Albert Gatschet Ojibwe Materials: 1878 Bottineau Vocabulary

Last updated: January 5, 2023

NOTE: I no longer hold certain of the opinions expressed in this post; in particular, I now believe Jean Bottineau could basically speak Ojibwe perfectly well, even if maybe not completely fluently and even if his stronger languages were French and English. I also strongly suspect that his father and paternal relatives had a significant influence on his acquisition of Ojibwe (and Cree).

Introduction

Hi there. If you thought some of my last posts were long, STRAP IN.

In the course of doing research on an upcoming post, I’ve been reading through several Ojibwe wordlists and texts collected by the Swiss linguist and anthropologist Albert S. Gatschet in the late 19th century and currently held in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. To my knowledge none of them have been published anywhere, although scholars are certainly aware of their existence and words from them have been cited in various places. As a public service, I decided to transcribe and publish the content of (at least some of) the materials here so it’s easier for anyone who wants to reference them in the future. (Photographs of the manuscripts in question are online, so anyone wishing to look at the originals can do so, which is how I’ve been able to read them in the first place.) In many cases these documents, despite generally being relatively short, also offer some interesting areas to explore.

This post will deal with the chronologically earliest material, a 23-page wordlist comprising a variety of mostly basic vocabulary along with some clan names, band names and locations, and a very small handful of ethnographic notes, which was collected on May 28, 1878 from from Jean Baptiste Bottineau, a 41-year-old lawyer of Ojibwe and French ancestry from the Pembina/Turtle Mountain Band, and is found in NAA Manuscript 68, which also contains data collected by Gatschet from several other languages and sources.

The Bottineau vocabulary, consisting as it does mainly of basic vocabulary, might be thought to not be of particular interest in and of itself, as almost all the words can be found in other sources as well. However, there are some interesting points which can be noted concerning Gatschet’s field methods as well as Bottineau’s dialect, translation choices, and actual competence in Ojibwe, which I will discuss here.

The organization of the post is as follows (see also the fuller table of contents below):

1. First, I give brief biographies of Gatschet and Bottineau (I will provide a fuller biography of Bottineau in the future).
2. Second, I link to a verbatim transcript of the vocabulary and a retranscribed and reorganized list of the terms found in it—designed to present each of the words as originally written, the equivalent in the modern standardized southern Ojibwe orthography, and its accurate translation—along with an explanation of the notational and transcriptional conventions I’ve used.
3. Third, I provide commentary on linguistic and other points of interest in the Bottineau vocabulary.
4. Fourth, I give a list of all the words in the Bottineau vocabulary that I have not found attested elsewhere (although some surely are).
5. Fifth, I conclude with a brief recapitulation of some of the most important things and interesting facts which the vocabulary demonstrates and which, as far as I know, have not otherwise been noted before. This can serve as a tl;dr section for anyone who inexplicably insists on not wading through a 50,000 word treatise (though there is some good stuff in the post!).
6. Sixth and finally, I give an appendix with a photographic reproduction and discussion of the one word I’ve been unable to confidently read.

Table of Contents

Introduction Albert Gatschet and Jean Bottineau Albert Samuel Gatschet Jean (John) Baptiste Bottineau Bottineau Vocabulary: Verbatim and Retranscribed Notational Conventions Bottineau Vocabulary: Commentary Gatschet’s Field Methods Organizational Plan and Digressions Use of Other Sources Transcription System Phonology Dialect Represented Influence From Other Languages Translation Choices Past Tense First Person Plural Dependent Nouns Infinitives Oddities, Inconsistencies, Non-Idiomatic Constructions, and Ungrammaticalities Non-Standard Forms Non-Idiomatic Constructions Ungrammatical or Impossible Forms Participles Plural Concord Obviation Plurals Stress Bottineau’s Ojibwe: Lack of Fluency, or Obsolescence? List: Words Unattested Elsewhere Conclusions Vocabulary Appendix: Uncertain Readings Sources Used

Albert Gatschet and Jean Bottineau

Albert Samuel Gatschet

Albert S. Gatschet. (Photographer and date unknown to me. From Mooney 1907:562, Plate XXX.)

Albert Samuel Gatschet (apparently pronounced /ɡa'ʃe/ [NCAB; Landar 1974:160, n. 2]) was born in Beatenberg, Switzerland, on October 3, 1832, and showed an interest in linguistics from an early age. He attended the Universities of Bern and Berlin, where his studies focused on languages, history, and theology. While he initially considered becoming a minister like his father, his love of languages and philology ultimately won out. Gatschet moved to America in 1868, where he became a language teacher and journal contributor. After publishing comparative studies of numerous languages of the American Southwest (= Gatschet 1875, 1876a, plus later Gatschet 1876b), he was hired by Major John Wesley Powell of the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region in 1877 as a linguist/ethnologist, before moving to the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian upon its creation, with Powell as its first director, in 1879.

The Bureau under Powell had a very strong focus on American Indian languages, and Gatschet was an especially productive and prolific collector of linguistic data. He recorded vocabularies, texts, and ethnographic information from over a hundred languages and cultures from across the country, as well as working with older documentations collected by others. Partly in service of Powell’s principal goal of classifying all North American Indian languages, he also put his philological training to work and spent significant energy working on the classification of numerous languages and families (his strongest suit as a linguist). To take just one example, it was Gatschet who first demonstrated that Biloxi was a Siouan language; he also provided evidence for the connection between Siouan and Catawba. His research, along with that of fellow BAE linguist James Owen Dorsey, was the main source of data for Powell’s final, seminal 1891 classification (= Powell 1891). Gatschet ultimately produced at least 72 publications on Indian languages, mythology, history, and culture, in English, German, and French (Mooney 1907), though many were fairly short and circumscribed in scope. His most important contribution was a massive and well regarded two-volume work on Klamath and Modoc language and culture (= Gatschet 1890a, 1890b), which included texts, a grammar, ethnological/cultural notes, and a dictionary. Though flawed in many ways, Kinkade et al. (1998:63) observe it “was one of the first treatments of a North American language to present the structure of that language in its own terms.” Other important contributions included Creek and Hitchiti text collections accompanied by extensive commentary and historical and ethnological notes (= Gatschet 1884a, 1888), and the only truly extensive and reliable material—both vocabulary and texts—from Atakapa, later published, under John Swanton’s editorship and with some additional material, as Gatschet and Swanton (1932). He also published some articles on languages and cultures outside of North America and on linguistic theory.

Unfortunately, Gatschet’s experience at the BAE was in many ways far from ideal, and his difficulties were compounded by his own personality. While he had a few friends with whom he was close, including James Mooney, who joined the Bureau in 1885, he preferred to work alone and was generally perceived by others as cold and aloof (Landar 1974:160-161). From the descriptions I’ve seen, it seems as though Gatschet was closer to what we would consider today simply “socially awkward,” which manifested as a shyness and lack of interpersonal skills that were misinterpreted and poorly received by many of his colleagues at the time, with the exception of Mooney.^[1] He became alienated from Powell and especially from Powell’s close friend and clerk, and the BAE’s resident bibliographer, James Pilling, and was never a member of Powell’s “inner circle” (Hinsley 1981:162).

Indeed, while Powell respected Gatschet as a data collector, he appears not to have thought much of him beyond that, or to have trusted him with much else. In spite of the relatively meager linguistic training and prowess of Powell and of his assistant Henry W. Henshaw (who did much of the work in producing the final 1891 master classification and linguistic map of American Indian languages) and in spite of Gatschet being a legitimately great comparative linguist for the day (no less a figure than Franz Boas called him “by far the most eminent American philologist, away ahead of all of us” [quoted in Hinsley 1981:180]), Powell and Henshaw made use of Gatschet’s collected data for the classification, but at times ignored Gatschet’s actual judgments regarding the data. For example, they failed to recognize a Uto-Aztecan family, as Gatschet did. In other instances they ignored Gatschet’s conclusions in favor of those of Dorsey or others, even when Gatschet’s were based on substantially more experience with the languages in question. And in the case of the determination that Catawba was related to Siouan they ignored Gatschet’s judgments until these were duplicated by Dorsey on the basis of the latter’s own work. (Alfred Kroeber, based on his acquaintance with many of the people involved with the early BAE, also “got . . . [the] impression that Powell leaned less on [Gatschet] than on some others for decisions in linguistics” [Kroeber 1993:46].) Unlike Gatschet’s practices as a comparativist (see, e.g., Gatschet 1876a:332, 1876b, 1879b), Powell and Henshaw also based the classification solely on visual inspection of vocabulary lists for seemingly obvious cognates—placing no importance on regular sound correspondences or on grammatical evidence (see Sturtevant 1959; Haas 1969:249-255; Darnell 1971:80, 86-89, 93; Campbell and Mithun 1979:10-12; Campbell 1997:57-61).

Powell’s evident view of Gatschet as being primarily useful for data gathering led to significant frustrations for Gatschet. Instead of being permitted to continue his in-depth work with the Klamaths and Modocs as he wished, he was increasingly employed as Powell’s and Henshaw’s “laboring work-horse and philologist clerk” (Hinsley 1981:162, quoting Colby 1977:49), sent on endless field expeditions to collect data for the classification, as well as for Powell’s planned “synonymy” of all American Indian tribes (which gradually ballooned into a two-volume encyclopedia), and finally to record and compare various Algonquian languages and dialects. As Gatschet was continually sent to conduct new fieldwork, he was never given the opportunity to edit and publish his extensive and accumulating past fieldwork. Boas commented that he “had accumulated such a vast amount of material that the only right thing for him to do would have been to sit down and write it out for publication. And he . . . would have . . . [done] so. His lack of publication is only a result of the policy of Major Powell, who wanted him to gather material for his general volume on the languages of the American Race” (quoted in Hinsley 1981:179).

