot be used to analyze an arbitrary word such as iktsuarpok; only its short fixed demo-word list is functional through this access route.
Gaps
- Absence from an "Outline Dictionary" explicitly labeled non-exhaustive is a real but non-conclusive negative data point — it does not prove the word does not exist in any Inuktitut dialect, only that it is absent from this particular ~8,000-entry compilation (which itself may simply not cover the word's dialect of origin, unspecified in every popular source on file).
- The Uqailaut analyzer's full functionality (a genuine free-text morphological decomposition) could not be reached through this project's available tools — its real backend (possibly a Java applet or a POST-based form not visible via a plain
curlGET request) was not identified. This is a new, distinct failure shape from this project's other JavaScript-rendered-site fences: not simply un-crawlable text, but an apparently defunct or inaccessible public-facing analysis endpoint.