Editing Aleut language (section)

===Comparison to Eskimo grammar===

Although Aleut derives from the same parent language as the Eskimo languages, the two language groups (Aleut and Eskimo) have evolved in distinct ways, resulting in significant [[linguistic typology|typological]] differences.  Aleut [[inflection]]al morphology is greatly reduced from the system that must have been present in Proto-Eskimo–Aleut, and where the Eskimo languages mark a verb's arguments morphologically, Aleut relies more heavily on a fixed word order.

Unlike the Eskimo languages, Aleut is not an [[ergative-absolutive language]].  Subjects and objects in Aleut are not marked differently depending on the [[Transitivity (grammatical category)|transitivity]] of the verb (i.e. whether the verb is [[transitive verb|transitive]] or [[intransitive verb|intransitive]]); by default, both are marked with a so-called absolutive noun ending.  However, if an understood complement (which may either be a complement of the verb or of some other element in the sentence) is absent, the verb takes an "anaphoric" marking and the subject noun takes a "relative" noun ending.

A typological feature shared by Aleut and Eskimo is [[polysynthetic]] derivational morphology, which can lead to some rather long words:

{{interlinear|indent=2|lang=ale
|top=Ting adaluusanaaĝiiĝutamasux̂takux̂.
|Ting adalu- usa- -naaĝ- -iiĝuta- -masu- -x̂ta- -ku- -x̂.
|me lie- -toward- -try.to- -again- -perhaps- -PFV- -PRES- -3SG
|'Perhaps he tried to fool me again.'{{sfn|Bergsland|1997|p=123}} }}