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

paakweeči kooniki...Because it is snowing...

In the Illinois language, there are three words for “snow”:   

             koona, waapikoona  and  manetoowa.

In the noun  waapikoona,  waap- means “white” while the noun final  -ikoon  is related to Proto-Algonquian  *ko˙ni  ‘snow’. Miami-Illinois has a reflex of Proto-Algonquian *ko˙ni in the form koona, attested by the Jesuit missionary/dictionary writer Jean Le Boullenger. In going from Proto-Algonquian to Miami-Illinois, *ko˙ni  changed genders, from being an inanimate noun to being an animate noun. We see this in the final -a  of both the noun koona and waapikoona, this final -a being the proximal singular animate noun marker. In other words, the terms  koona and waapikoona  are two of a few dozen animate nouns in the language, such as those meaning “drum” (ahkihkwa),  “star” (alaankwa), “rainbow” (alaankweewa) “net” (ahsapa), “thunder” (čiinkweewa) “Sun,” (kiirihswa),  “Moon” (kiirihswa) “bow” (mihtehkoopa)  “feather” (piiweewa), and “rock cliff” (aašipehkwa), which are terms for inanimate things but marked as animate, and which take animate-gender verbs.  As we can see here, each of these foregoing nouns bears the animate gender marker -a.

(There is an on-going debate about whether inanimate nouns marked for animacy involve a semantic or a syntactic issue.  Some argue that, since there is no clearly defined semantic system for determining whether a noun is animate or inanimate, the issue must be at heart a syntactic one; others argue that a great percentage of the inanimate items marked as animate have numinous or cultural significance, and that this fact suggests that syntax alone cannot explain the situation.)

While Jean Le Boullenger attested the noun koona  for “snow,” which he wrote << g8na >>, we can see from the linguistic data that span the years from the late 1600s to the early 1900s that manetoowa and waapikoona were the most common terms used in the Miami-Illinois language for “snow”.

The term manetoowa 'snow'  literally means “spirit, Manitou”. Although in the modern language the term for “snow” is  manetwa,  there was no difference in pronunciation in the 1600s and early 1700s between “snow” and “Manitou”.  In the Miami-Illinois language represented in the three Jesuit dictionaries from the late 1600s and early 1700s, the term was  manetoowa.  All three dictionaries not only write the words for “Manitou” and “snow” in the same way,  <<  manet8a  >> ; they also write the abbreviation for both words in the same way. There is no doubt then that in the 1600s and early 1700s, the word for “Manitou” and “snow” was one and the same,  manetoowa. In its form meaning “snow,”  manetoowa  later underwent the -oowa to -wa sound change reduction that is common for forms morphing from Proto-Algonquian into Miami-Illinois, as we can see in words such as Proto-Algonquian  *wi˙nteko˙wa  ‘windigo, cannibal monster’, which became Miami-Illinois  miintikwa  ‘eastern screech owl’.

Interestingly, Miami-Illinois is the only Algonquian language that took the term for “Manitou” and turned it into a term for “snow”. The general trend in Algonquian is to take “Manitou” and turn it into a word for “snake,” as we see for example in Potawatomi  mnədo  ‘spirit, snake’.

Now, an idea that has circulated and which seems widely held is that in Miami-Illinois manetoowa and waapikoona are distinguished from each other in meaning as words for “snow” in that the former refers to falling snow and the latter to snow on the ground. This notion got its start in the early 1800s, with C.C. Trowbridge, an U.S. Indian agent working with Miami-Illinois speakers. However, that definition does not find support in the other sources of the language, and in fact is contradicted by Trowbridge’s own data.

Consider these examples also taken from the Jesuit dictionaries in light of Trowbridge’s notion that manetoowa only refers to falling snow:

<<  ne8e ek8itchi manet8o   il y a de la nege Jusque la  >>  for neewe eehkwiči manetoowa ‘there is snow up to there’

<<  8anic8ntam8o mi8i manet8o  La nege couvre Le chemin  >> (Fr. the snow covers the path)

<<  pai8naro manet8o  secoue La nege de dessus la Cabane  >> (Fr. Shake the snow off from on top of the lodge! )

<<  manet8a p8tchissakina on fait fondre la n. avec des pierres chaudes  >> (Fr. people melt snow with hot stones )

<<  manet8o kin8ita la neige est epaisse  >> (Fr. the snow is thick) for manetoowa kiinwita  ‘the snow is deep’

While manetoowa  is clearly well represented in phrases referring to snow that has already fallen, waapikoona can be seen in at least one phrase referring to falling snow:

<< P8nisse8a 8abig8na la neige cesse de tomber >> (Fr. the snow stops falling) for  pooni(i)hseewa waapikoona 

Importantly, there is also a related verb root for “snow,”  koon- , which is an inanimate intransitive verb initial that underlies the principal verb for expressing the very idea of snow falling from the sky. We get, for example, in the Jesuit dictionaries <<  g8ni8i g8niki   il nege  >>   for kooniwi  and kooniki   ‘it is snowing’.  (At the same time, there is another way to say that snow is falling: manetoowa piiwa ‘it is snowing’, literally ‘snow comes’).

A few other terms from the Jesuit dictionaries involving “snow” include the following (phonemicized):

waapikoonahkiwi,  literally ‘it is snow-land’, referring to ground covered in snow

koonahkiwi   Fr. lieu couvert de neige--‘place covered in snow’. koonahkiwi is literally “it is snow land, it is a snow field”.

koonatenwi  Fr. glace couverte de neige--‘ice covered with snow’ . koonatenwi literally means “it is snow ice”.

ninkoonapi  je suis couvert de neige--‘I am covered in snow’ (Fr. je suis couvert de neige)

ninkoonohsee  Fr. je marche sur la neige--‘I am walking on the snow’

koonipihkaakani  'snow water'  (Fr. eau de neige), recorded <<   g8nipicagane >>. koonipihkaakani is literally “snow water thing”.

And finally, a discussion of snow would not be complete without a snow ball fight, which we find a reference to in an entry in Pinet’s dictionary from around 1696, an appropriate entry for a recording made at Chicago:

<<  on me jette de la neige sur le visage  >> (Fr. people are throwing snow on my face), a phrase recorded in the form << nic8nig8chag8 >>.

Michael McCafferty

©2015