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Chapter 3 Basic Concepts Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 1 Chapter 3 Basic Concepts 1. Introduction This chapter introduces some basic concepts and facts about Menominee that will be needed to understand the material in subsequent chapters. Here we look at parts of speech, person, animacy, obviation, and verb types. 2. Parts of speech Different languages have different inventories of parts of speech. It’s safe to say that virtually all languages have nouns and verbs, but beyond that we find a lot of differences. According to Bloomfield, Menominee has the following parts of speech: (1) Menominee Parts of Speech (Bloomfield 1962:25) • Nouns • Verbs • Pronouns • Particles • Negator There are also prefixes (which come before words) and lots of suffixes (which come after words). The prefixes are discussed briefly below, and both the prefixes and suffixes are discussed further in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. Brief discussion of each of the parts of speech appears in this chapter, and more detail is given in later chapters. 2.1. Nouns We all learn in school that nouns describe a “person, place, or thing.” That works for many nouns, but not necessarily all of them. For example, it leaves out abstract concepts like joy or independence. In Menominee, beyond looking at the meaning, you can tell if something is a noun by the following factors (among other things): (a) whether it can be pluralized (by -ak or -an), (b) whether it can have the locative ending -eh added, (c) whether it can be possessed (using the three person-marking prefixes discussed below) (d) whether it can have a demonstrative (like eneh ‘that (inan.)’ or enoh ‘that (an.)’) before it. Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 2 2.2. Verbs ‘Verb’ is a lot harder to define than ‘noun’. Verbs express actions as well as states of being. But they can also express existence, occurrence, relationships between people and objects, etc. Menominee is a very verb-oriented language, and you’ll find that verbs in Menominee often express much more information than verbs in English do. For example, eskōthkaew is a Menominee verb meaning ‘he or she makes a fire’. Notice that it’s just one word in Menominee, but it contains the concept of creating something (a fire) and what that something is (the fire). It also tells you who is doing the action (‘he or she’). Another thing that surprises some people is that concepts expressed by adjectives are often expressed by verbs in Menominee. So for example, maehkīw means ‘it is red’, but it’s a verb, not an adjective. You can identify verbs by the prefixes that some of them take, and by the very large number of suffixes that most of them take. These will be explained in Chapter 5. 2.3. Pronouns Pronouns are words that substitute for nouns, like ‘she’ or ‘that’ (wenah or eneh/enoh in Menominee). In fact, there are several different subcategories of pronouns. Personal pronouns, for example, are the ones that indicate people and things: ‘I, you, he, she, it, we, they’ and so on. Demonstrative pronouns are usually described as pointing to a thing. They can either be used as a substitute for a noun (like saying ‘I want that’) or with a noun (as in ‘I want that bike’). Pronouns are a little tricky in Menominee because they can be inflected – that is, they can have different endings on them. They are discussed in depth in Chapter 8. 2.4. Particles ‘Particle’ is a huge category that Bloomfield used for any word that does not inflect (i.e. words that never have any endings on them). These are sometimes characterized as the “little words,” but the fluent speaker elders will always tell you that using them right makes all the difference in the world in a Menominee sentence. Unfortunately, sometimes they’re very hard to translate into English. We can group particles into various subcategories, as will be shown in Chapter 7. You can see the diversity of meaning that particles have by just considering the small sampling in (2): Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 3 (2) anāmepik ‘under the water’ enāk ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure’ kēwāc ‘mistakenly, wrong’ māwaw ‘all, everything’ mesek ‘and, also, again’ nahāw ‘yes, all right, come on; well, well then; you’re welcome’ new ‘emphatic, contrast; precision, selective’ nīwinoh ‘four times’ sew ‘actually; rather, as it were; like, as if; just, simply’ yōhpeh ‘now, today’ 2.5. Negator The main negator in Menominee is kan ‘no, not’. Bloomfield gave it its own part of speech because it didn’t really fit into any of the other categories. It seems most like a particle, but it has some inflected forms (forms with suffixes on them), which excludes it from that category. Table 1 lists the