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