THE INNOVATION OF IGLOO

I thought I would change things up a little; this is the first word on my blog not to come from Afro-Eurasia. The word igloo, meaning "a domed hut made out of ice", can be traced back to a word in Proto-Eskimo (not to be derogatory; that's the language's name) which vaguely sounded something like uhnloo and, based on the evidence I could find, arose just as the First Nations people both were beginning to use language and inventing igloos; around 4000-5000 BCE. Obviously, Inuit natives had no written languages, and much like with Proto-Indo-European, etymologists had to make an educated reconstruction of the word based on phonetic frameworks. As far as we can tell, this later passed into Proto-Inuit with a word that sounded like ugloo, which had descendants in nearly all northern-North American native languages as far as anyone can tell, and meant "any kind of house or building", since that's all the Alaska natives had to live in. This went into Inuktitut as igloo, and later got picked up by both Canadian English and French explorers. The American word igloo comes from Canadian, and many other European countries, like the Netherlands, Poland, and Serbia, all have their word for igloo deriving from the American English version.