Breath of Life June 4, 2015

Breath of Life 2015 is supported by the Documenting Endangered Languages Program (NSF Award No. 1360675).

and the Smithsonian Institution, Myaamia Center at Miami University, National Endowment for the Humanities, Recovering Voices, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, National Museum of Natural History, National Anthropological Archives, National Museum of the

American Indian, and Library of Congress American Folklife Center

Double Negative

from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfB8hng2bo

What is “grammar”?

•  The full set of patterns (often called “rules”) that allow the composition of words and phrases in a given language.

•  “A grammar” is a description of the above, usually as a reference book

•  “Grammar is your friend.” -Pat Shaw

Writing conventions are informed by grammar, but are not themselves “grammar”.

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9NlqIGm500

– – – – 

– – – – 

from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuepU-5Y50E

♥

John Eliot’s Apostle to the Indians

(created at the Harvard Indian College)

“________’s handwriting is pretty good.”

• 

– 

– 

“The vocabulary of the Miamis was not very great, probably containing not over six hundred or eight hundred words, but it was all they needed in their savage life … they possibly used no more than one hundred [words] in common conversation. … The language was very imperfect as one might suppose. The noun, the verb, and the adjective were about the only parts of speech used.”

McClurg, Martha Una. (1961). Miami Indian Stories told by Chief Clarence Godfroy Ka-pah-pwah (Great-great-grandson of Frances Slocum). Winona Lake, Indiana: Light and Life Press, p. 159.

McClurg was wrong!

•  What would be expressed with an adjective (e.g. color terms) in English is expressed with a verb in myaamia:

•  moohswa waapisita ‘The deer is white.’ deer he is white

•  alaakani waapiki ‘The dish is white.’ dish/plate it is white

myaamia doesn’t have adjectives …

Nouns (words for persons, places, things, and ideas)

“Suffixes on Miami nouns mark the number and the

gender of the noun.”

•  Miami has two numbers – singular and plural

•  Miami has two genders – animate and inanimate

Grammatical “Gender” What is a “gender” and why is that term used here?

Number in myaamia Animate Nouns alaankwia, alaankwiaki ‘rainbow, rainbows’ piloohsa, piloohsaki ‘child, children’ naala, naalaki ‘cicada, cicadas’ myaamia, myaamiaki ‘Miami, Miamis’ eelaalaahšiwia, eelaalaahšiwiaki ‘monkey, monkeys’

Inanimate Nouns kaloosioni, kaloosiona ‘word, words’ tawaani, tawaana ‘tree, trees’ alaakani, alaakana ‘spoon, spoons’ siipiiwi, siipiiwa ‘river, rivers’ waawi, waawa ‘egg, eggs’ pakaani, pakaana ‘nut, nuts’

myaamia nouns – summary

Animate nouns: sg: -a pl: -akiInanimate nouns: sg: -i pl: -a

Learn several examples!!!! Also to consider:

-What kind of number contrast (singular, dual, plural, etc.) does your language make, if any?

-Does number (how many of something) get marked on verbs or in other classes of words besides nouns?

Be prepared for exceptions –especially for commonly used

words

myaamia forms of MOTHER term:

-ninkya ‘my mother’

-ninkiiki ‘my mothers’

Pronouns(generic nouns that stand in place

of specific nouns) •  Some major examples – Words for …

I, you (singular), he, she, it, we-inclusive, we-exclusive, you (plural), they (they-two, they-more than two)

-Are overt pronouns frequently used in your language?

-Remember that pronouns very often work differently from regular nouns in terms of where and how they occur.

Units of linguistic analysis that often get employed in reference materials

Morphology

The study of word composition and formation

Morphemes • A morpheme is the smallest

meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.

•  Here are some morphemes of English: – like (one morpheme) – like-s (two morphemes) – dis-like-s (three morphemes)

What is the morphemic breakdown of helicopter?

• heli-copter

• helico-pter

pterodactyl

•  With helicopter, most people intuitively find two morphemes, and the example is interesting because English speakers usually analyze the break as heli+copter, instead of the historically accurate helico+pter. Again, you could analyze the word either way and have a good argument so long as you presented a reasonable justification for your morphemic breakdown.

•  You could say “Well, it’s helico+pter because the word was created with those Greek roots (you could look up this word), and those roots show up as units in other words like pterodactyl and helicobacter pylori (a bacterium shaped like a helix, as with the wings of a helicopter). You could also point out that English has the truncated form ‘copter’ (to mean helicopter) and also has words like gyrocopter, which is based on gyro ‘triangle’ plus ‘copter’. (If it followed Greek roots, it would be gyropter.) Then you would have a solid argument for why the morphemic breakdown of helicopter could be described as ‘heli+copter”, even though the historical breakdown of the word was different.

•  Regardless, laying things out in this way and looking for patterns can help you discover things about your language that you might otherwise not notice, which can help with needs such as creating new words.

