It’s hard to reliably hear the difference between gwu (“gwoo”) and gu (“goo”).  So if putting a word together would get you /gwu/, the language naturally simplifies it to /gu/.  For similar reasons, any time you might get /ugw/ at the end of the word, it can be pronounced either as /ugw/ or as /-ug/.  But then if more is added to the word, the full /ugw/ will always be pronounced, since it’s not at the end any more.  Same goes for /uggw/, too, so we say

gesalugg            ‘we (you+me) love h/her’

but then adding -ig, to refer to more people, we say

gesaluggwig        ‘we (you+me) love them’

The long-awaited “transitive animate” paradigm! To figure out how to conjugate a form, find the person of the subject by going down to the left-side column to find the right row; next move over to the column for the object you want. For example, a first person exclusive subject (13) acting on a second person plural object (2PL)––e.g. for “We saw you guys”––gets the ending -ulneg.

Before we get into the patterns themselves, a few points should be made: diagonally from top right to lower left you see cells marked “(refl)” for “reflexive”; these forms will get a special marking, not included here. In addition to the reflexive forms, there are certain cells that are impossible. Note that these are cells where features “overlap”. Meaning, if there is a first person specified anywhere in the subject, it can’t be anywhere in the object; same for second person. This rules out forms like “You all saw you”, and “We saw us”. In Mi’gmaq, third persons can act on third persons, but this is where obviation comes into play, which we will save for a future post.

Also, note that some forms begin with either a -(V) for vowel or a -(Ve). With a stem like nemi- “see”, the final vowel is kept in the stem when the (V) appears, but dropped elsewhere. For example: nemul “I see you”, but nemi‘g “I see him”. In other verb forms, the vowel doesn’t appear. Take taqam- “hit”: taqamul “I hit you” and taqam‘g “I hit him”. It would be interesting if we could find regularities here.

(I should preface what I am about to write by saying: the next part might be fun for people interesting in finding patterns here. That said, understanding all of it isn’t necessary to being able to use these forms! However, if you are interested and something I’ve written is unclear or just plain wrong, please post comments.)

Looking now more carefully at the table above, some basic patterns emerge. First, we can assign feature values to morphemes (pieces) as follows:

-i’li – 1 object; -ul(n) – 2 object; -a – 3 object; -ugsi – “participant” plural object; -eg – 13; -gw – 12; -oq – 2PL; -ig – 3PL; -n – 2 subject; -t – 3 subject

Now how do we figure out how to put all of these together? Though it becomes more clear in the negative forms (to be posted), we can think of these as involving 2 slots, plus an additional slot if there is a third person plural involved. So we can think of our template as looking roughly like this:

Verb – Slot1 – Slot2 – (3PL)

The first step is to figure out what goes in slot 1; this is the easier slot, because we can basically just think of it as object agreement: see the object forms listed above. A couple of tricks apply here. -i’li is triggered if a first person is part of the object, including first person plural; this means that a 13 object gets -i’li in a 2>13 form like -i’lieg. However, if we find a third person subject acting on a participant plural object (12, 13, or 2PL), we get -ugsi in the first slot. Finally, note that in the 3rd person object cases, we don’t always see the -a. It will show up for us in negated forms though.

Next step: what goes in slot 2? Well, if no participant plural morphemes are involved, life is easy: just agree with the subject––note that the subject agreement forms (-n and -t) look familiar from the VAI paradigm. This means that a form like nemi’lin “You see me” can be straightforwardly broken down into nemi-i’li-n: see-1obj-2subj. Also as in the VAI paradigm, there is no clear subject agreement marker; rather, a 1st person subject is indicated by the absence of marking, as in the form nem-ul “I see you”, where we only have agreement with the second person object.

If plural participants (again, 12, 13, or 2PL) are involved as either the subject or the object, they will occupy the second slot. If a first person plural is involved anywhere, the second slot will agree with it (-gw for 12, -eg for 13). If neither of these is involved, agree with second plural, -oq. This means that sometimes the subject will not get to realize any of its features. Take for example 1>2PL, “I saw you”: nem-uln-oq. First we have the stem, then we have second person agreement with the object (-uln), then we have second person plural agreement again with the object (-oq). First person is nowhere to be found. (Why isn’t this form ambiguous? Remember, if a 3rd person subject is acting on a local plural object, you get a special object form -ugsi in slot one.)

Finally, note that almost all forms involving 3PL––whether in the subject  or object––end in -ig, and this appears outside of the second slot. (Remember that [t] turns into [j] before an [i], accounting for alternations like -it/-ijig.) Interestingly, this morpheme also comes outside of tense when tense is involved. Negation also intervenes between the 1st and 2nd agreement slots, making it clear that these really are separable. A full template, which needs more work, looks like this:

Verb – Slot1 – (Neg) – Slot2 – (Past) – (3PL)

Lots remains to be worked out! In some cases some unclear sound changes take place, but again, stay tuned for negative forms to see the pattern described above a bit more clearly. That said, everything here is subject to revision––please don’t hesitate to post comments, questions, or suggestions.

Some particular questions:

• What is -ugsi? It seems like it can also be used in VAI forms, and is listed in Pacifique as a passive morpheme in some contexts. Is it possible that the -ugsi forms are really passives?
• Some speakers dislike -ig endings for 3 plural subjects when a plural object is also involved––is there a pattern here? Do some sound worse than others with -ig?

The 4th and 5th conjugations provided in Father Pacifique’s grammar are for “transitive inanimate” verbs. This means verbs that take both a subject and an object, but the object belongs to the category of inanimate nouns.