Thus, while he had some key early publications, Gatschet published little of much substance in the last years of his professional life, and the bulk of his documentary work remains unpublished, in numerous field notebooks and file cards sitting in the National Anthropological Archives, as is the case with the Bottineau vocabulary. Nonetheless, many of these materials are invaluable, as they constitute some of the only quality documentation of many languages now long extinct, including a number of isolates (Goddard 1988). And lest this leave any misimpression, he and his writings were certainly well known to the scholarly world in both North America and Europe.

A sick and aging Gatschet retired from the BAE in 1905, and after a long battle with nephritis he died in poverty two years later on March 16, 1907, at the age of 74. Gatschet had married Louise Horner, an American, in 1892, but had no children.

Although the language never formed one of his primary focuses, Gatschet collected Ojibwe materials from several different consultants at various times during the first decade and a half of his career. In addition to the Bottineau vocabulary, he collected a three-page vocabulary in January 1883 (NAA MS 1449), 16 pages of vocabulary in March 1883 and a short text at an unclear date, possibly in 1896 (MS 66), 37 pages of texts and vocabulary in March 1889 (MS 1999), and three records of Kansas/Oklahoma Odawa: a 28-page vocabulary in November 1884 (MS 288), a collection of texts and vocabularies beginning in 1887 (MS 237), and an undated cleaned-up retranscription of part of the first text of MS 237 (MS 2001). It is also clear that he remained in contact with Bottineau long after the collection of the 1878 vocabulary. For example, in his field notebook of Odawa materials collected in 1887-1888 (MS 237), he has multiple notations indicating that in December of 1891 Bottineau assisted him with interpreting some of the material, as will be discussed in more detail in the “Commentary” section below.^[2]

Jean (John) Baptiste Bottineau

Jean Bottineau in 1896, at the age of 58-59. (Photo by William Dinwiddie. BAE GN 00556A 06148200, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.)

Gatschet’s consultant for his 1878 vocabulary was no random member of the Pembina/Turtle Mountain Band. Jean Bottineau was part of an illustrious family, as well as one of the key players in what were among the most momentous events in the Turtle Mountain Band’s history.^[3] To do justice to his story and the story of the Turtle Mountain people I’ve ended up abandoning my original plan to merely have a short biography of him here; instead, while I will summarize his biography briefly here, I will also present a fuller exploration of Bottineau’s life and the events in which he took part in an upcoming post.

He was born near the settlement of Pembina at the borders of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Manitoba (for a map that includes some locations relevant to Bottineau’s life, see below) on May 3, but sources conflict as to the year; I will go with 1837 for this post, and will discuss the conflicting evidence in the future post. His father Pierre was a renowned Métis voyageur and guide for numerous expeditions in the old Northwest, for whom Bottineau County in North Dakota is named. Pierre’s father was a French Canadian fur trader for the North West Company, and his mother was an Ojibwe woman. Jean married Marie Renville, another Ojibwe of the Turtle Mountain Band, in 1862, and together they had three daughters, one of whom died in infancy; another daughter, Marie Bottineau Baldwin, “the first woman of color to graduate from the Washington College Law School” (Barker 2014:1), would go on to be a lawyer, a feminist and suffragette, and an Indian advocate both from within the government as an employee of the Office of Indian Affairs and from without as a member of the Society of American Indians.

Jean Bottineau held many roles during his life, but the one for which he is best known, by far, is serving as the attorney for Chief Little Shell III (Ojibwe name Ayabiwewidang “Sits and Speaks ”) and members of the Turtle Mountain Band composed of both Métis and Ojibwes in their dealings with the U.S. federal government, between 1878 and shortly before his death in 1911. (I will be using the term “Turtle Mountain Band” here somewhat anachronistically, since in one sense they did not become a single political unit until 1905, and in fact divisions within the community have remained to this day. Just think of “Turtle Mountain Band” as convenient shorthand for “the group of Ojibwes and Métis who wintered at or near the Turtle Mountains along the North Dakota-Manitoba border by the early to late 1800s, were frequently interconnected through kinship ties and some cultural traits, and often shared a number of political goals and acted in concert as something at least vaguely resembling a single unit and under a single leadership structure.”)

This was not an enjoyable role. Bottineau was a trained attorney, but was up against forces which had little interest in acting legally or according to their own professed norms of justice. The American government unilaterally deprived the Turtle Mountain Band of the vast majority of their lands during the 1880s, aside from a miniscule reservation, before strong-arming “representatives” of the band to conclude an agreement (the McCumber Agreement) in 1892 to officially sell those lands; the people were paid one million dollars for just under ten million acres, leading to the McCumber Agreement’s common derisive nickname, the “Ten-Cent Treaty,” i.e. ten cents per acre. By comparison, agreements with other U.S. tribes from around the same time and/or place paid between about $1.25 and $2.50 per acre, while the average price for agricultural land at the time in Rolette County, where the reservation is located, was $7.00 per acre, and average values for agricultural land in other counties which the tribe relinquished under the agreement were $6.33 per acre in 1890 (in 1900, after more substantial white settlement and usage—and thus a better gauge of the land’s true value to the Americans—the number was $10.44 per acre); finally, the Indian Claims Commission later valued the land they relinquished at mostly $11.20 per acre (S. Doc. 444, at 3, 21, 37, 177; Barnard and Jones 1987:72-74; Richotte 2009:267; note that the ICC was calculating values from 1905, when the Agreement finally went into effect).

At the same time as the Ten-Cent Treaty was negotiated, hundreds of people were struck from the membership rolls of the tribe, including some members of a given family but not others. The agreement negotiations were conducted with a group, the “Committee of Thirty-Two”—which also decided on the individuals to be excluded from the rolls—whom the government agents claimed to have selected (or in fact, to have been directly “elected by the band” itself [S. Doc. 444, at 12]), and which did not include Chief Little Shell or any Ojibwe members of the existing tribal council. In fact, however, there is evidence that this was effectively a secret coup against Little Shell and the traditional leadership by the men who were later “selected”/“elected” as committee members, executed with the foreknowledge and support of—and then eagerly exploited by—the federal government (Marmon 2001, 2009).

Government agents continually ignored Bottineau’s protestations and demands for information and justification, and on more than one occasion banned him from the reservation on threat of arrest to prevent him from being able to influence events, provide legal advice, or present legal arguments on behalf of the band members. Little Shell and the old tribal council denounced the Committee of Thirty-Two as illegitimate and refused to sign the Ten-Cent Treaty, and the Turtle Mountain Band split into multiple groups, with some people moving to Montana, Minnesota, South Dakota, or Canada, and others remaining on the tiny Turtle Mountain Reservation or elsewhere in North Dakota. Embroiled in both internal and external political machinations and controversies, for the rest of his life Bottineau continued to fight against the Ten-Cent Treaty, for some sort of resolution to the tribe’s status, for justice to be done for them, and for the reinstatement of those denied enrollment. He died on December 1, 1911 at the age of 74 (under the reconstruction here), the same age as Gatschet—and, like Gatschet, of nephritis.

While all this is of course important in its own right, I will close by asking what Bottineau’s biography might tell us about the vocabulary which Gatschet collected. In the commentary, these questions will be examined again, and answers suggested, in light of what the vocabulary shows.

First, we know that Bottineau spoke both French and English; some of his correspondence with J. N. B. Hewitt (MS 3968 = Bottineau 1909) and a comment of Hewitt’s in Hodge (1910:289) indicates that he spoke at least some Plains Cree as well. His father Pierre reportedly spoke not only French, English, Ojibwe, and Cree, but also the Siouan languages Assiniboine, Dakota, Mandan, and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) (“Pierre Bottineau”). I’m not aware of any evidence that Jean Bottineau knew any of these Siouan languages. It’s possible he also spoke Michif, the language of most Red River Métis and their descendants, given that the Métis were from the beginning the numerically dominant ethnic group of the Turtle Mountain people, that it was their language which by the 20th century was the non-European language used by all members of the community who spoke any language in addition to English (a handful of native Ojibwe speakers remained until relatively recently, but all of them also spoke Michif, and many other Ojibwes had already shifted to speaking only Michif in previous generations), and that many of Michif’s first speakers were of Ojibwe ancestry. I have not come across anything that would suggest he did speak Michif, however, and so the question remains unanswered.^[4] He also, of course, spoke Ojibwe, as indicated by this vocabulary, but there are two questions to consider in this regard.

The first question is, what dialect of Ojibwe would he have spoken? He was a member of the Pembina Band (initially centered around Pembina, ND—along the Minnesota and Canadian borders—and the Pembina River; see footnote five below for the relationship between the Pembina and Turtle Mountain bands), which included people whose ancestors had originally come from various locations to the east—Little Shell’s ancestors for their part may have been from Leech Lake in north-central Minnesota or Mille Lacs in central Minnesota (Coues 1897:53-54; Murray 1984:16; Marmon 2001:34-36, 2009:21), but many band members’ ancestors were from Red Lake in northern Minnesota, while some were from other locations in central or eastern Minnesota, Rainy Lake or Lake of the Woods further north, or the northwest shore of Lake Superior, and some were even Odawas from further east, like John Tanner’s adoptive community—and Bottineau could have spoken any of several different (sub)dialects.^[5] In fact, until it went extinct there a few years ago, two dialects of Ojibwe were still spoken on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, a variety of Saulteaux and a variety of Minnesota Ojibwe (Bakker 1997:124, citing p.c. from Richard Rhodes). His band affiliation thus indicates that Bottineau probably would have spoken either Southwestern Ojibwe or Saulteaux, but gives us no information beyond that.

In fact, though, we know a bit more about his family history, which might suggest an answer. His grandmother, Pierre’s mother, was Margaret/Marguerite, the cousin of Misko-Makwa, the head chief of the Pembina Band and the head Pembina signatory to the Old Crossing Treaty. Margaret Bottineau is said to have been born near modern Warroad, MN, on the southwest shore of Lake of the Woods (TOR United States ex rel. Detling v. Work, at 6), and her extended family to have had their “habits and ranges . . . on Roseau Lake and River, Lake of the Woods, Pembina River, Hair Hills and Turtle Mountain, [and] the upper Red River country” (Bottineau 1910b:14), which more or less describes the early territory of the Pembina Band and so is entirely consistent with her being Pembina Ojibwe. (Incidentally, there is a great deal of confused, conflicting, and/or inaccurate information on Bottineau’s genealogy out there, both on the internet and in some published sources, but I will go into more detail on this in the post dedicated to Bottineau and Turtle Mountain.)