More on the point of the former slide

Roots

• The base form(s) within words.

• Usually there are a large number of roots in a language.

Free vs. Bound Morphemes

•  Some morphemes are free, which means they can be used on their own as words – (like ‘walk’)

•  Other morphemes are bound, which means they must occur with a root

– (like the “past tense” -ed)

Affixation Affixes are bound morphemes • Prefixes come before the root

– (un-happy)

• Suffixes follow the root – (walk-s, walk-ed)

• Infixes go inside the root • Circumfixes are two-part affixes, one of which goes before the root, and the other of which goes after

Note: “affix” is an umbrella term for bound morphemes that attach to roots in fixed places. They have subcategory names (prefix, suffix) based on where they attach.

Point to keep in mind In most languages of the Western hemisphere, affixation is relatively robust – that is, most of these language encode important ideas through affixes (more than English does).

Note that in most dictionaries, hyphens before or after a given entry indicate that this morpheme must take something before it or after it, respectively. For example, in myaamia, there is a root -iipiti that means “tooth”. However, this is not a self-standing word; it needs a possessive prefix to create a full word (e.g., niipiti ‘my tooth’, kiipiti ‘your tooth’, awiipiti ‘his/her tooth’, etc.). The hyphen before the first letter in the dictionary entry for TOOTH indicates that something has to be there. The main myaamia dictionary, however, does not tell its users what sort of prefix this root takes. This grammatical fact is something that one has to know in order to be able to use the dictionary effectively.

Reduplication (part of) a word is repeated and doing so has some sort of conventionalized meaning

Ex: myaamia verb root neehse- ‘breathe’neehseeta ‘(s)he breathes’

There is also a reduplicated form: neeneehsee-. What do you think it means?

neeneehseeta ‘(s)he _______________’

Isolating languages

• In the simplest case (as in ‘walk’), one word=one morpheme.

• Some languages (like Chinese) are predominantly this way

• Each idea can be isolated into a separate word.

(Poly)Synthetic languages • (Poly)synthetic means ‘synthesizing

(lots of) things together into a word’ • These languages allow many

morphemes in a word … for example, an action verb might have morphemes indicating who’s doing it, to whom, at what time, by what means, and so on.

What can you tell about these myaamia verbs?

from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVDNcoT6R0A

Some myaamia morphology • weehsiniaani ‘I eat’ • weehsiniyani ‘you-singular eat’ • weehsinici ‘(s)he eats’ • weehsiniaanki ‘we (not including addressee) eat’

• weehsiniyankwi ‘we (including addressee) eat’ • etc.

• weehsiniaani ‘I eat’ • weehsiniyani ‘you-singular eat’ • weehsinici ‘(s)he eats’ • weehsiniaanki ‘we (not including addressee) eat’

• weehsiniyankwi ‘we (including addressee) eat’ • etc.

myaamia, like many languages, differentiates “inclusive” and “exclusive” we

A myaamia verb paradigm

• I -aani we -aanki (first person exclusive)

• you -(y)ani we -(y)ankwi (first person inclusive) you all -(y)iikwi

• (s)he -ci/-ta they -waaci/-ciki (-ki/ka -kiki (after consonant-final stems)Imperative singular (command to one person): -lo

(-to after [n]) Imperative plural (command to more than one person): -ko Let’s ______.”: -taawi

What are the various forms for kiiweeli- ‘to laugh’?

Terminology •  The previous slide contains part of a

VERB PARADIGM – a table giving the set (or a systematic subset) of forms in which a given verb occurs. – number often organized in columns

(singular on left, plural on right) – person (1st – I, we; 2nd – you, you guys; 3rd

– s(he), it, they) often presented in rows (with 1st person on top)

Polysynthesis in Yup’ik Eskimo

kaipiallrulliniukkaig -piar -llru -llini -u -k

be hungry

really PST apparently INDIC they-two

‘the two of them were apparently really hungry’

example from George Charles, a Yup’ik speakerMithun, Marianne. (1999). Languages of Native North America, p. 38

Sometimes in linguistic reference materials, particularly textbooks and other publications,

synthesis gets illustrated with very complicated examples. This is likely at least partly due to an

intent to show the possible complexity of Native languages, which is important since

some people assume that these languages are “primitive”. However, even highly synthetic

languages will normally have some words with only one or two morphemes.

An example of synthesis as it commonly occurs

from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1s9jd7OOcM

What is a word anyway?!

• Speakers normally pause between words, not morphemes

• General rule: a unit with one primary (phonological) stress is a word.

• Often morphemes in a word come in a fixed order; this is called a template.

• Speakers recognize words as words.

Apparently, some U.S. politicians have a different notion of what constitutes a word …

“One word sums up probably the

responsibility of any vice president, and

that one word is

-December 6, 1989

Dan Quayle, U.S. Vice President (1989-1993)

‘to be prepared’.”