Indigenous Languages Challenge #2: Proto-Algonquian
(see bottom of post for a quick introduction to language families and proto-languages, if you’re not familiar with my terminology here.)
Name of the language is Proto-Algonquian; since we have no record of this language actually existing, we don’t know what its speakers might have called themselves, though we could guess. Looking at the root of the Wôpanâak word hutuwôk (”that [language] which they can speak to each other”), from the first post I made in this series, we might guess that it’s related to *eϴketoᐧmakatwi, the verb “speak,” but I haven’t found any writings on this yet. The word “algonquian” itself may descend from a Maliseet word, elakómkwik, meaning “they who are our allies/relatives,” whose root I haven’t been able to find.
Basic Information - We get to Proto-Algonquian by pulling back from Wôpanâak to look at the entire Algonquian language family; this is sometimes subdivided into Plains Algonquian (such as Blackfoot / Siksiká), Central Algonquian (such as Ojibwe / Ojibwemowin / Anishinaabemowin), and Eastern Algonquian (such as Wôpanâak), but we can argue for a while about how the sub-groups should actually be split up. (There are many more in the Algonquin language family than I’ve listed here, of course).
History - Of course, much like we don’t have direct record of Proto-Algonquian, we don’t have direct record of who its speakers were; however, based on the geography and history of the groups in the language family, its guessed that they were a largely settled group in the central-south Canada area; northeast of the Great Lakes. Part of the point of this challenge is to recognize indigenous people and languages as living and existent, not historical curiosities, which I’m already stretching by talking about proto-languages, so instead of continuing to tell you about that, I’ll give you a little information on those two randomly-chosen subgroups I mentioned above, excluding Wôpanâak since I already talked about it.
The Blackfoot Confederacy (Niitsitapi or Siksikaitsitapi) describes four groups in Montana and in southwestern Canada. They were originally nomadic inhabitants of the Great Plains area. There’s several strong language revitalization and education movements among the Blackfoot Confederacy. The Piegan Institute, founded by Darrell Robes-Kipp, supports several immersion schools; and Montana radio station KBWG broadcasts shows in the language.
The Ojibwa or Chippewa (this is still a wide group, and there are so many different names for them, based on exact langauge, dialect, and area, that there’s an entire wikipedia article List of Ojibwa ethnonyms) are an Anishinaabe people and members of the Council of Three Fires; they live largely in an area I can best describe as south-middle-eastern Canada, north of the Great Lakes and sweeping a bit east and west, as well as a bit south into the United States. In 2001 an Ojibwe-language school, Waakoododaading (”the place where we help each other”) was founded by a community effort in Wisconsin; there were many people involved, but some of the original founders still working with the school are Keller Paap and Lisa LaRonge.
Linguistic revitalization - Algonquian has been one of the more heavily studied of the American language families; a first attempt at its reconstruction was published by one Leonard Bloomfield in the early 1900s, not long after Proto-Indo-European obtained a widely accepted form. A dictionary of Proto-Algonquian was published here (x) by the Algonquian Dictionaries Project, a subsidiary of the Algonquian Linguistic Atlas. The dictionary project makes available here (x) many resources on Algonquian languages; the Atlas also offers great resources for learning and use of these languages, such as fonts, conversation audios and manuals, and this super neat “terminology forum” (x) with common and important phrases.
Support - I wasn’t able to find an active donation site for Waakoododaading, and the Algonquian Dictionaries Project is an academic project which gains funding through grants, not donations, but...
Support the Piegan Institute here!
Phonology - As we saw with Wôpanâak , voicing / aspiration were not phonemic in Proto-Algonquian. The consonant inventory is a bit restricted as a result, but, notably, there’s a palatal or post-alveolar series as well as alveolar (again, as in Wôpanâak). The language did have at least one approximant/trill in the form of /l/, or /ɹ/. And, like Wôpanâak, there are four basic vowels and a length distinction, though nasalization was probably not phonemic. Like its daughter language, Proto-Algonquian was likely distinctive for its abundance of multi-vowel and semivowel-vowel syllables.
Morphology - Again, like Wôpanâak (and like many proto-languages), Proto-Algonquian is pretty heavily marked. It heavily uses a proximate-obviative distinction - much like the difference between “this” and “that,” this is the distinction between an object/person who is close to / part of / more relevant to the conversation, vs. one who is far away / not participating / less relevant. The distinction is used with pronouns to keep track of third person referents (as if you were referring to this-he and that-he, instead of leaving it unclear who a particular “he” refers to), for instance.
Syntax - I wasn’t able to find a ton on the syntax of Proto-Algonquian (it’s even more difficult to reconstruct grammars than phonologies, and heavily-marked languages tend towards less rigid syntax anyways), so, in interest of getting this posted, I will refrain from trying to find and get an interesting factoid from a paper on Proto-Algonquian syntax.
Vocabulary - Like Wôpanâak, many Algonquian languages have lent words to English / American terms and place-names. From Massachusetts, which we saw before, to Michigan (mishigamaa, Ojibwe “big water”), to animals such as moose and woodchucks (from Cree otchek or Ojibwe otchig, altered to match “wood” [now you know how much wood a woodchuck can chuck: none]), and even the word tuxedo (named for the town the style originated in, which in turn took its name from a Munsee-langauge place-name).
Information from one of the listed sources, Wikipedia, World Atlas of Language Structures, Online Etymology Dictionary, etc.
In case you don’t know what I’m talking about here, a “proto” language is one for which we have no record (living speakers or writings), but which we can reconstruct based on the similarities of languages we do know about. A proto-language is constructed for a language family, a set of languages that we know are related because of similarities in their words and grammars. Roughly speaking, this means comparing words we think are related, and hypothesizing an ancestor word which can produce all of the descendants via regular sound changes; of course, it tends to get a lot more complicated than that might sound.
Often, because of the relatively short history of written language, more than one proto-language can be constructed in the history of a language family; the Algonquin language family is itself part of the Algic family (unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, linguistics haven’t followed biologists in the order-phylum-class-etc-etc classification, so everything’s a family of different sizes), along with Wiyot and Yurok, and we have another reconstructed language, Proto-Algic, from which they all descend.
As an example, Wikipedia helpfully provides the word for “woman” in many Algonquin languages; a random sample of them is okwéew, iskwew, and aakííwa. Clearly related, right? The hypothesized root for these is *eϴkweᐧwa; so the major changes we have are deleting /ϴ/ (the sound at the end of “with”) or replacing it with /s/ (if this seems improbable, considered how often non-native speakers pronounce English “the” like “ze;” the two sounds are, by linguistic standards, quite similar), and messing about with the vowels. If I had the time and energy to pull up more words and roots, we’d expect to see regular correspondences between languages, like “o,” “i,” and “aa” appearing in the same word.
As a note, reconstructed words are generally marked with * to indicate that they aren’t actually attested.
