Estonian to Inuinnaqtun: distinguish polite you from the number of people addressed
Teie can address one person or a group
The Estonian explanatory dictionary records teie, with unstressed te, both for several addressees and for polite address to one person. The latter is often capitalized in correspondence. An Estonian letter to one unfamiliar recipient can therefore contain a form that otherwise refers to a group. Translating that form into Inuinnaqtun requires the actual number of people addressed, rather than simply treating Estonian grammatical plurality as a headcount.
The dictionary also illustrates genuinely plural address with teie kolmekesi, referring to three people. Compare that with its discussion of an individual professor or another singular recipient addressed respectfully. These uses cannot all be assigned one target number. In an Estonian message addressed to two named people, the recipient count differs again. Recover that count from the addressee line and the sentence’s references; a capital letter can indicate courtesy, but it does not by itself establish a larger group. This decision affects who is included in an instruction or invitation.
The target has a separate form for two
Richard Compton’s analysis presents Inuinnaqtun personal-pronoun paradigms with singular, dual and plural distinctions. Thus, two addressees need not be grouped with a larger audience as they are under an ordinary Estonian plural. A pair receiving an instruction, a single respected recipient and three colleagues are distinct cases for interpreting the translation. Do not preserve the apparent plurality of a polite Estonian pronoun at the expense of the people actually being addressed.
Compton further shows that these pronouns combine person, number and case information. A form for an addressee in one grammatical relationship is not automatically interchangeable with a form in another. His note on iliffi explicitly separates its ordinary Inuinnaqtun spelling from the analytical representation /iliphi/ used to explain its internal structure. That notation is linguistic analysis, not an instruction to replace the spelling in a message. The study draws relevant paradigms from Lowe’s Inuinnaqtun description; neighboring Inuit varieties should not silently supply missing forms.
Read the recipient forms using the target spelling conventions
The Northwest Territories language resource lists ff in its Inuinnaqtun consonant inventory and states that f occurs doubled. This supports treating the doubled letters in a target form as part of its writing system, rather than reducing them to match an imagined simpler pronoun. For an Estonian reader inspecting an unfamiliar recipient form, letter count and person count are different issues: doubled consonants do not mean that two people are necessarily addressed.
The same resource distinguishes ng as a single consonant, nng as its doubled spelling, and a separated n-plus-ng sequence. These conventions explain why visual comparison of word length cannot substitute for identifying grammatical number. Preserve the target spelling while using the sentence and documented pronoun paradigm to determine whether it addresses one, two or more people. Estonian courtesy and Inuinnaqtun number are interpreted through different evidence; neither changing capitalization nor shortening a consonant sequence resolves that grammatical choice.
Language references