The Miami-Illinois language
is an Algonquian language. Algonquian is
the name of one of some twenty-two language
families found in North America north of Mexico. (Such striking, vast linguistic
diversity is perhaps the principle reason linguists tend to embrace the long chronology theory for the
settlement of the Americas.)
English belongs to a
language family known as Indo-European, whose original parent language, known
as Proto-Indo-European, was spoken some six to eight thousand years ago. This
language family includes both close and distant cousins of English such as
Frisian, Danish, German, French, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, and Bengali,
just to name a very few. Miami-Illinois is in the Algonquian family, and is related
to languages such as Potawatomi, Meskwaki, Shawnee, Munsee, Powhatan, Massachusett,
Algonquin, Blackfoot, Arapaho, and many others.
The Algonquianist David
J. Costa is the preeminent scholar of the Miami-Illinois language. While his
book The Miami Illinois Language (University
of Nebraska Press, 2003) is a sophisticated linguistic analysis, its introduction
is a must-read for anyone interested in the Miami and Illinois peoples. There Dave
presents an in-depth and accessible description of the language as well as a detailed
history of the recorders of its native speakers from the time it was first
encountered by Europeans around 350 years ago up until the early 20th
century. The recordings of this language are rich and varied, and include for
example an extensive word list elicited from the great Miami war chief mihšihkinaahkwa ‘Painted Terrapin’,
(literally “big turtle”), a man known in English history books as “Little
Turtle”. (The symbol š stands for the
sound written “sh” in English.) In addition to his book, Dave has published a
number of interesting and accessible articles on various aspects of
Miami-Illinois, which can be found at this website:
http://myaamiacenter.org/?page_id=98
Among the Algonquian
languages, Miami-Illinois is the most closely related in terms of morphology
and phonology to Ojibwe-Potawatomi, but in many ways, especially lexically, it is
close to Kickapoo-Sauk-Fox. Moreover, Miami-Illinois is lexically one of the most
conservative Algonquian languages. In other words, many of its words, such as pyaakimini ‘persimmon’ (originally
Proto-Algonquian “cranberry”), have not changed form at all since the time the pan-Algonquian ancestral tongue
known as Proto-Algonquian was spoken some 2000 years ago somewhere west of Lake
Superior.
The name of the
Miami-Illinois language is hyphenated in order to indicate the existence of the
two major early historical dialect groups. However, Jesuit missionaries in New
France indicated that the Illinois and the Miami were originally one people
that had separated just prior to meeting the French for the first time in the
late 1600s. (Reuben Gold
Thwaites, Jesuit Relations and Allied
Documents. 73 volumes. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901), 55:200;
55:102.)
Archaeologists have
determined that before the 1640’s Iroquoian-driven diaspora of the various
Algonquian-speaking tribes living around the western end of Lake Erie and in
the southern peninsula of Michigan, the ancestral Illinois population lived in
the general Toledo, Ohio area. Archaeologists have also determined that the
Illinois settled in the Illinois River valley and environs by sometime around
1620, which is where Jacques Marquette, Louis Jolliet and Jacques Largillier
found them in the summer of 1673 while on their famous voyage by birch bark
canoes down and up the Mississippi. Earlier during that same trip, in the late spring,
the Frenchmen had found the Miami living in a fortified town on the upper Fox
River of Wisconsin. Sometime in the early 1600s these two groups had separated
for some unknown or unknowable reason.
Pierre-Charles
Delliette, a relative of Henri de Tonti, La Salle’s faithful lieutenant in the
Illinois Country, spent a great deal of his youth among the Wea, a
Miami-dialect group, and among the Illinois, where he learned to speak
Miami-Illinois. In his memoir, he describes the two groups as having the same
language, with only minor dialectal differences between them, as when he
indicates that the Miami had an s-sound
where the Illinois had an h-sound. Here
and elsewhere in his memoir, Delliette offers ideas that indicate that he was a
gifted observer. In the case of this linguistic observation of “s” and “h” variants
in Miami and Illinois, the language in the late 1600s and into the 1700s was
undergoing a phonological change that took the consonant clusters sp and sk to hp and hk, respectively.
(For Delliette, see “De Gannes Memoir,” in Thomas Calvin Pease and Raymond C.
Werner, eds.1934. The French Foundation 1680-1693, in Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, vol. 23,
302-395. Springfield: the Illinois State Historical Library. Note that Pease
and Werner, who did not know Miami-Illinois, misread the cursive symbol ƒ,
believing it was an “f” when in fact it represented one of two forms of lower-case
“s” common in early manuscripts.)
Delliette’s writings
are important as they indicate that the Miami dialect was undergoing the above
mentioned phonological change more slowly than was the Illinois dialect, and in
fact we can see an example of this conservative Miami sk in the earliest recording of the name for the Wisconsin River,
written down by Jacques Marquette in 1673 from Miami speakers, in the form << Mesk8sing >> . Marquette’s recording represents phonetic
Miami [meesko(o)siŋgi] meaning “it lies red,” a name that refers to the red
stone bed of the Wisconsin River (See Michael McCafferty. “On Wisconsin: the
derivation and referent of an old puzzle in American Indian place names,” in Onoma 38 (2003): 39-56.) Later, once
that particular sound change had raked through the language, the term for “red”
became meehkw- for everyone, no
longer meeskw-.
