Greek to Inuinnaqtun: a self-directed action may already be part of the target verb
A separate Greek self phrase need not stay separate
Greek uses reflexive expressions when the person acting and the person affected coincide. The Centre for the Greek Language illustrates an accidental self-injury with a separate self phrase. Inuinnaqtun can express some everyday self-directed meanings within a lexical verb entry. A translation should therefore preserve the shared participant without assuming that every source self expression requires a separate target pronoun after the verb.
The Nunavut Arctic College dictionary gives aanniqtuq for hurting oneself. That entry is a useful starting point when a Greek source describes self-injury, but it is not a complete ready-made translation of every injury report. The target sentence must still express the actual person, time and circumstances. In particular, accidental in a Greek account contributes information beyond the general self-directed relation in the dictionary definition.
Dressing and being dressed describe different stages
The same dictionary distinguishes a verb for putting on one’s own clothing, aannuraaqtuq, from forms describing an already dressed state or the absence of clothing. A Greek source can identify the same person throughout while changing whether the passage describes an action, its completed result or a state. Selecting a general clothing-related word cannot preserve those distinctions automatically.
This matters in a sequence such as a person getting dressed and then waiting outside. The target first event must describe dressing rather than merely being clothed. Conversely, a source observation about someone already being dressed does not necessarily assert that the speaker watched the dressing action. Greek tense and aspect help organize that account; they must be interpreted alongside the lexical meaning selected from the Inuinnaqtun dictionary. A self-related definition alone does not settle the event’s stage.
Removing clothing is not the same as an outside actor doing it
The dictionary’s aannuraangijaqtuq describes undressing or taking off one’s own clothes. A Greek sentence with an explicit affected person must be read carefully before choosing it: an account of someone removing their own clothing is not equivalent to an account in which another person removes it for them. The source reflexive relationship gives important evidence about who performs the action.
Likewise, Greek distinguishes ordinary possession from reflexive self-reference. A reference to someone’s clothes does not by itself establish that the owner is also the person dressing or undressing. Follow the source actor and owner separately before selecting a target entry whose definition includes own or oneself. The dictionary was developed with local speakers and elders for the Cambridge Bay-area variety described in its introduction; these entries should not be generalized to every neighbouring Inuit variety. They show why the full definition matters in this direction: a compact target verb can preserve a relation expressed through several Greek words, but an attractive partial gloss can also assign the action to the wrong participant.
Language references