http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cap...harper_iqaluit_gaffe

It would be such a great word to have in the language that we should import it straight away.

We will doubtless find out more in time, languagelog is on the case.

I hope it's true as well. However, it does smack slightly of a wind-up perpetrated on ignorant southerners. It seems just too good to be true, somehow.

i believe that Old English had over one hundred words for that condition.

But only when they did it in the snow.

Mark Liberman of Language Log has posted the morphological analysis. Looks like it's true. The morpheme for dingleberry in Inuit is iquq (link). iqualuit means something like big poopy butt.

It seems to be because of a misspelling in his speech. But did Harper pronounce "iqualuit" [ikwɑluit] (the wrong way, but the way you might expect it to be pronounced based on the spelling), or [iquɑluit] (the right way, where [q] is a uvular stop)?

Nunavut has four official languages: English, French, Inuinnaqtun, and Inuktitut. Inuktitut is written with a syllabic alphabet, as on the government site. "Iqaluit" is an Inuktitut word.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,