While a prayer book
written in the 1680s and attributed to the Jesuit missionary Claude-Jean
Allouez is the earliest recording of the Miami-Illinois language, the language
truly comes into focus with the creation of three missionary dictionaries:
Jacques Largillier, a
yeoman for Jesuits in the Illinois Country and a Jesuit brother, was the
amanuensis of a massive Illinois-French dictionary. He collected Miami-Illinois
language data himself, as evidenced by word lists that he inserted in Pinet’s
dictionary, but he also probably used data gathered by the missionary Jacques
Gravier, to whom the authorship of this book has been traditionally attributed.
It is a tough call saying how much data either person collected for this
dictionary. Gravier is famous for working out the grammar of the language and
in having a gifted informant in the person of Marie Rouensa, daughter of a
Kaskaskia chief. And as I explained in a study of Largillier, the latter was on
the cutting edge of the Jesuits’ learning Miami-Illinois from the very
beginnings of contact between the French and the Miami-Illinois-speaking peoples,
and also knew the language very well. (Michael McCafferty, “Jacques Largillier:
French trader, Jesuit brother, and Jesuit scribe par excellence.”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Fall, 2011: 188-197.)
Largillier’s dictionary
dates to the last decade of the 1600s and is the largest of the three
dictionaries. It was edited and self-published by Carl Masthay in 2002 under
the title Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French
Dictionary. Masthay provides an excellent index for this work.
A French/Miami-lllinois
dictionary, a work whose creation was contemporary with Largillier’s book, was
assembled in the field between 1696 and 1702 by the Jesuit missionary Pierre-François
Pinet, first when he was living among the Wea at Chicago and then when he had
moved to be among the Tamaroa and Cahokia on the Mississippi. In 1999, I in
fact discovered and identified this then unknown dictionary while doing
research in the Jesuit archives in Quebec. Through handwriting and historical
analyses, I was then able to determine that the author was Pinet. (See Michael
McCafferty. “The Latest Miami-Illinois Dictionary and its Author.” Papers of the Thirty-Sixth Algonquian Conference.
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press (2005): 271-86.) Three other hands added
information here and there to Pinet’s dictionary, probably after his death in
1702 on the little rivière des Pères in
1702 (now a St. Louis drainage ditch). Two of these hands belonged to the
Jesuit missionaries Gabriel Marest and Jean Mermet. It would be a few years
before I was able to determine that the third hand was that of Jacques
Largillier—and figuring this out finally explained who had written out the
Illinois-French dictionary discussed above, whose authorship up to this point
had been a mystery.
Finally, Jean Le
Boullenger, a Jesuit missionary who came up the Mississippi from the Gulf in
1719, composed a French-Illinois dictionary in the Fort de Chartres area among
the Michigamea and the Kaskaskia. Le Boullenger borrows heavily from Pinet, but
for the most part appears to have compiled the book from his own notes or from
those of other Jesuits, as most of Le Boullenger’s book seems to be original.
It is important to
understand that the Jesuits, while learned scholars of their time and excellent
learners of foreign languages, were not modern linguists. In other words,
neither their impressive and intensive education nor their writing system could
adequately handle Miami-Illinois. And their French acoustic bias did not help
matters. For example, they were for all intents and purposes immune to noticing
or noting long vowels, i.e., they either did not hear them or they simply chose
not to record them—and Miami-Illinois makes a meaningful distinction between
utterances containing short vowels and identical utterances containing long
vowels. Furthermore, the Jesuits were equally deaf or uninterested in recording
pre-aspirated consonants, such as hk mentioned
above—they simply wrote this cluster and the other pre-aspirated consonants, hp, ht,
hc, hs, hš, without
indicating the h sound most of the
time. (At the same time, they were relatively good at indicating intervocalic h.) In light of the foregoing, one can
see that the Jesuit dictionary spellings for the most part have to be
deciphered in order to produce the actual phonemic form of a word. One tiny
example: the dictionary makers always spell the word for “black bear” in the
form << mac8a >> (Pinet and Largillier) or << mac8o
>> (Le Boullenger). Whenever that word appears in the dictionary,
they never note the h that is in fact
a part of the word mahkwa. The
language was recorded in three large dictionaries in this limited way, with
pre-aspiration marked extremely rarely.
Another problem that
occasionally arises in the Jesuit dictionaries of the Miami-Illinois language
is their “situational translations”. In these cases, the Jesuits simple would
give a meaning for a Miami-Illinois dictionary entry that was not a
word-for-word translation but rather an impressionistic interpretation of what
was being described by the entry in question. An extreme example of this type
of translation is Largillier’s recording << pag8tchi8a >> for pakociiwa, which means “his belly is
full”. (c is the linguistic symbol
standing for English orthographic “ch” and French orthographic “tch”.) But what
Largillier writes as the translation is “l’oyseau
de proye s’envole de desu la beste quil mange,” which is French for “the bird of prey is flying away from above
the animal that it is eating.” Let’s hope the bird’s belly was in fact full
when he had to fly away.
Regardless of these
transcription problems or translation freedoms, we now have three dictionaries
of the Miami-Illinois language from the late 1600s and early 1700s, Pinet’s
French/Miami-Illinois dictionary, Largillier’s Illinois-French dictionary, and
Le Boullenger’s French-Illinois dictionary. The Myaamia Center at the University
of Miami of Ohio is in the process of translating the French of these
dictionaries to English, which is my job, and of phonemicizing the
Miami-Illinois entries, which is Dave Costa’s job, as part of the Miami Tribe
of Oklahoma’s language revitalization program, The database for the Le
Boullenger dictionary, which we are still working on but which is now
searchable, can be found here: ilaatawaakani.org
Michael McCafferty
©2015
No comments:
Post a Comment