Fragments of Piscataway: a Preliminary Description

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Fragments of Piscataway: a Preliminary Description Fragments of Piscataway: A Preliminary Description A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy Lisa Mackie Oxford University Committee for Comparative Philology, Linguistics and Phonetics Sub-faculty of Linguistics Trinity 2006 Contents Chapter 1 Introduction..................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Project Goals................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Challenges....................................................................................................... 2 1.3 Attribution....................................................................................................... 3 1.4 Previous Work ................................................................................................ 4 1.5 Organization of the Thesis.............................................................................. 5 Chapter 2 Background..................................................................................................... 6 2.1.1 Maryland Mission ........................................................................................... 7 2.1.2 Father Andrew White...................................................................................... 7 2.2 The Manuscript ............................................................................................. 11 2.3 Other Primary Sources.................................................................................. 13 2.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 15 Chapter 3 Outline of Algonquian Morphology ............................................................. 17 3.1 Overview....................................................................................................... 17 3.2 Nominal Morphology.................................................................................... 19 3.2.1 Number ......................................................................................................... 19 3.2.2 Obviative....................................................................................................... 20 3.2.3 Possessive ..................................................................................................... 21 3.3 Verbal Morphology....................................................................................... 22 3.3.1 Person and Number....................................................................................... 23 3.3.2 Direct/Inverse................................................................................................ 24 ii 3.3.3 Verbal Template............................................................................................ 26 3.3.4 Orders............................................................................................................ 28 3.4 Negation........................................................................................................ 30 3.5 Derivation ..................................................................................................... 30 3.5.1 Reciprocal and Reflexive.............................................................................. 33 3.5.2 Locative and Others ...................................................................................... 33 3.6 Reduplication ................................................................................................ 34 3.7 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 35 Chapter 4 Catechism Analysis....................................................................................... 36 4.1 Sign of the Cross........................................................................................... 37 4.2 Pater Noster................................................................................................... 44 4.3 Ave Maria ..................................................................................................... 53 4.4 The Creed...................................................................................................... 61 4.5 Ten Commandments ..................................................................................... 72 4.6 The Five Precepts of the Holy Church.......................................................... 77 Chapter 5 Piscataway Phonetics and Phonology........................................................... 82 5.1 Consonants.................................................................................................... 83 5.2 Vowels .......................................................................................................... 87 5.3 Diacritics....................................................................................................... 88 5.4 PA Sound Reflexes ....................................................................................... 89 5.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 93 Chapter 6 Piscataway Morphology................................................................................ 94 6.1 Prefixation..................................................................................................... 96 6.2 Negation........................................................................................................ 99 6.3 Inflectional Suffixes.................................................................................... 100 iii 6.3.1 Verbs........................................................................................................... 100 6.3.2 Animate Nouns ........................................................................................... 101 6.4 Derivation ................................................................................................... 102 6.4.1 Nouns .......................................................................................................... 102 6.4.2 Locative....................................................................................................... 103 6.5 TI Verbs ...................................................................................................... 103 6.6 TA Verbs..................................................................................................... 105 6.7 Morpheme Alternants ................................................................................. 106 6.8 Unidentified Recurrent Elements................................................................ 107 6.9 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 107 Chapter 7 Syntax ......................................................................................................... 109 Chapter 8 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 111 Appendix A: Fr. Andrew White Manuscript in Piscataway ........................................... 113 Appendix B: Transcription ............................................................................................. 118 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 123 iv List of Abbreviations PA Proto-Algonquian SG singular AI animate intransitive verb PL plural II inanimate intransitive verb 1 first person TA transitive animate verb 2 second person TI transitive inanimate verb 3 third person NA animate noun C any consonant NI inanimate noun V any vowel DIR direct INV inverse OBV obviative IMP imperative LOC locative NEG negative CONJ conjunction PV preverb Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Project Goals The goal of the present project is to provide a preliminary descriptive analysis of the language found in a short manuscript in the Special Collections of the Georgetown University Library. The manuscript is a five-page Catholic catechism written in an Eastern Algonquian language. It is the only extant record of the language which is presumed to be Piscataway (also called Conoy). The identification of the language is based on the attribution of authorship to Father Andrew White, a seventeenth-century English Jesuit missionary. By providing as much of a description as possible through morphological and phonological analysis of the data, I hope to recover some knowledge about this extinct language and add to the sparse data on Eastern Algonquian languages. Because the goal of the project is to uncover the data in the manuscript, no theoretical viewpoint has been adopted regarding morphological entities or processes. Photographs of the manuscript pages are reproduced in full in Appendix A. My own transcription of the pages is found in Appendix B. I have consulted the original manuscript at Georgetown and have made extensive use of the photographs in order to create the transcription. Please refer to these two appendices to see the data in context. 2 1.2 Challenges Numerous challenges are posed by working with this source. Mary Hass notes that “American Indian philology poses all the problems of philology in general plus a few that are rather special to it.” These are 1) orthographies 2) interpretation of orthographies 3) theoretical orientation from century to century 4) translation and 5) extinct and unidentified languages (Haas 1975: 92). These problems are all relevant
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