Every Thursday from 10:30 to 11:30, Algonquian Reading Group meets in room 117 in the McGill Linguistics Building located on 1085 Dr. Penfield. Those interested meet to discuss papers on Algonquian linguistics.
This Thursday January 31, Alan Bale will be presenting Murray’s 2012 paper on Quantificational and Illocutionary Variability in Cheyenne.
Please contact info@migmaq.org if you would like to be added to the Algonquian Reading Group mailing list.
We invite Native Americans and First Nations people who are learning and revitalizing their languages, and graduate students, faculty and other scholars who specialize in Linguistics (preferably in Native American or First Nations languages) to apply to participate in the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages (BoL).BoL is designed to promote active collaboration among people with a wide range of perspectives about language and culture, including technical linguistic knowledge and cultural expertise. Participants will be grouped into research teams, based on language, made up of linguists and Native community language researchers. Team members will actively work together, mentor one another, and share their expertise throughout the program and beyond.The research teams will explore archives and museum collections at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, with morning workshops on linguistics, language teaching and learning, archival research and language revitalization held at the National Museum of the American Indian. The two weeks of study will culminate in a research project and presentation that uses archival or museum resources for linguistic research or language teaching.Beyond a general commitment to language learning from archival sources, participants must be willing and able to attend and actively participate in the entire Institute. Aside from truly unforeseen circumstances, it will not be possible to arrive late, leave early, or to skip the required workshops and events (though some workshops will be optional).Participants will stay in the dorms at George Washington University, where they can network and study together in the evenings. BoL will pay for participants’ rooms, and partially subsidize food and travel.BoL will accept 60 participants. This is a great opportunity to find and use archival materials to reclaim, learn, and teach indigenous languages, in the company of other like-minded people.The 2013 Breath of Life Institute is funded by the Documenting Endangered Languages Program of the National Science Foundation. Partners include the National Museum of Natural History, The National Museum of the American Indian, the Library of Congress, The Endangered Language Fund and Yale University.
This October was the 44th Algonquian Conference at the University of Chicago. Many of our Mi’gmaq Research Partnership members presented.
Alan Bale and Jessica Coon presented “Classifiers are for numerals, not nouns: Evidence from Mi’gmaq and Chol.” at the 43rd Northeast Linguistics Society (NELS) in New York, NY where Alan also had a poster presentation of “Agreement without AGREE: Disjunction in Mi’gmaq.”
More recently Mike and Gretchen both presented at The 2012-3 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in Boston, MA. Mike presented “Against Non-configurationality in Mi’gmaq” and Gretchen “Preverb Ordering in Mi’gmaq”
And stay tuned for Elise and Carol’s poster presentation of “Student perspectives on Mi’gmaq language-learning through multi-modal teaching: A community-linguistics partnership” at the University of Hawai’i’s at the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation on February 28th.
Mi’gmaq is a language with obviation – that is, a way of telling animate third persons apart. The first third person (or the proximate third person) is not marked, while the other third persons (or obviative third person or fourth person) is marked with the suffix -l or -al, as in Mali nemiatl Piel-al, ‘Mary sees Peter’. The verb also receives an ending indicating that a proximate person is acting on an obviative person: -atl. These endings can also vary for the number of people involved, like so:
This is really useful, since it helps us keep track of who is doing what and allows the word order in Mi’gmaq to vary. So, whether we say Mali nemiatl Pielal or Pielal nemiatl Mali or Nemiatl Mali Pielal, etc., we have a way of knowing who is seen and who is doing the seeing that is not based purely on word order, like in English.
But this isn’t the only way obviatives are used! If, say, we’ve already been talking about someone in the obviative person, we can continue referring to them in the obviative person with other verbs – even with intransitives. For example, if we’ve already said Mali gesalaji mui’naq, ‘Mary likes bears’, we could then say Wigulti’niji nipugtug, ‘they (the bears) live in the forest’, where the ending –ulti’nij means that it is them (obviative) that are living there, and not any other group.
Here are a few questions I have about this topic:
Three details on top of the basic pattern laid out earlier will help you handle the comings and goings of the /e/.
