The first contact with this alien species was regrettably not under the most ideal circumstances, which led to much confusion surrounding the name of the individual first encountered, the name of his species, and the name of the language.
Popular parlance uses the name “Tutki” to refer to all three. This name, however, is incorrect in several important respects.
Firstly, it is a grammatically-incorrect form, based on a misunderstanding of the first utterances humanity heard from the first member of this species: “hrufshainen tutki” [ˌxʀ̥ʊfʃajnən ˈtuθkɪ], with the last word repeated several times while gesturing to himself. Those present at the scene mistakenly thought that tutki must be the name of the individual, not realizing that it was a combination of the actual name tutk with the predicative suffix -i:
hrufshainen tutki.
| hrufshai-en |
| name-1sg |
| tutk-i |
| Tutk-pred |
My name is Tutk.
Secondly, unbeknownst to humanity until much later, the name “Tutk” is actually a pejorative, used derisively to refer to a random nobody, a person of no consequence, a country bumpkin, a simpleton. The individual first encountered by humanity turned out to be a social outcast, who has been derided as “Tutk” by other members of his society so much that he has come to adopt the pejorative as his personal name, having forgotten his real name(!).
Thirdly, the common pronunciation of “Tutki” as [tʊtkɪ] is incorrect; the correct pronunciation is [tuθkɪ], with a fricativised /t/ according to the phonological law concerning consonant clusters (see section 2.3.2.2). The spelling “Tutki” was based on a mishearing of the second /t/ by the first linguists who interacted with the individual Tutk, who spoke with a slight lisp that sometimes did not clearly pronounce the fricative, making it sound like an obstruent instead.
After the later arrival of other members of this species, it was finally learned that their endonym is Hrmitt [xʀ̥miθt]. However, by then the name “Tutki” had become irreversibly stuck in popular parlance as the name of this individual, the name of his species (“Tutki aliens”), and the name of the language (“Tutki language”). The difficulty of spelling and pronouncing the endonym only added to the inertia of continuing to use the misnomer “Tutki”.
This unfortunate popular insistence on using the name “Tutki” led some of the Hrmitt to coin the neologism tutkimi, a verb meaning “to say `Tutki' ”, and by extension “to be a foreigner”, or specifically “to be a human”, and, derisively, “to talk nonsense”. Based on the fact that tutki is the predicative form of the pejorative tutk, some of the Hrmitt further suggested, sarcastically, that humans are applying the term to themselves, and started referring to humanity as tutkah, “those simpletons”. Thus the pejorative tutk came full circle to be applied to the very humans who first misapplied it to the Hrmitt.
As a result of this unfortunate history, we, the linguists carrying out the primary linguistic work among this alien species, strongly recommend using the endonym Hrmitt [xʀ̥miθt] when referring to them and their language, rather than “Tutki”. The individual known as Tutk continues to go by that name; in this instance, and in this instance only, we feel there would be no harm in continuing to apply the name “Tutki” to him.