And then there are Dogs.

In the previous post, I should have mentioned that young warriors--the boys the French always called "la jeunesse" ("the youth")--were known in Miami-Illinois as aremooki 'dogs'. This term is evinced in Pinet's dictionary's entry << jeunes guerriers arem8ki >>. They appear to have been daunting adversaries.

Dogs

All three dictionaries of the language of the Miami and Illinois peoples created in situ by Jesuit missionaries in the late 1600s and early 1700s exhibit ethnologically interesting items.

From the late 1690s Pierre-François Pinet’s French-Illinois dictionary gives not only the word for the Indians’ dog, which was aremwa, but also a term for the dogs brought to the Illinois Country from France. 

Pinet’s dictionary entry begins with chien francois qui a les oreilles --baisses (sic)-- courbees (French dog, which has lowered curved ears), where his baisses meaning “lowered” is scratched out and replaced by courbees meaning “curved,” as he realized that baisses was an ambiguous, misleading term. What is curious and touching about Pinet’s entry is that right above this entry he added a small figure in the form of a superscripted U to show the shape of the ear that he was talking about. It seems that he probably not that satisfied with the “curved” notion, either.

Pinet wrote the Illinois term for the French dog in the form         
 << papakichia >>. His 17^th -century French spelling representing phonemic papakihšia, where the initial morpheme papak-  means “flat,” is derived from the verb “lie flat,” peepakihšin-. French dogs had floppy ears. The Indians’ dogs of course had ears that pointed up like wolves.

Jean Le Boullenger gives the same spelling for the Illinois word for the French dog in his own dictionary while providing a better term than “curved” to describe the dog’s ears. He wrote  chien franc. qui a les oreilles pendantes, meaning “French dog whose ears hang down”. 

Occasionally, one comes across real gems in these old Miami-Illinois language dictionaries, and here is another today. It’s the expression recorded by Le Boullenger from the Michigamea and/or the Kaskaskia for calling dogs. Le Boullenger wrote << cri pour appeler les ch(iens)  pic88 pic88 >>.

Now, the symbol 8 was a short hand and unequivocal way for writing French ou. However, the occurrence of two of these symbols appearing together at the end of words as in << pic88 >> is extremely rare. The intended phonetic form of the term is most probably [piikoo-piikoo], with natural elongation of the imperative suffix -o. The exclamation is likely a simplified, canine-adapted form of pyaako ‘Come!’, the plural command form of the verb.

Michael McCafferty

© 2015

When Ice and Mountains Sound Alike

Just as English has “sun” and “son,” “rain” and “rein,” “soul” and “sole,” and many more examples of chance homophony in the language, that is, words which sound alike but which have unrelated etymological histories, Miami-Illinois also has various sets of homophones. 

One set of Miami-Illinois homophones contains one term that means “freeze, ice” and the other that signifies “mountain, big hill”; both are -aten. This term does not stand alone; it occurs only in composite words. In Old Illinois, the independent nouns for “ice” was tahkwanwi, literally ‘it is cold’, as well as aašoohkooni, an old and modern word for “ice”. The independent noun for ‘mountain, hill’ in the language, old and modern, is ačiwi.  (š is the sound written “sh” in English and “ch” in French; č is the sound written “(t)ch” in English and “tch” in French.)

This particular homophonous situation involving terms meaning “freeze, ice” and “hill, mountain” is not uncommon in Algonquian. It is also seen for example in Ojibwe, where we find kepatin ‘it freezes over’ and kipapakatin ‘it is frozen thick’, but kiiškatinaa ‘it is a steep hill’  and tawatinaa ‘there is a dip between hills’.

The following are a couple of examples of -aten meaning “freeze, ice” in Illinois where -aten is a inanimate intransitive verb final:

siipiiwi soonkatenwi  ‘the river freezes’

nipihsi kipwatenki  ‘the lake freezes solid’

Other examples from the French Jesuit dictionaries:

<<  Cakiten8i  glace arretee qui ne peut passer  >> [Fr. stopped ice that doesn’t flow for kahkitenwi ‘(it is) stuck ice’.

<<  8acamaten8i glace belle, luisante, transparente  >> [Fr. beautiful, shiny, transparent ice] for waahkatenwi  ‘(it is) clear ice’

<<  arang8eten8i  glace blanche par petits endroits  >> [Fr. little patches of white ice here and there]  for  araankweetenwi  literally ‘rainbow ice’

<<  g8naten8i  glace couverte de neige  >> [Fr. Ice covered with snow] for koonatenwi ‘(it is) snow ice’

<<  nipiscaten8i  glace mouille  >> [Fr. wet ice] for nipihkatenwi  ‘(it is) water ice’

(Note that -aten, whether it means “freeze, ice” or “mountain, hill,” adapts its phonological shape to surrounding sounds, so that it is pronounced [-aten], [-eten] or even [-iten] sometimes.)