As for where Margaret’s family ultimately came from, we have the likely answer from attempts by two of her grandchildren—both half-sisters of Jean Bottineau, by a later wife of Pierre’s—to be recognized as Indians by the federal government. First, in 1925, Agnes Detling (née Bottineau) petitioned the Office of Indian Affairs for a pro rata and future shares in annuity payments as a “Chippewa Indian of Minnesota” under the Nelson Act of 1889 (25 Stat. 642) as well as 39 Stat. 123 and 43 Stat. 95. In supporting her petition, she included both an affidavit of her own, as well as affidavits from six Red Lake Ojibwes (although it is never specified whether these individuals are enrolled tribal citizens). In her own affidavit, she states that Margaret “was a full blood Chippewa Indian woman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians” from the region immediately south of Lake of the Woods (TOR United States ex rel. Detling v. Work, at 6). The affidavits from the six Red Lake individuals are all nearly identical to one another, and four of them include the phrase that Margaret “was a full blood Chippewa Indian woman of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians” (id. at 7, 8, 9, 10) and another that she “was always spoken of [by all the Indians in the neighborhood] as a full blood Chippewa Indian of the Red Lake Band of Chippewas” (id. at 12).

Second, in 1932 Laura Bottineau Grey applied to the Office of Indian Affairs for an allotment and annuities as a “one quarter (¼) Indian of the Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota of the Red Lake Band” which she had “continuously maintained by tribal relations,” stated that she had, “with her family, always been recognized as and affiliated with the members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewas from earliest times” and that “Pierre Bottineau, with his family, . . . were recognized as affiliated members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewas,” and referred to Margaret as being “of the Reindeer, or Ahdik Clan of the Red Lake Tribe” (Grey 1932).

It would thus seem that Margaret’s family was originally from Red Lake, in northern Minnesota. As Margaret’s birth by Lake of the Woods underscores, this should be taken to mean Red Lake territory in general, not necessarily the actual shores of Red Lake itself or its immediate environs: at the time of her birth, the area under the Red Lake Band’s control extended north up to Lake of the Woods and west past the Red River, with their hunting territory, at least, overlapping with that of the Pembinas for a while.

None of this should be surprising, since Red Lake was the most common place of origin for the ancestors of Pembina Ojibwes, and many of the latter retained strong kinship and other ties with the Red Lake Band/Tribe. A given Ojibwe band did not just immediately form as a new entity; they gradually budded off from one or more existing bands, with often a long period of continuing interaction and movement of people between the two semi-“independent” bands. (And even the boundaries between “established” bands were very porous and people easily could—and did—move from one to another.)

While this information on Margaret is useful, given his father’s absences from home while Jean was growing up, I think he is most likely to have been influenced by the language(s) spoken by his mother and the people around him—and here I have somewhat less information. His mother was Genevieve “Jennie” Larence (surname spelled a number of ways), also of Ojibwe-French ancestry, but I have found little reliable information about her background, beyond brief statements by Bottineau that she was “a Chippewa of a foreign tride [sic: tribe]” (Bottineau 1910b:16) and that she was three quarters Ojibwe and one quarter white (TOR Bottineau v. O’Grady, at 35, 271). There is some very tenuous circumstantial evidence that she may have been associated with Red Lake, but given Bottineau’s statement that she was from a different Ojibwe tribe than his father’s family, I’m not sure what to make of this evidence. Taking into account that much of the information I can find on Bottineau’s extended family seems to be unreliable, I have basically decided to ignore this (though see later in the post). From the movements of Pierre and the family, and other evidence, it is clear that Jean, although born near Pembina, spent most of his life in southeastern Minnesota. His early childhood was spent in the vicinity of Fort Snelling, before the family moved to St. Anthony, part of modern Minneapolis, when he was eight. His father helped found and moved to the town of Osseo—still in the vicinity of the modern Twin Cities—in 1855, when Jean was about 18. Even after leaving his parents’ household, he did not leave the area: his law practice was based in Minneapolis for most of his working life, until his relocation to Washington around 1890.

In other words, Jean’s father’s ancestry suggests Pierre spoke a descendant of Northern Minnesota Ojibwe (or possibly Saulteaux, or a more northern variety of Border Lakes Ojibwe), but Pierre was often absent, and I have no information on Jean’s mother’s ancestry beyond the unenlightening facts that she was mixed-blood or Métis and that her Ojibwe forebears were evidently not from the same area as Pierre’s. Furthermore, Jean grew up in a location with a burgeoning white population but no significant Ojibwe population, and continued to live and work there for much of his adult life, undoubtedly limiting his exposure to native Ojibwe speakers beyond, perhaps, his mother—if she spoke Ojibwe at all—and intermittent time spent around his father, uncles, and other extended family (though see the discussion concerning his wife at the end of the post). His biography alone is thus not a sufficient basis on which to firmly conclude what dialect we should expect Jean Bottineau to have spoken.

The second question is, how fluently did he speak Ojibwe at all? Clearly he was at least reasonably proficient in the language, as indicated not only by this vocabulary but also (presumably) by his interactions with Little Shell and other Turtle Mountain Ojibwes who did not speak English or French.^[6] But as we shall see, there are indications that either he was not fully fluent in the language, or that the Ojibwe as spoken by his family, or by some of the Pembina or Turtle Mountain Ojibwes by this time, was already undergoing significant obsolescence, with some considerable simplifications, structural changes, and loss of grammatical categories.

Bottineau Vocabulary: Verbatim and Retranscribed

A table with a verbatim transcription of the actual text of the vocabulary may be downloaded HERE (XLSX format).

I’ve tried to follow as closely as possible the original arrangement in Gatschet’s notebook, including spacing, etc., but for practical reasons I’ve segmented out notes or entries which Gatschet clearly added later (and which occupy the same lines in his notebook as other entries) onto new lines. I preserve Gatschet’s spelling, capitalization, punctuation, underlining, and diacritics. One problem I ran into was how to transcribe his use of acute accents, which in his handwriting vary considerably from being directly over the vowel they apply to, to being very far to the right and clearly separated from the vowel. After vacillating on this for a while, I’ve decided to simply write all instances with the acute directly over the vowel, regardless of exactly where it might appear in the original notebook. The two exceptions are certain words with multiple stacked diacritics, where I’ve had to write the acute separately or it isn’t visible, and cases where the acute was written to the right of a superscript <ⁿ>. Gatschet sometimes writes what looks like <ē> instead of <é> or <eˊ>. Whether this is an attempt to record a long vowel instead of a stressed vowel, I’m not sure, since it can look slightly different from his normal macron used with other vowels, and when he uses a macron with other vowels it is virtually always in conjunction with an acute accent. He does use <ē> in at least some of his printed works, and I have transcribed the character which looks like <ē> as <ē> here.

In addition to the verbatim vocabulary, I have created a table in which the data in it is re-presented in a manner which will hopefully help make it much easier to use. This may be downloaded HERE (XLSX format). Each row, or a series of rows, corresponds to a keyword (listed in the leftmost column and ordered alphabetically) which is either directly taken from Gatschet’s glosses; or is a simplification or modernization in order to make searching easier or to avoid using what are now potential slurs; or is a more correct gloss, in cases where Gatschet’s is significantly erroneous. Thus, for example, Gatschet’s “co-itus” is under the keyword SEX, “half breed Indian” is under the keyword MÉTIS, and “my arse” and “posteriors” are under the keyword ANUS. Gatschet’s Ojibwe word or sentence and gloss are then given, followed by the word/sentence respelled into the modern orthography, and a corrected gloss, if Gatschet’s is inaccurate or incomplete. If the original Ojibwe is grammatically incorrect or abnormal in some way, this is indicated in the respelled column with a bracketed asterisk [*] or some variant thereof, and a corrected or more standard equivalent is often provided. Finally, there is a column for and the page number where the word/sentence is found. Some of Gatschet’s entries appear multiple times in this reformatted version, because a sentence is generally listed under they keyword corresponding to each significant word composing it.

In the retranscribed vocabulary I have removed extraneous punctuation, spaces, etc., written out some abbreviations in full, and otherwise slightly condensed and modified some parts of Gatschet’s text for ease of presentation and consistency, as well as silently corrected misspelled English words. Thus it must be emphasized the Gatschet column is not always a completely verbatim record of what he wrote—for that, you must consult the verbatim vocabulary, using the page number references in the retranscribed table.

Uncertain readings are marked with question marks, and segments which I have not been able to interpret (even in cases when their phonemic interpretation is fairly secure) are enclosed in ⟨ shallow angled brackets ⟩ and kept in Gatschet’s original spelling. Finally, I have provided English translations for the few items glossed in French.

The rewritten vocabulary additionally contains a number of detailed notes on specific forms, to the right of the final main column—generally words that deviate in some way from what is expected or pose some difficulty in interpretation. Because they are repeatedly referenced both in this post and in two supplementary documents, these notes are also available on a separate page on this site HERE.