These stems fall into two main groups: in the 4th conjugation, stems end in a consonant and are then followed by [m]. Frequently the final two consonants in the conjugated forms are [tm], as in nestm– “to understand (something inanimate)”, but we also find others such as [lm] in pegawatelm– “to buy (something inanimate)”, [gm] as in ewi’gm– “to write (something inanimate)”, and te’pm– “to deserve (something inanimate)”. Stems of the 5th conjugation end in [tu]. I’ve separated the [m] and the [tu] out in the paradigms for each below.

In the tables below, the forms with singular objects are in the first column, the forms with plural objects are in the second column. For example mena’tu’n is “You remove it (inanimate)”, while mena’tu’nn is “You remove them (inanimate)”. Note that while Pacifique provides a distinction between dual and plural subjects, as in VAI, speakers we have consulted prefer to make only a singular/plural distinction with most of these forms.

Beginning with the 4th conjugation, we see that endings here after the [m] are very similar to those in the VAI conjugations, with a few exceptions. In the first person singular, we find the suffix -an appearing in the plural. Based on some other work, it seems likely that this is the first person suffix, and it perhaps does not appear in most contexts. Note that in the third person singular we find a final [g] rather than the [t]––we will see other places where [t] and [g] alternate in the 3rd singular. Note also that in the 3rd person singular the [m] final does not appear. The 3rd person dual is also different: [-ijig] in VAI, but [-i’tij] here.

TI “4th conjugation”: nest-m- “to understand (something inanimate)”

Turning to the 5th conjugation we again see familiar suffixes after the [tu], but again some surprises. Note here that the third singular is [-toq]. We also find the [u] of [tu] lengthened in some forms––looks like before consonants?

TI “5th conjugation”: mena’-t- “to remove (something inanimate)”

More examples of each conjugation can be found in Pacifique––also note, there is a new version of the Francis and Hewson translation, available here. As with the first three conjugations, it would be interesting to know if there is a way of predicting if a stem belongs to the 4th or 5th group––both clearly involve [t]. Pacifique also notes that for most forms in the 5th paradigm, there is no distinct negative form (negation also involves a [u]). As always, we welcome your comments, additions, and corrections!

Alan and I spent some time this past week working through the “conjugations” given in Pacifique (Hewson & Francis 1990 translation). Below is the first installment: the first three conjugations, or the “animate intransitives” (we checked most of these over, but please correct us if you see we’ve transcribed something wrong).

First a few background notes, which will be relevant for the rest of the paradigms as well. “Intransitive” verbs are those that have just a subject, like “I danced” or “Mary slept”, not a subject and an object as in “I read the book.” These are “animate” intransitives because the subject must be animate. In Mi’gmaq, as in other Algonquian languages, “animate” is a grammatical category (comparable to “feminine” and “masculine” in French). Humans and animals are generally animate, but so are bottles and potatoes. Each of the forms below involves a single animate participant. Stay tuned for wiki info on animacy; a different conjugation will be given for intransitives with inanimate subjects.

The paradigms below have are in the form of this first table, where I’ve given English versions of the “person” and “number” distinctions. Note that Mi’gmaq makes two distinctions not found in English. Where as English distinguishes between singular (one) and plural (more than one), Mi’gmaq makes a three-way distinction: singular (one), dual (two), and plural (more than two). Mi’gmaq also distinguishes different kinds of first person in the dual and plural forms (forms equivalent to “we”). In English, if I say “we” I could be referring to me and someone else in the discourse (“yesterday when you weren’t here, we went to the store”), or to me and the listener, and possibly others (“we have a lot of work to do, let’s go!”). In Mi’gmaq the first kind is the “exclusive” (excluding the listener), while the second is called the “inclusive” (including the listener). Finally, because Mi’gmaq encodes the information about the subject on the verb, an overt noun or pronoun is not necessary (compare Spanish). More on this in a separate post.

Now for the paradigms. These paradigms are helpful because once you know one form of a given verb, you know the others. For example, if you hear [amalgai] “I dance”, you know that “they (pl) dance” will be [amalga’tijig]. Furthermore, note that while these are listed as three different conjugations, you don’t actually need to memorize three different paradigms. Instead, the main difference between the three forms is the first vowel: no vowel in 1, [a] in 2, and [e] in 3 (if you know Spanish, you can think of these as being comparable to -ar, -er, and -ir verbs; comparable distinction in French). So you just have to memorize the endings in the first paradigm, the others will be the same with the addition of the initial “stem vowel”, with one of important difference: In the first conjugation, if you compare the dual and plural columns, you see that plural involves the addition of [-ult]. In the second and third conjugations, the [u] is dropped. In the second conjugation, the stem vowel is lengthened: [-a’t]. In the third conjugation, a reduced vowel (represented with the apostrophe) is present [-‘t].

One more helpful thing to note is that the sound [t] frequently becomes [j] before a vowel. This means that the difference between the 3rd person singular [-it] and the third person plural [-ijig] can be thought of as the addition of the plural marker [-ig] plus the sound change: [-it-ig] becomes [-ijig]. We will see the [-ig] marking plural elsewhere in the language.

VAI “1st conjugation”: teluis- “to be named”

VAI – “2nd conjugation”; amalg- “to dance”; alangu- “to shop”; a’sutm- “to pray”; gaqnm- “to be out of things”

VAI – “3rd conjugation”; ewi’gig- “to write”

McGill team: could someone take charge of getting this up on the wiki? The Pacifique grammar also gives more examples of each conjugation, which would be helpful to have, and could be worked into CAN8 lessons. The verb forms should be checked over with a speaker, and let’s try to include more frequently used verbs, or verbs that will be useful in everyday conversation. Eventually we’ll want to put up at least negative and past forms––maybe in tables hyper-linked from this one.

Mi’gmaq speakers: please add comments if you see mistakes or can think of any helpful examples or frequently used verbs.