I am currently making some worksheets to supplement Mi’gmaq courses. So far I have done worksheets to practice basic phrases (e.g. Taluisin gi’l? Tami tett wigin?). I also would like some suggestions from those of you who have taken the course and those of you who are just starting out!
At the end of July, a small group of volunteers stepped forward and committed themselves to teach and learn Mi’gmaq through this method. It’s called the Master Apprentice Program. Although not yet formally implemented yet here in Listuguj,
they’re getting the feel for what it’s like. I’m sure at some point they’d love to see this grow into a full blown program. We’ll be meeting with the small group of volunteers this Friday to get some feedback.
Hear what participants from British Columbia had to say about their Master Apprentice experience after committing over 300 hours over three years, only speaking their First Nations language.
Sepei gigpesaqaq aq nige’ alugwig… Saponug na’gusetewitew!
Hello from rainy Listuguj! Good thing we have been learning about the weather because sepei ma’munloqap (it was pouring this morning!)
Students, both in the post secondary class and the high school graduate class, have been learning (and mastering!) many different grammatical and lexical elements of the Mi’gmaq language from inanimate intransitive verb paradigms to body parts!
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’
“Where Are Your Keys?” is a language game that I just found out about at CoLang. The game is played with several simple objects, such as a red stone, a white stone, a red stick, and a white stick. The players then repeat several phrases about these objects (such as, “what’s that?” and “I want the red stick”) while pointing and passing them around. The phrases are repeated many times with different variations by the players, so the people I was talking to said that they found it was a great way of getting people comfortable talking. This is a video of Mohegan language learners playing the game.
Another example of things that other people are doing with video is Katie Grant, a participant in the Sauk Master-Apprentice program who is making youtube videos about things she is learning in the Sauk language.
Hello all!
Today was the first day of classes (however there was some confusion and turnout wasn’t optimal, but we will recruit more tonight!).
The first lesson starts out by the students learning how to introduce themselves and talk a bit about their families and where they come from. By learning all this, at the same time students are learning many grammatical elements without all the dreaded tables and parsing!! This is the beauty of this teaching method: the situational phrases also convey key grammatical elements (this is the grammar-phobe friendly method 😉 ). For example at the beginning of the class the students learn how to say where they live (e.g. Wigi Muliang ‘I live in Montreal’). The –g ending denotes location. Later on in the lesson this comes in handy when the students learn places and various nouns like jinm ‘man’, gisisgwisgw ‘elderly woman’, and patawti ‘table’, awti ‘road’ etc. Then the students can make sentences like jinm gaqamit patawtigtug ‘the man is standing by the table’. The locative ending surfaces again with patawti ‘table’ (although in a different form, but the introduction of the locative ending at the beginning of the lesson makes this concept easier to grasp once learning how to construct longer phrases). And thus the lessons go!
One of the goals for this summer is to document the curriculum for the Mi’gmaq lessons. By the end of the summer we will have generated a kind of curriculum from the lessons to act as a guide for future instructors of Mi’gmaq. Lessons will be divided up by content, so for example one class which meets for 1.5 hours could contain more than one lesson. For example today there were two lessons (Lesson 1: teluisi…’My name is…’ and Lesson 2: jinm gaqamit… ‘The man is standing…’). Lesson 1 comprises of introductions of oneself whereas Lesson 2 comprises of creating basic sentences (as exemplified above). An example of a lesson and a lesson template for this methodology will be posted soon!
All in all, so far so good! We are all looking forward to some spectacular classes and learning more and more Mi’gmaq! 🙂