Notational Conventions

In addition, I’ve used the following conventions (both in the tables and in this post):

• gray text = material apparently added later by Gatschet, either in pencil and/or seemingly using a different pen.
• strikethrough = characters struck through by Gatschet. Since in this font struck-through <e> is almost impossible to distinguish from regular <e>, I write struck-through <e> as <ɇ>. Note also that all instances of <i> are struck-through <i>’s, not a barred i <ɨ>, and that <´> represents an instance where Gatschet originally wrote a vowel with an acute accent but then crossed the accent out.
• \inward-pointing slashes/ or ^carets^ = enclose material later inserted by Gatschet into the word or line and written above or below the word/line it is inserted into.
• X = illegible character.
• {?} = follows a word when I’m uncertain of the reading of some or all of it.
• {i} = (in the rewritten table) an initial epenthetic /i-/ which Bottineau pronounced in some cases to avoid illegal consonant clusters when giving Gatschet just the stem of an inalienably possessed noun rather than a possessed form, and not actually present in the Ojibwe stem.
• One thing I have not indicated is cases where Gatschet originally wrote one or more characters and then over-wrote them with new characters as a correction (as opposed to crossing the old characters out and then inserting new ones), partly because it’s frequently difficult or impossible to tell what the original reading was.

In the rewritten table, ungrammatical or incomplete Ojibwe words or phrases/sentences are marked with a preceding bracketed asterisk [*], and usually a grammatically correct alternative is provided within [square brackets]. Merely unidiomatic phrases are usually left as is, and are addressed in the discussion below instead. Uncertain readings are marked with question marks, and segments which I have not been able to interpret (even in cases when their phonemic interpretation is fairly secure) are enclosed in ⟨ shallow angled brackets ⟩ and kept in Gatschet’s original spelling.

In many cases Gatschet provided plural forms for nouns, and occasionally for verbs. For reasons of space, in the modern Ojibwe column of the rewritten table I have only listed the plural suffix separately, and not, as Gatschet usually did, provided the entire plural form of the word. For example, where Gatschet wrote “kgakígan , pl. kakíganan” for “male chest,” the modern Ojibwe column has -kaakigan +an. If Gatschet’s singular and plural forms differ only in the presence of the plural suffix, I also use the same convention in the “Gatschet” column (e.g., for “egg,” instead of “wáwan, pl. wáwanan”: “wáwan +an”); however, if he wrote the singular form of the stem differently from the plural form, I have kept both written out fully (e.g., for “fox”: “wágush, pl. wagúshag”). There are some cases—discussed below—where the Ojibwe form appears to contain multiple plural suffixes; in these cases the main one is set off with a plus sign and any remaining ones with a hyphen. I have not marked the few cases where Bottineau used a plural suffix that is incorrect for that noun stem; these are again listed and discussed below. In the few instances where Gatschet gave a “plural” verb form, I’ve treated that as a separate entry.

Finally, there is inconsistency in how Bottineau pronounced and Gatschet wrote the first person prefix ni- (and a few other words with an initial ni- sequence) when preceding lenis plosives. In many Ojibwe dialects, an excrescent nasal is inserted between the vowel and plosive or obstruent (e.g., ni + dagoshin → nindagoshin “I arrive,” ni + bi-izhaa → nimbi-izhaa “I come”), and in a few, particularly Southwestern Ojibwe, there is instead metathesis, with ni- showing up usually as iN- (e.g., indagoshin, imbi-izhaa). While speaking slowly and carefully, Bottineau evidently usually did not produce any excrescent nasal, at least that Gatschet could hear, while at other times he did. In a few instances just the nasal consonant is written (<nbagátomen> “we boil it” and <ndoshitómen> “we make it”), which likely reflect somewhat more allegro speech in which the ni(N)- sequence is pronounced as a syllabic nasal. For consistency, in the modern Ojibwe column I’ve transcribed all of these as niNC-, but you can easily see from the Gatschet column how that particular word was originally transcribed.

Bottineau Vocabulary: Commentary

While I’ve tried to make it so that it shouldn’t be necessary to consult the vocabulary in order to follow the commentary here, it may still be useful to have it open in another window when doing so.

Gatschet’s Field Methods

(Some potential issues regarding the reliability of Gatschet’s records will be addressed below.)

Gatschet did his fieldwork with speakers just as linguists today do: either by going to them, or taking down information from consultants who were already close to him. In his case this mostly meant, as Mooney wrote (1907:563), “systematic[ally] interviewing night after night . . . the numerous Indian delegates visiting Washington [where Gatschet’s office at the BAE was located] during Congressional sessions.” While Bottineau did travel to Washington frequently in his later years, the information Gatschet provides at the top of the first page of the vocabulary indicates that this may not have been the case here, and his session with Bottineau took place in Minneapolis. (It may be recalled that in 1878 Gatschet was not yet an employee of the BAE, but rather was an ethnologist with the Geological and Geographical Survey, though he was still based in Washington.)

Organizational Plan and Digressions

It’s quite clear from the order and organization of the material that before beginning, Gatschet had a specific plan in mind of at least the general categories and outline of the vocabulary and information which he wished to gather—one almost identical, in the beginning, to the outline he followed in collecting the shorter Potawatomi vocabulary which appears in the same notebook. To some extent the outline follows that laid out by J. W. Powell, his superior at the Survey, in Powell (1877), most obviously in beginning with names for humans and life stages, and in some of the specific vocabulary words to collect (e.g., words related to political organization and government, including “war chief,” “council member,” and “slave”). Indeed, it’s quite clear that Gatschet was directly following Powell’s schedules in at least some instances. For example, to again use Powell’s schedule V (“Governmental Organization,” pp. 26-27), on two successive lines, Powell lists “Council” and “Council chamber (sometimes built under ground, and called sweat-house).” Meanwhile, on pg. 57 of our vocabulary, Gatschet elicited “councilmen,” then (after a few digressions based on the response Bottineau gave him) “council-house,” followed by a brief ethnological note on “steam – sweat'g” practices, despite the fact that sweatlodges have no special connection to council meetings in Ojibwe culture or language, so his questioning Bottineau on sweatlodges at this point can only have been because of Powell’s note that some tribes held council meetings in “sweat-houses.”

Nonetheless, generally speaking, while Gatschet followed Powell’s outline to some degree, he failed to elicit a great deal of the vocabulary and grammatical information (e.g., kinship terms, colors, traditional implements and tools, etc.), and the order in which he elicited various categories frequently differed from Powell’s order. The vocabulary begins with words relating to humans and life stages (pg. 23), moves to a few animals (25) followed by names of various metals (25-27), names of some racial/ethnic groups and tribes (27-29), placenames (29-31), body parts and bodily functions (33-39), various significant Ojibwe “tribes and localities” (in English) (40), numerals (43), and a few words on bad weather (45). At this point the words become a bit more semantically disorganized until page 51, dealing with peoples’ health and condition, then terms related to life and death (53), eating, drinking, and food (53-57), a few words pertaining to traditional Ojibwe political organization and the like (57-59), a list of the Pembina Band’s clans/doodems (59), a short list related to seasons and times of the year (61), and finally terms related to religion and traditional sacred stories (63-65). The contents of pages 41 and 49, and a few terms scattered elsewhere (e.g., between pp. 31-33) are a bit more disorganized, though still often broken up into categories (e.g., the four cardinal directions at the beginning of pg. 41, and various times of the day at the bottom of the page). Gatschet also clearly attempted to elicit some grammatical material, though he did not spend much space or energy on this: inalienable possession or possibly just possession on page 33, imperatives and verb tenses on pp. 45 and 49, and relative time reference or tenses on pp. 45-47; his label at the top of page 49 also makes explicit that he is investigating distributive plurals there.

While Gatschet thus clearly had a general plan in mind before beginning the elicitation session, one can catch glimpses where an answer by Bottineau caused him to deviate for a moment to explore that answer further. For example, in the section where various metals are listed, “iron” is given as “ashkî́kuman” (ashkikomaan, pg. 25), with Gatschet then writing on the immediately following line: “raw, soft metal, which can be cut.” This must by a gloss supplied by Bottineau (cf. ashk- “raw, fresh” and -komaan “knife,” though Bottineau’s gloss is a folk etymology). The next entry, in the middle of what is otherwise a list of metals, is for “it is soft.” This makes sense only if Gatschet, on being told by Bottineau that ashkikomaan literally meant “raw, soft metal, which can be cut,” asked him something like, “So how do you just say ‘soft’?” In fact, several of the other metal entries show evidence of the same thing: “copper” (glossed, due to Bottineau’s input, as “yellow metal”) is followed immediately by “yellow”; “silver” [the metal] (waabishki-zhooniyaa, in Bottineau’s terms meaning “white valuable,” though not glossed by Gatschet) is followed immediately by “white.” Similarly, on page 33, after eliciting three terms relating to cats (“lynx, catamount,” “cat,” and “tabby” [actually “female cat,” but mistranslated]), the next term Gatschet records is “gourmand” (i.e., “glutton”), because the word for “cat” literally means “little glutton” (glossed by Bottineau and hence Gatschet as “le petit gourmand”).

Another probable example is found on page 29, where “prairie” (“máskude” = mashkode) is immediately followed by “fire” (“ishkudé” = ishkode); the two words have no close semantic connection, but of course sound almost identical in Ojibwe, and Bottineau likely offered the word for “fire” after giving the one for “prairie” because the nearly homophonous mashkode brought it to mind.^[7]

Of course, many of the religious and cultural terms would have been supplied by Bottineau on the basis of a general prompt or question by Gatschet. The most interesting example of this, in my opinion, is on page 53. After a number of words relating to birth and life, Gatschet began a line with “funeral”—but then crossed this out. The lines following this are the terms: “to put a corpse away (to keep from destruction)”, “to hang (a corpse.) (viz. put on scaffold)(elevated place),” “we have put him away,” etc. Obviously, Gatschet asked Bottineau for the Ojibwe term for “funeral,” but Bottineau replied with an explanation of the old Ojibwe mortuary practice of placing the wrapped body in a tree or on an elevated scaffold, and Gatschet dutifully recorded the terms relating to this custom instead. Another likely example is found on page 63, in the midst of a number of terms relating to Ojibwe traditional religious practitioners and shamans. After several terms relating to the Midewiwin, and just before “rattle (of the conjurer)” on the following page, is the seemingly unrelated entry “cords tied.” I suspect, however, that this is a reference to the jiisakiiwin or Shaking Tent divination practice, which often included a portion in which the shaman was bound with cords or ropes and placed inside the tent, in some cases then being miraculously being freed of these shackles by his manitou helpers. It seems likely that Bottineau made some mention of this to Gatschet while they were discussing Ojibwe shamanism, and Gatschet thus recorded the term for cords being tied—although it’s a bit odd that no other terms related to the jiisakiiwin ceremony or its practitioners are given.