<< Espaten8i ~ patenwi >> is a common word for “mountain, hill” in Old Illinois.   Le Boullenger’s translation is hauteur (Fr. a height, an eminence). Literally, the Illinois term, which is phonemic espatenwi  is composed of  esp- ‘up, above’ and -aten ‘hill’, along with what is at heart a third-person singular inanimate intransitive independent verb suffix -wi.

Note that << Espaten8i  >> and << paten8i  >> are the same word. The initial vowel, in this case e-, when it precedes a pre-aspirated consonant, here written sp, was disappearing from the language in the late 1600s. Consequently, some speakers said espatenwi while others said patenwi for short. pahpatinwi ‘it is mountainous’ is a related inanimate intransitive verb recorded from a Wea speaker by Albert Gatschet in the late 1800s. Here we see the same verb as above but with first-syllable reduplication, giving the form  pahpa-, which has the sense of repeating hills, hence the translation: “it is mountainous”.

Two more examples of -aten meaning ‘mountain, hill’ are

<<  Pimitaten8i  >>, which Le Boullenger defines as colline qui regarde vers ici (Fr. a hill that faces this way), is phonemic pimitatenwi. This term literally means ‘(it is) a cross-hill’ (cross as in perpendicular).

<<  Ch8catinwi   colline penchant  >> (Fr. inclining hill) for šookatenwi  ‘(it is) a sliding-hill’

Finally, there was once a large natural hill along the Des Plaines River known to Miami-Illinois-speaking peoples as mihsooratenwi ‘(it is) a dugout canoe hill’. This toponym was recorded in Miami-Illinois with the spelling << Missouratenouy >> and its referent described by Pierre-Charles Delliette in his memoir of the Illinois Country known as the “De Gannes Memoir”. The hill, which had the appearance of a large dugout canoe, was located at some difficult rapids in the Des Plaines River at present Joliet, Illinois. The hill is indicated on the map that Louis Jolliet had Jean-Baptiste Louis Franquelin make after the latter’s return to Quebec from the Mississippi voyage of discovery with Jacques Marquette. On that map it is called “Mont Joliet”.

Michael McCafferty

©2015

You, Me, and We

From the point of view of a native speaker of an Indo-European language such as English or French, Algonquian languages have many curious features. Verbs house the lion’s share of these.

The person prefixes for the  independent order verbs in Illinois are ni- meaning ‘I/me/we/us’ and ki- signifying ‘you’. (Third-person independent verbs don’t have prefixes, nor does the entire order of dependent verbs, verbs which the French Jesuits called “subjunctive”. The latter are never marked prefixally.)

In English, we talk about “I/me/we/us” as being the set of “first-person” pronouns, and “you” as being the “second-person” pronoun. That is English “person hierarchy”: 1^st person is “I/we,” 2^nd person is “you,” (As in Algonquian, 3^rd person is, of course, “he/she/it/they”).

However, Algonquian person hierarchy is different. ki- ‘you’ is considered “first person” and ni- ‘I/me/we/us’ is “second person”. This fact is borne out by any verb in Miami-Illinois that involves “I/we/me/us” and “you”. In such cases, ‘you’ is always the prefix of the verb. In other words, if we translate these English sentences into Miami-Illinois, 

"You see me"  kineewi   and      "I  see you"   kineeyole, ki- ‘you’ is always the prefix. 

In other words, the independent verb prefix ni- is only present if the verb has a first-person argument but no second-person argument.

(Notice that it’s the end of the independent verb that carries the meaning as to who is doing what to whom.)

Within this verb system lies another curious item: 

Like other Algonquian languages, Miami-Illinois has two “we” verb forms. In other words, there are two “we’s”. One “we” means “us but not you/ him/her/them”. It’s naturally called the first-person plural exclusive. The first-person plural inclusive “we” means “us and you/him/her/them”. 

So, there is never a doubt in the Illinois listener’s mind whether he/she is included in the party when someone says, for example, “We’re going fishing”. The Illinois interlocutor knows instantaneously whether he/she is included in the trip.

Now here’s where it’s gets interesting, or beautiful, one might say. When its “we/us” exclusive of the others, the ni- “we/us” prefix is used; but when it’s “we/us” inclusive of everyone, the ki - “you  prefix” is used. For example nisimina ‘we (excl.) say’ but kisimina ‘we (incl.) say’.

I guess one would expect something like this in a language with a dual system such as this.

Of course, the foregoing is  something that no native speaker of the language would have ever thought twice about, natural as it was.

Michael McCafferty

©2015