ug^ada-x^, the Aleut Kayaker's Sea Bag in Unangam Tunuu

I decided to fight my way through Knut Bergsland's Aleut Kayak Terminology a piece at a time. Rather than starting at the beginning with the kayak itself, I have decided to start near the end, not with the kayak itself but with the sea bag or ditty bag, ug^ada-x^ that an Aleut kayaker would carry with him inside his kayak. The ug^ada-x^ contained a bunch of small items that the kayaker would need to repair his kayak or clothing and also some items he would need to start a fire on shore.
The terms listed here come from page 154 of Contributions to Kayak Studies.
For background on Bergsland see an earlier post of mine on this blog.

Bergsland's notes on the kayak terms is here in this picture. Click to enlarge.

This is Bergsland's explanation of where his information came from. The key information here is the explanation of the abbreviations EA, AA, and Au for the principal Aleut dialects.

This is the snippet of Aleut Kayak Terms that deals with the ditty bag.

My illustrated version of Bergsland's text.  Click on the picture for a larger view.

I should mention that in drawing up the diagram of ditty bags and ditty bag contents, I did not have any images of what these things actually looked like.  Bergsland mentions that the ditty bags were about two feet long.  That's all I had to go on.  Dry grass, yeah, we know what that looks like, but whether it was just in a lump or if people twisted it up, I don't know.  Likewise, I don't know what Aleut fire drills looked like.  They could be the type I showed which is a pump drill.  But there are other types of fire drills.  I drew a pump drill because Mike Livingston had students make these at Aleut Culture camps.  Same goes for amulets and charms.  They could be just about anything from a pebble to elaborately carved ivory.  As for caul of baby, look that up.

And part 2 of ditty bag contents.

Moses Dirks Reads out Aleut Kayak Parts in Unangam Tunuu

Here's a video of Moses Dirks reading out the names of Aleutian Kayak parts in Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language.  The names and the kayak parts are linked in the picture below for reference. The video was made at the Aleutian Pribiloff Islands Association Urban Culture Camp in Anchorage in 2010.

Click on the image to get a large enough picture to read the text.

Unangax^ (Aleut) Kayak Terms, Part 0

A few decades back, Knut Bergsland, wrote an article called Aleut Kayak Terms which was published in Contributions to Kayak Studies in 1992. The article contains a wealth of information but in a format that is difficult to extract information from.  The article has a few illustrations that tie Unangax^ names directly to kayak parts and parts of hunting implements, but for the most part, illustrations are lacking and we have to wade through Bergsland's difficult syntax to figure out what's what.

Sample page of  Bergsland's prose.  Click on image for readable size illustration.

So for some time, I have been wanting to draw some pictures of the things that Bergsland was supplying names for so that someone wanting to know what the Unangan called their kayak parts and activities related to kayaking would have an illustrated guide, myself being the primary audience.
As it turned out, the project was always in progress and never made much headway, primarily because I didn't  give it the time it needed and because I didn't think there was enough of an audience besides myself to justify the effort.  After all,  the information was there in Bergsland's article, even if difficult to extract.

Sample of kayak drawings I made to anchor Unangax^ kayak terms to. What would be helpful would be English names for the kayak parts and the transliterations that Bergsland gave where the Unangax^ names were descriptive, for instance, deckbeam for kicking your feet against.  

But the other day I was for some reason inspired again to work on this project and thought that if I approached it piecemeal and posted my illustrations with Unangax^ names attached as I completed them, they would be available even if I never finished the thing as a whole.
Some Background
Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language, had several dialects so that there might be different names for the same kayak part depending on the dialect.  Also, names varied over time and from village to village even within the same dialect.  Bergsland records these variations to the extent that they made it into print.
Bergsland distinguishes between several dialects, which he calls Eastern Aleut (EA), Atkan Aleut (AA) and Attuan Aleut (AU).  Within the article itself, he uses only the abbreviations.  Where Unangax^ kayak terms are similar to Yupik, Bergsland also lists them, primarily as he explains that this indicates antiquity, given that Eskimo an Aleut languages diverged quite some time ago.
Stay tuned.  More of this sort of stuff may be forthcoming.

Unangan (Aleut) Kayak Terminology

Unangan kayak terminology has been set down in an article written by Knut Bergsland, Norwegian linguist, now dead, in Contributions to Kayak Studies, Eugene Arima, editor. I think that's the most commas I've ever put in a sentence.
I've been wanting to do an illustrated version of that article for some time, but what has discouraged me is the messy nature of the information in Bergsland's article.  The information is messy because there was never just one official way of naming kayak parts in the Aleutians.  For one thing, Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language had multiple dialects, at one time, probably as many dialects as there were tribal groups, something like nine, possibly more.  Along came the Russians, consolidated settlements and moved people around and a number of dialects disappeared.  The documented dialects remaining were the Eastern Aleut, the Atkan and the Attuan dialects. Then during WWII, the Japanese invaded Attu and moved the Aleut community there to Japan while the US moved the remaining Aleut population to the Alaskan mainland.  After WWII, Aleuts were repatriated, Attuans moved to Atka and so the only two dialects that were still alive were the Atkan and the Eastern Aleut. 
So when Bergsland collected his list of kayak terminology, he had some historical sources available that documented Attuan terms and speakers of both the Atkan and Eastern Aleut dialects. Not surprisingly, documented Attuan terms are fewer in number than for the other two remaining dialects at the time that Bergsland did his compilation. 
And terminology varied over time so that some kayak part may have been called one thing in the 19th century and then something else in the 20th.  Keeping all of this straight is not an easy thing. 
On top of that, we have to deal with Bergsland's dense and sometimes cryptic writing style.  I give one example here.
"On top of the taamx^aax^, on the right side in front of the hatch, there was a hook for holding the paddle when not used, made of wood or baleen, or sometimes ivory (Atka 1952), possibly in the shape of a sea otter (Jochelson 1952:131), called in western EA (1909, 1950) x^aach(a)g^iilux^, in AA (1840, 1952) haachachag^iilux^, derived with the suffixes -g^i- + -alug^- 'place for having -' from the above-mentioned term for paddle, EA (1778-) x^aasi-x, AA Au hassi-x."  inhale.  and so on he goes.  So you rub your eyes, go back to the start of the paragraph, try to match up the English with the Aleut term the two of which are invariably separated by a string of parenthetical phrases and hope you don't miss the period that lets you know that you have finally arrived at the end of the sentence.  By the way, the AA, Au and EA sprinkeled liberally around the sentence are abbreviations for the dialects respectively, Atkan Aleut, Attuan Aleut and Eastern Aleut. 
You get the idea.  I thought it might be nice to have a version of this that puts the Aleut term right with a picture of what it is referring to. 
I might put the pictures and words in this blog if I can make that work, the problem being that the blog software controls the size of the pictures, (small) and the layout of the text. Stay tuned.