Some of Gatschet’s plan/organization makes sense only under the assumption that he was already familiar with certain facts or concepts. The most obvious example of this is on page 29, where Gatschet elicited the Ojibwe name for the city of Chicago, before then recording several words related to skunks and onions. Now, the toponym “Chicago” is in fact from an Algonquian word referring to the wild garlic/ramp Allium tricoccum (also known as “wild onion”), which in turn is a word that literally means “striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis)” or “skunk plant” (it emits a skunk-like smell when crushed). While the outline of this etymology has been known for a very long time, there has been uncertainty over the donor language, and for many years many people believed it meant “skunk place” (e.g., cf. Ojibwe zhigaagong “skunk place”) rather than “wild garlic [= skunk (plant)] place”; it’s still cited as meaning “skunk place” (or an incorrect plant like “skunk cabbage place”) in a number of sources.^[8] In any event, Gatschet was evidently interested in this question, and so asked Bottineau for terms relevant to it. This line of inquiry was definitely initiated by Gatschet himself, and not based on a suggestion by Bottineau: not only is the first entry for “Chicago city,” rather than for “skunk” or “onion” or similar (in a context where no other placenames are being elicited), but he elicited the exact same sequence of words in the Potawatomi vocabulary he collected in the same notebook at roughly the same time (pg. 28).

Use of Other Sources

We can also note that Gatschet made use of several other sources in addition to Bottineau in compiling the vocabulary, although sparingly, and all but three of the Ojibwe words in the main entries were supplied by Bottineau. Gatschet explicitly mentions at least four other sources by name: Lahontan (= Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan) on page 31 as the source of the term “Mitigouche” meaning “shipbuilders” in Algonquin (in his lexicon Lahontan in fact spells this <Mittigouch> [Lahontan 1728:227, 1905:738]); Steinthal (= Heymann/Hermann Steinthal) on pp. 47 and 51, both referencing page 562 in one of Steinthal’s works, although I haven’t been able to figure out which one; “Longf.”/Longfellow (= Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) on page 65 as having “nokómis” for “my grandmother” (in the original The Song of Hiawatha this is spelled “Nokomis,” with no accent, though metrically it must be stressed on the second syllable in the poem) and having the word for “squirrel” also reflected in Hiawatha (Gatschet recorded it from Bottineau as “adshitáma”; it appears in Hiawatha as “Adjidaumo”); and two words/names (the top one apparently “surveilleur,” the bottom one illegible and possibly crossed out; see the appendix below), also on page 65, cited for the claim that the name/figure “Hiawatha” is not Ojibwe and that the original (Iroquoian) name was <ayawáta> (cf. Onondaga Hayę́hwàtha’, Mohawk Aionhwátha’ [Tooker 1978:424]).

There are at least three additional locations in which Gatschet quotes a word from another source, but does not cite the source(s), so I’m not sure what they are. These can partly be identified by: in one case being a citation from a language other than Ojibwe; the presence of <l>, which no longer existed as a phoneme in Ojibwe in the late 1800s; the use of the old French character <ȣ>, which Gatschet makes no other use of in this vocabulary though he used it in some of his other fieldnotes; and other spelling conventions which are otherwise completely unlike those Gatschet employs. These uncited quotations are: (1) “apéȣ” cited as the Cree term for “man”/“male,” page 33, on the line where the English keyword/phrase is “Lenni Lenape” (which literally means “regular regular-man”; presumably Gatschet was drawing a connection between Lenape and supposed Cree “apéȣ,” although as in Delaware, -āpēw in Cree only appears as a Final, not a free word); (2) “wah-say-ya” given as one word for “to shine” on pg. 41 (not only is the spelling and division into syllables completely foreign to Gatschet and other professional American linguists of the time [though entirely in line with typical transcriptions of Indian languages by non-linguists and by some earlier anthropologists], but the word is crammed in above the line with what appears to be a different pen than the one used to write the original Ojibwe entry on the line); and (3) “Ah.nung” for “star” on the previous line, also in a foreign transcription system and written with a different pen (and sharing the line with the original entry, <ánung>). The word “kílio,” listed along with vague English and French definitions of <kînî́u , kînî́^u> (= giniw, which means “golden eagle, Aquila chrysaetos”) on page 59, may also be something Gatschet took from another source, but this is less likely, as discussed later.

Transcription System

Finally, before moving on to the content of the vocabulary, beginning with the phonology represented, I will close this section by listing my best guesses as to what the orthography used by Gatschet is intended to represent phonetically—which will to some extent beg some of the questions of the following discussion on phonology, but I hope the evidence I present is strong enough to bear out my guesses/assumptions here. Keep in mind too that these are what Gatschet heard and/or wrote, not necessarily what was pronounced. Unfortunately, in some areas Gatschet does not seem to have been an especially skilled phonetician or have had a great ear for other languages, especially at this stage of his career, and this is compounded by the fact that he was not using a very specialized phonetic alphabet here, instead simply employing the Latin alphabet as used in familiar Western European languages with a handful of deviations in line with other Americanists of the time. (In 1878 the phonetic alphabet recommended by Powell and William Whitney [Powell 1877]—which had a number of similarities but also some differences with Gatschet’s transcriptions—was quite similar to the Western European Latin alphabet as compared with later Americanist phonetic alphabets, including Powell’s own substantial revision of 1880 [Powell 1880]. It seems, however, as though Gatschet continued to use his original transcription practices largely unchanged throughout his career.)

In spite of these drawbacks, interpreting Gatschet’s consonant symbols is mostly fairly straightforward, though some phonetic details were likely not indicated: <p, t, k, tch, b, d, g, ds(h), m, n, w, y> = [p, t, k, tʃ, b, d, ɡ, dʒ, m, n, w, j]. <ss> = [s], <s> = both [z] and [s], <sh> = both [ʃ] and [ʒ]. <’h> or <χ> preceding a plosive represent [ʰ]/preaspiration. <ng> probably represents the cluster [ŋɡ] while superscript <^ng> (and <n^g>?) represents [ŋ] (and in a couple cases, what was probably a nasalized transition between two vowels, perhaps [ɰ̃], and sometimes [j̃]). <ñ>—and in a few cases <ni> or <nⁱ> or <ny>—represent what Gatschet may have heard as [ɲ] or [ɲj] but which were almost certainly pronounced [j̃]. <-> indicates the hiatus Gatschet heard for [ʔ] (except in a couple instances, “boy” and “flesh, meat,” where it indicates a hiatus he heard which was not [ʔ]). [w] (and also [wV] and [Vw] on occasion) is also sometimes written as <u> (almost universally so after a consonant, though a few instances of post-consonantal <^u> and <w> are also found), and [ij] as <i>.

Vowels are more difficult to interpret—and some additional details on my assumptions as to what Gatschet’s characters likely symbolized will be given in the discussion on phonology below—but I assume that <i, u, e, o, a> = [i, u, e~ɛ, o, a(~ɑ~ʌ)] (both phonetically short and long), <î, û> = [ɪ, ʊ] (both phonetically short and long), and <ä> = [æ] (both phonetically long and short). An acute marks stress, a macron explicitly marks a long vowel, and a breve a short one.^[9] <ⁿ> following a vowel indicates nasalization.

The assumption that <î> and <û> represent laxed/lowered vowels requires some justification, especially since, according to Costa (1991a:36), at least in his Miami-Illinois fieldwork from 1895-1902, Gatschet used a circumflex to mark long vowels. This was, however, nearly two decades after he took down the Bottineau vocabulary, and his transcription practices could easily have changed in the interim; he also uses circumflexes overwhelmingly more frequently in the Bottineau vocabulary—on pretty much every other word—than he apparently did in his Miami-Illinois records, where the citations I’ve seen from Costa’s publications indicate that he used them extremely sparingly. In our vocabulary he very, very frequently marks short vowels with circumflexes (as will be noted below, my impression is circumflexes are used on short vowels significantly more often than on long vowels, though I have not attempted to actually count this). And if the circumflexes are not marking length, and very commonly occur on short vowels, then most likely they’re marking a quality difference from plain <i> and <u> (it’s unlikely they are solely marking vowels as being short, because as noted Gatschet also makes some limited use of macrons and breves, and as will be seen below these quite consistently correspond to long and short vowels). Furthermore, in his published Klamath-Modoc grammar, Gatschet uses circumflexes to mark what he calls “deep” vowels (<î û â>), as opposed to “clear” ones, and his descriptions of the distinction and his examples make it clear that <î>, <û>, <â> represent [ɪ], [ʌ]/[ʊ], and [ɔ] respectively, and other symbols the more peripheral vowels [i], [u], [a], [e], etc. (Gatschet 1890a:207, 212-214; this is mostly in line with Powell’s phonetic alphabets). And there are additional examples of Gatschet using such a transcription system, e.g., a brief comment by Haas (1963:65) indicates that he used <û> to transcribe [ʊ] in notes of Chickasaw from 1889.

Phonology

Although there are some uncertainties, the material recorded here does permit us to learn a decent amount about the phonology of Ojibwe as spoken by Bottineau. Two broad questions to ask up front are: (1) was there any quality difference between long and short vowels, or just a quantity difference?, and (2) what was the phonetic nature of the distinction between “lenis” and “fortis” obstruents?

Regarding the first question, there are some difficulties, because although in this vocabulary Gatschet occasionally marked vowels as long, he rarely did so, and given other issues with Bottineau’s Ojibwe, including issues relating to stress, this raises the question of whether he even had distinctively long vowels, so this bears further investigation.

