. Gemination is caused by suffixes being added to a consonant, so that the consonant is found between two vowels. Writing systems Iñupiaq was first written when explorers first arrived in Alaska and began recording words in the native languages. They wrote by adapting the letters of their own language to writing the sounds they were recording. Spelling was often inconsistent, since the writers invented it as they wrote. Unfamiliar sounds were often confused with other sounds, so that, for example, 'q' was often not distinguished from 'k' and long consonants or vowels were not distinguished from short ones. Along with the Alaskan and Siberian Yupik, the Iñupiat eventually adopted the Latin script (Qaliujaaqpait) that Moravian missionaries developed in Greenland and Labrador. Native Alaskans also developed a system of pictographs, which, however, died with its creators. In 1946, Roy Ahmaogak, an Iñupiaq Presbyterian minister from Utqiaġvik, worked with Eugene Nida, a member of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, to develop the current Iñupiaq alphabet based on the Latin script. Although some changes have been made since its origin—most notably the change from 'ḳ' to 'q'—the essential system was accurate and is still in use. Extra letter for Kobuk dialect: ʼ Extra letters for specific dialects: Diomede: e Qawiaraq: ch // Morphosyntax Due to the number of dialects and complexity of Iñupiaq morphosyntax, the following section discusses Malimiutun morphosyntax as a representative. Any examples from other dialects will be marked as such. Iñupiaq is a polysynthetic language, meaning that words can be extremely long, consisting of one of three stems (verb stem, noun stem, and demonstrative stem) along with one or more of three endings (postbases, (grammatical) endings, and enclitics). The stem gives meaning to the word, whereas endings give information regarding case, mood, tense, person, plurality, etc. The stem can appear as simple (having no postbases) or complex (having one or more postbases). In Iñupiaq a "postbase serves somewhat the same functions that adverbs, adjectives, prefixes, and suffixes do in English" along with marking various types of tenses. There are six word classes in Malimiut Inñupiaq: nouns (see Nominal Morphology), verbs (see Verbal Morphology), adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, and interjections. All demonstratives are classified as either adverbs or pronouns. Nominal morphology The Iñupiaq category of number distinguishes singular, dual, and plural. The language works on an Ergative-Absolutive system, where nouns are inflected for number, several cases, and possession. Iñupiaq (Malimiutun) has