negators in Menominee, including all of the inflected forms of kan plus the two other negators (kat and pōn) and the verbal order that each one goes along with. (Orders and the names for the categories are explained in Chapter 5.) MENOMINEE ENGLISH CATEGORY ORDER kan not non-predicative Conjunct kan not indicative Negative kawen it is said not to be quotative Negative kan-q is it not? interrogative Negative kapaq but it was not preterit Negative kasaq so it is not present Negative kasapetok I wonder if it isn’t dubitative Negative kat not (unexpected, surprising) mirative Conjunct pōn not imperative Imperative Table 1: Menominee Negators 3. Person In grammar, “person” refers to a division of the world into three parts: • first person: speaker • second person: hearer • third person: everyone and everything else Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 4 There are some additional distinctions made to this categorization in Menominee (and in many other languages of the world) involving plurals and subcategories of third person, but these three are the basic building blocks. The three persons are realized in Menominee in some contexts by prefixes, and in other contexts by full pronouns (and sometimes by both). (These contexts and a fuller description of the pronouns appear in Chapters 5 and 8.) Table 2 illustrates the singular prefixes and basic singular personal pronouns of Menominee: PERSON WHO ENGLISH PRONOUN PREFIX 1 speaker I nenah ne- 2 hearer you kenah ke- 3 everyone, everything else he, she, it wenah o-/w- Table 2: Person (Singular Examples) 4. Animacy All nouns in Menominee are classified into one of two categories: animate and inanimate. This is similar to the classification of nouns into masculine and feminine in languages like Spanish and French. Usually you can guess about the animacy of a particular noun just by considering whether it’s living or not living. But sometimes the language can surprise you. Bloomfield’s grammar (1962:28-36) provides some categories of nouns that are generally animate. Table 3 lists those categories and an example of each: Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 5 ANIMATE NOUNS CATEGORY EXAMPLE people enniw man animals anm dog spirits awtok spirit trees/large wood anēp elm parts of the body nekhsehkwan my wrist bodily fluids saehkōm saliva plants sēwāpemen sweet corn tobacco, etc. ohpuakan pipe some natural objects anāh star shells/beads/china mēkes shell clothing/accessories moswn shawl moving machines otācekwan car playing cards kānōw diamond card Table 3: Animate Noun Categories (Bloomfield 1962:28-36) Beyond this, though, there are also some unpredictable cases. Table 4 gives some examples of animate and inanimate pairs: ANIMATE INANIMATE ketāqsowak popcorn ketāqsan popped rice anōhkan raspberry athemen strawberry nekqtek my knee naehtūhkwan my elbow maeqtek tree, big piece of wood maeqtek stick Table 4: Animate/Inanimate Pairs Note that this is a classification that is mostly based on meaning (except for the exceptions). That is, you can’t tell by the form of a singular noun (how it sounds, or by an ending) whether it is animate or inanimate; you have to know its meaning and in some cases whether it’s an exception. This may lead you to wonder what the point is – why does the language have these two categories? The answer is that this division of nouns into animate and inanimate is reflected in various ways in the grammar of the language. Here are some examples: Monica Macaulay DRAFT last updated 3/8/13 6 ANIMATE INANIMATE plural suffix enniw-ak ‘men’ wēkiam-an ‘houses’ demonstrative pronouns enoh ‘that (animate)’ eneh ‘that (inanimate)’ verbs: depending on subject pāpaehcen ‘s/he falls’ pāpaehnaen ‘it falls’ verbs: depending on object nenwāw ‘I see him’ nenmen ‘I see it’ Table 5: Animacy in Menominee Grammar We can see from Table 5 that the form of the plural suffix depends on animacy, the form of the demonstrative that goes with a noun depends on animacy, and the suffixation on verbs depends on the animacy of either its subject or object. So it’s important to know the animacy of every noun in order to choose the right plural suffix, as well as the right verb form and other words that accompany it in a sentence. 5. Obviation Obviation is a very interesting property of third person nouns and pronouns in Menominee (that is, excluding the first and second persons, ‘I’, ‘you’, and their plurals). In the third person, a distinction is made between the PROXIMATE (the main character or animate thing) and the OBVIATIVE (all other characters or animate things). Just like animacy, it gets reflected in various places in a sentence: on the noun itself (in the form of a suffix -an), on demonstratives (like ‘this’ and ‘that’) and on the verb.
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