By my count, Gatschet marks a vowel with a macron 37 (or possibly 38) times; of these, only three fall on expected short vowels (“he, she has an offspring” [pg. 23], “he is resting” [pg. 29], and one instance of the plural of “young dog” [pg. 31]), as well as one case in which the analysis of the word is uncertain and so the vowel length cannot be stated with complete confidence (at least by me: “he is now in the act of medium,” pg. 63—see Note P). In the remaining 33 or 34 cases (92% of the total, when throwing out “he is now in the act of medium”), the macron accurately marks an expected long vowel. Furthermore, although I have not done any sort of quantitative analysis of this, in those cases where Gatschet’s marking of stress diverges from one of the usual patterns (discussed in more detail below), the vowel he marks as stressed is very frequently an expected long vowel. Finally, while there are not many minimal pairs (of any sort) in Ojibwe, there are actually several cases of minimal or near minimal pairs in which the two words/morphemes are not only distinguished (solely or partly) by vowel length, but are semantically or paradigmatically related as part of the same “set,” making the difference in vowel length between them especially salient, most notably: the numerals niizhwaaswi “seven” and nishwaaswi “eight” (repetition forms for Bottineau: niizhwaasing “seven times” and nishwaasing “eight times”), and the conjunct verbal endings -(y)aan “1sg” and -(y)an “2sg” (as well as other verbal endings, but these two examples are sufficient). If there is one place someone is going to explicitly mark vowel length, it is in these pairs, especially the verbal suffixes.^[10] And in both of these crucial cases, Gatschet does explicitly mark vowel length, although only partially in the case of the numerals: <nī́shwassing> [“seven times”] vs. <nîshuássing> [“eight times”] (both pg. 43); and <tchibuá tagushini/ā́n> “before I arrive” (jibwaa-dagoshiniyaan, pg. 45) vs. <tchibuá tagushiniắn> “before you arrive” (jibwaa-dagoshiniyan, pg. 47).

Taken together, these data add up to very strong evidence that Bottineau did distinguish vowel length, and that Gatschet merely failed to record it in most instances. This is consistent with what I know about his fieldwork on other languages, where he occasionally heard vowel length, but usually did not.

With that out of the way, we can consider the original question, which was whether Bottineau’s Ojibwe had a quality distinction between vowels in addition to a quantity distinction. In modern Ojibwe, this is extremely common, almost universal; long vowels are relatively tense, while short vowels are most often pronounced laxer and more centralized (with /a, i, o/ realized as something like [ʌ, ɪ, ʊ], though with plenty of variation), and especially so when unstressed. Many individual varieties have further short vowel laxing/centralization rules—for instance, some dialects of Algonquin merge /a, i/ to a lax [ᵻ].

However, it doesn’t seem as though if this was always true, at least in all areas. Many older grammars and dictionaries, such as those of Frederic Baraga—not to mention the works of the French missionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries—fail to note any quality difference between long and short vowels. Baraga had a good ear for the language in general, was a native speaker of Slovene, and also spoke German from a very young age—he even wrote almost all of his personal diary (Baraga 1990) in German—and so should be expected to have heard a difference between, say, [iː] and [ɪ] or between [a] and [ə].^[11] Jean-André Cuoq similarly doesn’t really mention any significant pronunciation variants in vowels, although he discusses pronunciation less than Baraga does. The “general English/continental Europeanish”- and French-based orthographies Baraga and Cuoq were using were ill-suited to mark such distinctions in any case. As late as 1911, the Dutch linguist and anthropologist J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong, describing the speech of multiple individuals from Red Lake, MN (where Bottineau’s paternal ancestors were from, and not far from the Pembina region and the area where Bottineau’s paternal grandmother was born), doesn’t appear to distinguish significant vowel quality differences in certain cases. In particular, for both /i/ and /iː/ he only writes <i>, describing it as “about = engl. ea in meat; sometimes a little longer like ee in meet” (??), and also says that the /a/-quality vowels are “never [pronounced] like u in engl. but” (Josselin de Jong 1913:v). Josselin de Jong was a native speaker of Dutch, so he would certainly be expected to be able to hear a difference between [i(ː)], and [ɪ]. (Then again, Gatschet frequently missed, or at least failed to indicate in his transcription, oppositions which existed in his native dialect of Highest Alemannic.)

On the other hand, other contemporary sources do indicate or suggest laxing of short vowels in several different varieties of Ojibwe, including at Red Lake and elsewhere in northern Minnesota, not to mention the hints of lax vowels in the French spellings dating back to the 17th century mentioned in footnote 11. The grammar and dictionary of the missionary Edward Wilson, published in 1874, certainly seem to indicate that the Ojibwe speakers he was working with (mostly of Eastern Ojibwe) had laxed short vowels; here his English-based orthography is actually quite helpful in revealing this (cf., e.g., <opineeg> “potatoes,” <muhkuhk> “a box,” <cheemaun> “a canoe,” and <neebing> “in summer” = opiniig, makak, jiimaan, niibing [Wilson 1874:11]). The detailed phonetic (pre-phonemic) orthography used by William Jones (1917, 1919) to transcribe Ojibwe texts from northern Minnesota and the north shore of Lake Superior from 1903-1905 also makes clear that the speakers he was working with often, though not consistently, had quality as well as quantity distinctions on vowels, and Jones, in addition to being a native speaker of both English and another Algonquian language (Meskwaki), was by far the most linguistically sophisticated recorder of Ojibwe to that point. And finally, in the orthography of Wright (n.d.) (ca. 1890), a missionary who learned Ojibwe at Red Lake and Leech Lake, MN in the mid-1800s and was primarily describing the speech of Red Lake, short /a/ is fairly often spelled <û> (or occasionally <u> or <ĕ>, and some other vowels are also occasionally spelled as though laxed) (e.g., <Û-kû-kûn-djĭ sû-kû-teg> for “Living coals” = akakanzhe zakideg “burning coal” [Wright n.d.:9]; <Nij-tĕn-û û-cĭ be-jĭk> “21” = niizhtana ashi-bezhig [ibid., pg. 17]).

So, at the very least by the time Gatschet took down this vocabulary, some Ojibwe speakers had a quality distinction between their long and short vowels, including some but perhaps not all of those near to people Bottineau had family connections with. Which of these groups Bottineau was a part of is a bit difficult to determine, at least not without a lot more work that I haven’t had time for. Gatschet not infrequently writes long /iː/ and /oː/ with <î> and <û>, but very often these have added acute accents even when the word or stem is monosyllabic (e.g., <nî́nsh> “hand, finger” = -niinj [pg. 37]; <mû́> “excrement” = moo [pg. 39]; <wî́giwan> “home, residence” = wiigiwaam [pg. 41]; <nî́sh> “2” = niizh [pg. 43]; <nabû́b> “soup, broth” = naboob [pg. 55]; etc.). However, <î> and <û> are also used for short /i, o/, seemingly a reasonable amount more frequently, though I have not actually counted this up (e.g., <û́kan> “bone” = okan [pg. 37]; <sî́kuan> “the spittle” = zikowin [pg. 39]; <kísîs> “sun, moon, month” = giizis [pg. 41]; <nî́ssui> “3” = niswi [pg. 43]; <pagísû> “he is bathing” = bagizo [pg. 49]; etc.). Similarly, <i> and <o>/<u> are used for both short and long vowels, as is <a>. As discussed above, I’m not completely positive what Gatschet actually intended to indicate with a circumflex, but it’s almost certainly some difference in vowel quality. My working assumption, as stated previously, is that <î, û> = [ɪ, ʊ] (phonetically short or long), <i, u, o, e, a> = [i, u, o, e~ɛ, a(~ɑ~ʌ)] (phonetically short or long, plus in some cases, before another vowel, <u> also indicating [w] or [Vw] and <i> [ij]), <ä> = [æ] (phonetically long or short), a macron explicitly marks a long vowel, and a breve a short one. Again, however, I have not had the time or patience to actually do an in-depth analysis of this. But my impression is that while there may not be a huge difference in spelling between long and short vowels, there is definitely some, and so Bottineau probably pronounced his short vowels as lax/centralized more often than he did the same for long vowels, even though he apparently pronounced both short and long vowels as both tenser and laxer at times. If anyone else wants to do a more thorough analysis, have at it.^[12]

The second basic question asked at the beginning of this section was what the nature of the distinction between “lenis” and “fortis” obstruents was in Bottineau’s speech. This is a parameter of pronunciation which varies considerably among different Ojibwe-speaking communities and among individual speakers, though lenis consonants, nowadays, are almost always voiced intervocalically and always voiced after nasals, and fortis consonants are always voiceless, usually longer in duration than lenis ones, frequently preaspirated or postaspirated, and seem to be produced with greater muscular tension. Historically the fortis consonants were preaspirated, which is how they are still pronounced in Oji-Cree, many Western Saulteaux communities, and many Northwestern Ojibwe communities. In a very small number of cases, Gatschet in fact explicitly writes a fortis stop as preaspirated, usually indicated by a preceding <’h>. These cases (ignoring plurals of the same words) are:

1. <á’hkî wä́nsi> “old man” = akiwenzii, pg. 23 (also with <ắki> indicated as an alternative pronunciation for the initial portion).
2. í’hkuä “woman” = ikwe, pg. 23 (also derivatives of this such as <ushkí i’hkuä> “young woman” = oshki-ikwe [pg. 23], <wisákude wi’hkué> “half breed woman” = Wiisaakodewikwe [pg. 27], and <i’hkue gáshagäns> “tabby” [actually “female cat”] = ikwe-gaazhagens [pg. 33]—but not consistently, cf. <ikuésäⁿs> “little girl” = ikwezens [pg. 23]).
3. <u’hpuágan> “tobacco pipe” = opwaagan, pg. 31 (also derivatives of this on the same page, except for the plurals for “wooden pipe,” <mî́tig upuáganag> and <[mî́tig] upuáganan>).
4. <uχgā́d> “leg” = okaad, pg. 35.
5. <û’htáwag> “ear” = otawag, pg. 37.
6. <u’hpî́kuan> “back” = opikwan, pg. 37 (but not an [ungrammatical] derivative of this on the same page, <upíkuan û́kan> “backbone, dorsal spine”).
7. <ú’hkan> “bone” = okan, pg. 37 (also spelled <û́kan> in the same entry; also see above on <upíkuan û́kan>).
8. <á’htis> “sinew, ligament” = atis, pg. 37.
9. <kí’htchi> “hard [i.e., ‘a great amount, very much’]” = gichi-, pg. 45 (given as an alternative spelling/pronunciation of <gitchî́>).
10. <animî́ki=’ka> “[it thunders]” = animikiikaa, pg. 45 (part of the same entry as “hard” above; I’m not positive whether this is actually meant to indicate preaspiration on the final /kː/).
11. <a’htawesse> “[the fire is/has] going/gone out” = aatawese, two entries on pg. 45 (also spelled <atawésse> and <átawése> once each on the same page).
12. <pí’htchibúen> “poison” = bichibowin, pg. 55 (also spelled <pitchipúen> in the same entry, and related terms spelled <pitchibû́>, etc., on the same page)

The initial takeaway from this is that Bottineau very occasionally pronounced fortis plosives as preaspirated, but usually did not. Costa (1991a:36, 1991b:366) states that Gatschet had some trouble hearing preaspiration in Miami-Illinois, but was often able to record it; in the latter article Costa says he “heard [it] more often than not.” Costa (2003:22) states that “he did not always hear preaspiration,” which is still consistent with the preceding claims. The citations I’ve seen suggest that for Miami-Illinois he wrote it reasonably frequently, and even heard it on fricatives with some regularity. This fits with what LeSourd (2021:195) describes for Gatschet’s work on Passamaquoddy in the 1890s, where he “recorded most, though not all, preconsonantal occurrences of h” while “[o]ther early recorders of the language typically missed preaspiration.” The accompanying Passamaquoddy text taken down by Gatschet shows that this included him fairly regularly recording preaspiration even on fricatives. All this is suggestive that the almost total lack of preaspiration marking in the Bottineau vocabulary genuinely reflects Bottineau fairly rarely pronouncing fortis consonants with preaspiration, though there were undoubtedly some instances in which he did so and Gatschet failed to hear it.

There are two points to note in this regard, however. First, Gatschet collected the Bottineau vocabulary in 1878, at the start of his career with American Indian languages and over a decade before he began work on Passamauoddy and Miami-Illinois. In the intervening period, he may simply have become better at hearing this distinction, even if his abilities were still imperfect. (In fact I would be very surprised if this were not the case given the tremendous amount of additional exposure to Indian languages he had over that time, including several Algonquian ones.) Second, observe that the distribution of the preaspiration marking in the Bottineau vocabulary is not random: (1) it occurs unusually frequently on body part terms (I don’t have any idea why this would be the case, other than observing that in all but one case the preaspirated fortis stop follows the third person prefix o-, which Gatschet’s transcription indicates was [u] or [ʊ] in these particular instances, and the other case [“sinew”] also involves a fortis stop that immediately follows a word-initial short vowel—as do three of the other, non-body part examples, for that matter), and (2) it becomes significantly less common the further into the vocabulary Gatschet gets. The first page has three words marked with preaspiration, and the first 12 pages, ignoring page 40, which only has one Ojibwe word, contain all but one of the examples in the vocabulary; there is only one word marked with preaspiration over the final ten pages (on page 55). The most likely conclusion, in my view, is that by the mid-point of the vocabulary, and probably before then, Gatschet had realized that preaspiration was redundant/non-distinctive, and so failed to continue recording it in the cases when he successfully heard it from that point on. It may also be relevant that the one word which Gatschet marks with preaspiration late into the vocabulary is one in which the preaspiration occurs on /tʃː/ following /i/: bichibowin = <pí’htchibúen>. William Jones’s text collection indicates that at least for his consultants preaspiration was very salient in just this environment, apparently with the /h/ commonly assimilated in place to the /i/ and /tʃ/ as something like [stʃ] or [çtʃ] or [ʃtʃ]. Thus, e.g., Jones often spells gichi- as <ki^stci> or similar and izhichige as <ijictcigä> or similar.

If Bottineau sometimes pronounced fortis stops with preaspiration but frequently did not—a situation still found among a number of Ojibwe speakers—he likely distinguished the lenis/fortis pairs primarily on the basis of both length and (optional) voicing. If he did use consonant length, however, Gatschet never records it;^[13] unfortunately, it is impossible to say whether this is due to Bottineau genuinely not pronouncing fortis consonants longer than lenis ones, or just Gatschet being unable to hear, or electing not to indicate, consonant length. (While I have not closely examined all of the publicly available material he collected on Ojibwe, in what I’ve gone through so far I’ve found no indication of consonant length there either, which strongly suggests Gatschet was unable to hear or indicate in writing consonant length in general—though it’s important to keep in mind that this does not conversely mean that Bottineau was producing it.) As for voicing, the lenis consonants are variably recorded with either voiced or voiceless symbols intervocalically, but usually are written as voiced, and always as voiced after nasals (except for the fricatives, which are never written as voiced, as pointed out in footnote 13); they are also fairly often written as voiced word-initially, but word-finally they seem to more often be written as voiceless—though there are still a good number of voiced examples—except that the animate plural suffix is consistently written with final <g>. This suggests a not-unexpected situation given Bottineau’s time and place: lenis consonants are always voiced after nasals and usually but not universally voiced intervocalically, are variably voiced initially, and are sometimes but not frequently voiced finally.^[14] Gatschet’s recording of the animate plural suffix as ending in <g> in all cases—except once on the first page—surely reflects his quick recognition of its status as a distinctive morpheme, and thus one that he ended up spelling in a consistent way regardless of precisely how he may have heard it in individual instances. He used a similar practice in several other cases.

In a very small number of cases, fortis consonants are written as voiced, possibly due to mishearing (or possibly not being pronounced as long in those instances: see footnote 13), although two actually feature the same morpheme, e.g.: <piwábig> “iron” (biiwaabik, pg. 25), <wassḗtchiganábig> “glass of window” (waasechiganaabik, pg. 57), <kashkibî́de^ng> “tied” (gashkapide⟨^ng⟩, pg. 63) and <odshidshā́k> “spirit of dead” (ojichaag, pg. 63); for the first two, compare other terms on pp. 25-27 with the same morpheme spelled with voiceless <k> (<osawábik> “copper”; <wábik> “metal”; <piwábikons> [diminutive of “iron”]; <osawábĭ́kons>/<-koⁿs> “cents”; etc.).

Moving on to other phonological issues, one process suggested by Gatschet’s recordings is that Bottineau’s dialect of Ojibwe appears to have had allophonic lowering of /i/ to something like [e] in a number of instances, since they are spelled <e>, or occasionally <ē>. This seems to be most common in two environments. One is word-finally, including preverb/prenoun-finally:

1. <unídshanissē> “he, she has an offspring” = oniijaanisi pg. 23 (cf. on the same page <kîdudshánissî> = gidoo[nii]jaanisi with the same final morpheme, although the word is ungrammatical)
2. <wemîtígoshē> (?) “French” = Wemitigoozhi, pg. 31
3. <ininiwe> “he is a man” = ininiiwi, pg. 33
4. <pashkinéyabe> “eyes full of tears” = baashkineyaabi, pg. 39
5. <náwe> “middle” = naawi–, pg. 41
6. All of the numerals ending in -aaswi are spelled with final <-ā́sswĕ>, <-ássue>, or similar (always with the last character being <e> or <ĕ>), pg. 43
7. <óndshe> “because” = onji, pg. 45
8. <pā́ssue> “he dries himself” = baaswi, pg. 49 (an alternative pronunciation of baaso, with the common Ojibwe interchange of /o/ and /wi/; cf. <pā́ssu>, <pā́ssû>, and <pássû> on the same page)
9. <wabishéshe> “weasel” [actually “marten”] = waabizheshi, pg. 59
10. <minupû́gûse> [“taste good”] = minopogozi, pg. 63
11. <mámawe> “in a whole, bundle” = maamawi(-), pg. 63
12. <mitéwe> “he is now in trance” = midewi, pg. 63

It may be relevant that most of the examples occur either following /w/ (six cases) or a coronal fricative (four cases, plus one instance following the coronal affricate [dʒ]), but given the small sample size it’s hard to be certain.

The other main environment in which lowering of /i/ is indicated is preceding nasal consonants:

1. mindimooyenh “old woman,” spelled all four times as beginning with <mindemó…>, pg. 23
2. <ndoshitómen> “we are making [it]” = nindoozhitoomin, pg. 27
3. <nbagátomen> “we boil [it]” = nimbagaatoomin, pg. 27
4. <ishpéming> “high, en haut” = ishpiming, pg. 29
5. “resting place” and “he is resting” probably end in -abi (see Note Y) = <eshkanábe^ng> and <eshkanábē> (the former is pre-nasal consonant, the latter word-final as in the list above), pg. 29
6. <sî́kuan> “life” = zikowin, pg. 39 (possibly just a representation of a very lax pronunciation of /i/ as something close to [ə], or an error)
7. <tagúshenia^ng> “[before we] return,” pg. 45 and <tagusheniwát> “[before] they arrive,” pg. 47 = dagoshiniya(a)ng and dagoshiniwaad
8. <îshnîkásuen> “name of things (or pronunciation)” = izhinikaazowin, pg. 49
9. <pimadî́siwan> “life” = bimaadiziwin, pg. 53 (possibly just a representation of a very lax pronunciation of /i/ as something close to [ə], or an error)
10. <tebiwissiniwen> “rassasiement [‘satiety, fullness’]” = debi-wiisiniwin, pg. 55
11. Possibly <agómĕn> “to swallow” though the proper interpretation of the ending is unclear (I have assumed it is ⟨a⟩gomind) and the <ĕ> may represent [ə] (see footnote nine), pg. 55
12. <pitchipúen>, <pí’htchibúen> “poison” = bichibowin, pg. 55
13. possibly <edîtégĕn> “when [they] are ripe” = editegin (though the <ĕ> may represent [ə] (see footnote nine), pg. 61
14. <akûsî́wen> “sickness” = aakoziwin, pg. 65
15. <bemwḗwē> “sound of thunder travelling over” = bimwewe, pg. 65

It may also be relevant that the pre-nasal /i/’s spelled as lowered follow a labial consonant in the majority of cases (11 of 15); 11 of 15 are also in the final syllable of the word. However, given how many of these examples involve the nominalizer -win or 1pl suffix -min, both these statistics could be coincidental and reflect specific pronunciations of those morphemes. And as noted it may not be proper to count <sî́kuan>, <pimadî́siwan>, <agómĕn>, or <edîtégĕn>, since it’s not at all clear that the vowel was pronounced as anything very close to [e] in these words (<ĕ> could represent [ə]).