(a) The /e/ vowel actually comes up as /a/ when it’s followed by /q/. Otherwise the pattern is the same.
naqa’si I stop
→ ‘nqa’si stop!
→ ‘npa’sites I will stop
naqalg I leave h/her
→ ‘nqal leave h/her!
→ ‘nqalates I will leave h/her
maqtawe’g s/he/it is black
→ ‘mqatawapu “black-broth” = cormorant
(b) Because /o/ is generally originally from /a/—give or take some other details—a few words have the same pattern with /o/. The most common and useful of these is /poqt-/ ~ /’pqot/ ‘start, begin to…’.
poqtlugwei I start working
→ ‘pqotlugwa start working!
→ ‘pqotlugwetes I will start working
(c) Finally, a few words have a slightly quirky pattern between the e-form and the plain form. The most important of these is /wejgu-/ ~ /jugu-/ ‘coming this way/here’.
wejgu’ei I am coming (here)
→ jugu’a come (here)!
→ jugu’ates I will come (here)
wejgua’tu I am bringing it (here)
→ jugua’tu bring it (here)!
→ jugua’tutes I will bring it (here) (also said /juguattes/)
A vowel /e/ appears in the first syllable of many Mi’gmaq verbs. You will notice that this /e/ goes missing in lots of related words.
teli’si I speak (that) way
tli’si speak (that) way!
tli’sites I will speak (that) way
tli’suti language (way of speaking)
This /e/ comes in mostly for events that are real: they are actually happening, or they did. This is why they’re not used for commands or for the future, since haven’t actually happened yet. It is also pretty consistently not used for most related nouns (like tli’suti ‘language’ here), and verbs made directly/recently from nouns.
What’s more, this /e/ only comes in on words whose first syllable has the weak vowel /’/. Where the /e/ is not used, you get the original weak vowel form. But most often that weak vowel is actually dropped or left unwrittten. That lost vowel is why the /e/-less forms start with two consonants in a row, like /tl/ up above.
You will be understood most of the time if you mix up when to use the /e/-forms and when not to, but it does sound like a kid saying “I sleeped all night”. For the start, just learn to recognize it when it happens—“Oh, that had the /e/, and that didn’t”—and pretty soon you will pick up the pattern automatically.
When /l/ and /n/ come together in a word, generally the /l/ will turn into /n/: so /ln/ becomes double /nn/. Since /l/ is common ending, you will see this pattern whenever it is added to words ending in /n/.
su’nn ‘cranberries’ (comes from su’n-l) su’n ‘cranberry’
signn ‘socks’ (comes from sign-l) sign ‘sock’
It also happens in the opposite direction: when you add /n/ to something ending in /l/.
etlatal I am eating
etlatann you are eating (from etlatal-n)
mesgil I am big
mesginn you are big (from mesgil-n)
This pattern is distinctive to Listuguj Mi’gmaq: speakers from the east do not make this sound change. This is the reason, for example, why Listuguj speakers say /nnu/ while others say /lnu/.
(There is at least one important exception to this rule—seen in words like /nemulneg/ ‘we see you’—more on that when it comes up.)
The sound /a/ in Mi’gmaq is pronounced low and in the back of the mouth. When you add a /g/ after it, the /a/ sound pulls the /g/ down low and back into your throat, giving it that very distinctive guttural sound that we write with /q/.
(There are still some words—like jagej ‘lobster’—that do have /ag/, but as a general rule, /ag/ almost always comes out pronounced as /aq/, especially, as Erin notes, before a consonant or the end of the word.)
So for example, the common ending -g, which you may know from these two words
tap’tang ‘potatoes’ tap’tan ‘potato’
comes out as -q after the -a- that some words have before the ending:
ga’taq ‘eels’ (comes from ga’ta-g) ga’t ‘eel’
muinaq ‘bears’ (comes from muina-g) muin ‘bear’
As Erin notes, /o/ will do the same thing, so that /og/ comes out as /oq/. This is probably because /o/ mostly comes from /a/-sounds that have fused together with a nearby /w/ or /gw/ sound.
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’