She Represents More of the Planet Than Any Other Legislator on Earth

[demmiblue]

Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, 25, was just elected to the Canadian House of Commons.



The physically largest electoral district represented by a single legislator on the face of the planet is Nunavut, a vast region of northern Canada that stretches across three time zones and extends from islands in Hudson Bay all the way to an Arctic community (Alert, population: 62) that is ranked as the world’s northernmost permanently inhabited place. The Nunavut electoral district covers more square miles than Germany, France, and Italy combined, and it is three times the size of Texas—a state that sends 36 members to the US House of Representatives.

Nunavut’s population is small. But because Canadian political and election reforms have guaranteed the overwhelmingly indigenous population of the territory the authority to elect a member of the country’s House of Commons, the far north has the opportunity to send a mighty signal to Canada and the world at a time when climate change and the rise in advocacy on behalf of long-neglected and disenfranchised peoples are turning attention to Arctic regions.

Last Tuesday, Nunavut seized that opportunity when it elected Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, a 25-year-old Inuk woman who promises to challenge a government that has “left us on the back burner too long.” The success of this candidate from Canada’s social democratic New Democratic Party, who promises a fight to “dismantle systemic racism from the top down and bottom up,” is surely a victory for “not me, us” movement politics. “This isn’t about me,” Qaqqaq says. “This is about everybody in my territory.”

But it also says something about the determination of a new generation of first-time contenders to speak in bolder, deeper language about issues that have for too long been neglected.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics-canada-indigenous/?utm_medium=socialflow&utm_source=twitter

Link to tweet

[Demovictory9]

1. k&r

[Garrett78]

2. Congrats, Mumilaaq Qaqqaq. Best wishes.

[Stuart G]

3. Great Find K and R...Incredible Last Name...4Qs..Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, Age - 25

I have seen a whole lot in a long time alive. more than 65 years,,,(quite a bit more).............
......................
...................... BUT I HAVE NEVER, EVER SEEN A LAST NAME WITH 4 Qs


..................Have You?......................

[hunter]

5. qangatasuukkuvimmuuriaqalaaqtunga

ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᒻᒨᕆᐊᖃᓛᖅᑐᖓ

meaning in Inuktitut, "I'll have to go to the airport."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut

[Igel]

7. Orthographies vary.

They use double letters in transcription to represent long letters (like the difference in Italian between -ata and -atta) or Czech vowels with and without an accent (Hungarian uses double accents).

"q" is just a uvular voiceless stop. A lot of languages have them. Some have more complicated kinds of uvulars; not this one. English only uses q where Latin had it (where it really stands for either kw or just k) or in transcription from languages where the transcriber wants to preserve the meaningful differences in the source language (like pulling a word from Arabic script to English). It's an unnecessary interloper in English, and I think of using q for Arabic as equivalent to spelling "Putin" with a ,: "Put,in" or a superscript j after the t to show palatalization.

You're looking at one orthography, which is vaguely linguistic. Use a different system and there'd be 4 ks. One of the standard orthographies in Nunavut, her name is written using what's called "syllabics" (abugida, really) where initial consonants are written but vowels are secondarily represented. Hence the superscripts for what would be regular typeface if the "q" was at the start of a syllable.different.

As for the second script (the one with the mirrored ? and the b, more or less), I'll just say that the person who devised it really shouldn't have been allowed near the bars and pharmacies. He probably thought it was clever and scientific.

[The Conductor]

13. How to write down a sound...

Exactly... It is for the same reason that those of us who learned growing up that the capital city of China was Peking now see it as Beijing. And old Chungking is now Chongqing, and Bombay is now Mumbai. People who live in those places have taken control of their own international content, and want their own names to sound right to themselves in other languages, even if the pronunciation and spelling looks more challenging to people who only speak English. As for the reversed characters - languages that did not have a written form until modern times often had to be more clever than us in representing sounds that have no parallels in English. When doing this in the days of hand-set type, they didn't exactly have big money to have custom typefaces made, so they had to be creative with typefaces that did exist. That "backwards b" is actually an upside down p.

[The_jackalope]

10. Oh yeah? Well four Q's too!

Badabump tissshhh!

Sorry!

[smirkymonkey]

4. Good for her!

I am liking this trend of young women getting involved in politics and getting elected to office. I think it will bring about some real, lasting change in this world for the better.

[George II]

6. I wonder how she did in the Canadian National Elections two weeks ago.

[luvtheGWN]

8. She won!

[Uncle Joe]

9. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread demmiblue.

[The_jackalope]

11. And she's NDP too!

Way to go, New Democrats!

[SpankMe]

12. Cool story.

We need a pronunciation guide, though.