Although the number of examples suggest there was a real difference in pronunciation in these environments, it was either optional, or subtle enough that Gatschet usually failed to hear it, since most of the time he wrote something indicating a pronunciation of [i] or [ɪ]. For instance, cf. the two examples of the verb stem dagoshin- spelled with <e> with the four examples spelled with <i>, or the plural of <îshnîkásuen> izhinikaazowin being spelled <ishnikásuinan>. There are also a handful of other words where expected /i/ is spelled as though it were pronounced [e], but is not before a word boundary or nasal: <nĭngîtcháges> “I burnt [him/her]” (ningii-chaagiz, pg. 51; cf. two other examples on same page of this verb with <i>), <sagassué-idewag> “they are smoking” (zagaswe’idiwag, pg. 57), and probably the initial vowel in <eshkanábe^ng> “resting place” and <eshkanábē> “he is resting” (pg. 29, likely beginning in ishk-; see Note Y).

Somewhat parallel to this, it’s clear that /ɛː/ was pronounced or at least perceived differently word-finally, when next to a nasal consonant, and especially when nasalized. These are virtually the only environments in which Gatschet writes /ɛː/ as <ä>. This was presumably optional/variable at least word-finally, since Gatschet also frequently recorded <e> in that position, but it was very likely a real exceptionless pronunciation in the case of phonemic /ɛ̃ː/ and allophonically nasalized /ɛː/, both of which Gatschet always wrote with <ä>. Notably, while most Canadian French dialects don’t lower historical /ɛ̃/ to [æ̃ː] as in most of European French (though nowadays it can be pronounced [ãɪ̃] in addition to [ɛ̃ɪ̃]), Métis French does lower it to [æ̃]. I think it’s quite plausible that this feature was carried over from Bottineau’s French to his Ojibwe.

There is also one word where <é> spells /iː/, which could be attributed to a slight mishearing on Gatschet’s part or isolated tokens of a somewhat lower pronunciation than normal on Bottineau’s part, though it’s interesting that it actually occurs twice: in the base word, and in a derivative of it (<ushkinégi> “young (of men)” = oshkiniigi and <ushkinégiwîn> “youth” = oshkiniigiwin, pg. 39 [the entries are not contiguous]; but cf. <ushkiníg i’hkuä> “young woman” = oshkiniigikwe [pg. 23], containing the same morpheme).

Weakening of intervocalic or prevocalic /k/ is found in several dialects of Ojibwe, and there is one probable example represented in this vocabulary: <unawúshin> in the term for “supper” = onaagoshin [“evening”], pg. 55; cf. “evening” = <unagû́shin> and <unagû́shîng> on pg. 41. Of course the context of fieldwork like this means we should not expect many allegro speech phenomena like /k/-weakening/elision.

There’s a good deal that could be said regarding nasalization and related issues in the vocabulary, but I’m going to try to keep my commentary relatively brief.

Gatschet seems to have had a fair amount of difficulty hearing and distinguishing nasalization (including not only missing it at times, but also occasionally writing a nasalized vowel with a following segmental <n> or writing /j/ adjacent to a nasalized vowel—presumably pronounced [j̃]—as <ñ> or <ni> or the like), so it’s not always easy to determine what Bottineau’s pronunciation was actually like. However, apparently, like a a number of Ojibwe speakers, he had allophonic vowel nasalization after nasal consonants which was especially strong and salient on long vowels and when preceding fricatives, though there are only four reliable examples: <minde móñä/mónyä>, pl. <mindemóñag, mindemóniäniag> “old woman/women” (mindimooyenh +yag ≈ †[mĩndemõːj̃æ̃ː], pg. 23), <maⁿshíwe> “co-itus” (mazhiwe ≈ †[mɐ̃ʒiwɛː], pg. 39); <niⁿshwā́sswĕ> “7” and <nîⁿshuássue mítana> “70” (niizhwaaswi and niizhwaaswimidana ≈ †[nĩːʒwɑːsːwë], etc., pg. 43); and <kinónshe> “pickerel” and <mashkinónshe> “species of pickerel” (ginoozhe and maashkinoozhe ≈ †[kinõː(n)ʒɛː], etc., pg. 63).

Another nasalization process which is attested several times in the vocabulary is what has been called “nasal spreading” (Sullivan 2016:208). In a couple dialects of Ojibwe, though in different patterns and under different conditions, nasalization or a coda nasal consonant “spreads” from one syllable to a neighboring syllable, either in the form of vowel nasalization or a coda nasal added to that neighboring syllable; the nasalization may or may not be retained on the syllable where it originally/historically occurred. In the Bottineau vocabulary, nasal spreading is found (basically) twice:

• <apinû́ⁿdshi> “baby,” <apinûⁿ´dshiyag> [“babies”], <abinoⁿ´dshíak> “infants” (abinoonhjii +yag ← abinoojiinh +yag, all pg. 23; but cf. <abinódshi> “infant” [pg. 23], <apinótchiag> “children” [pg. 53], with the nasalization probably not heard).
• <oⁿgashî> “hoof, nail, claw,” (-onhgazhii- ← -oganzhii-, pg. 25; but cf. pl. <ógashig> on the same page, with the nasalization probably not heard).
• <pebéshig oⁿgashig> [“horses”] which contains the above morpheme (bebezhigoonhgazhiig ← bebezhigooganzhiig, pg. 25; but cf. <pebéshigogashi> “horse” and <pebéshig ógashiⁿs> “colt” on the same page, with the nasalization probably not heard).

As will be discussed further below in a document on Bottineau’s dialect, Gatschet’s spellings—which would indicate Bottineau pronounced the syllable into which nasalization spread with nasalized vowels but no coda nasal consonant—may represent an intermediate stage in nasal spreading between the original situation and the one now found for at least some speakers in which the newly “nasal” syllable has a coda segmental nasal.

There are a couple of morphophonological processes in Ojibwe reflected (probably) in the vocabulary which I will quickly note here. The first involves the copying of the nasal of the first person prefix ni- onto a following lenis stop or obstruent (ni-d- → nin-d-, etc.), or metathesis of the nasal (ni-d- → in-d-, etc.; some facts about the distribution of these variants in Southwestern Ojibwe suggests this really is, synchronically, metathesis, and not nasal copying followed by deletion of the initial nasal). Nasal copying or metathesis also apply to a few other morphemes which historically began with the sequence /nik-/. Nasal copying is found widely across Ojibwe dialects, while nasal metathesis is more restricted, but most Ojibwe speakers pronounce the first person prefix as a syllabic nasal homorganic with a following lenis stop in allegro speech. The Bottineau vocabulary shows variation in how this prefix is written: usually it’s <ni->, occasionally it’s <nin-> (the historical /nikot-/ of the numeral “six,” one of the morphemes which undergoes copying or metathesis, is also spelled with <nin>), and in two cases, which immediately follow one another, it’s <n->, suggesting a syllabic nasal (<ndoshitómen> “we are making [it]” and <nbagátomen> “we boil [it],” pg. 27). (There is actually a third probable case, in which the nasal was not written at all, addressed below in the section on “Translation Choices.”) In much of Southwestern Ojibwe this nasal copying/metathesis also occurs before lenis fricatives, but this has expanded its range over the last century plus, and there are no cases in the vocabulary which are written this way, so despite Gatschet’s issues with nasalization I’m fairly confident in concluding this rule did not exist for Bottineau.

The other morphophonological process I’ll discuss, also found in several dialects, is the fortition of lenis obstruents after the preverb gii- “PAST” (and also wii- “PROSP/DESID,” but this doesn’t occur in the vocabulary). Two factors make it almost impossible to say whether this rule applied in Bottineau’s Ojibwe: (1) there are only four tokens in the vocabulary (three of which are in direct succession and involve the same verb) to judge by, and (2) Gatschet did not consistently write fortis consonants differently from lenis ones aside from sometimes writing the latter as voiced. So unfortunately we can only rely on the negative evidence that in none of these four tokens is the following obstruent written as voiced. The data are thus consistent with Bottineau forticizing obstruents after gii-, but don’t conclusively demonstrate this. The tokens, in any case, are: <gikimî́wan> “it rained” (gii-kimiwan (?), pg. 45; cf. gimiwan “it rains”), and <nĭngîtcháges>, <nĭngîtchágis>, and <ningitchagisánan> “I burnt . . .” (ningii-chaagiz(aanan) (?), pg. 51; cf. jaagiz “burn him/her!”).

In this whole discussion so far, I have left off by far the most notable phonological fact about the vocabulary, one which anyone familiar with Ojibwe probably noticed almost immediately on looking at it. The stress system, as marked by Gatschet, is very irregular and utterly alien to the stress system found in any Ojibwe dialect known to me, and in fact almost certainly cannot be “correct,” in the sense of being good Ojibwe. This issue will be taken up further below.

Dialect Represented

At the beginning of the post, it was asked what regional variety of Ojibwe we might expect Bottineau to have spoken. We would expect his father’s family to most likely have spoken a variety of Northern Minnesota Ojibwe, close to the speech of Red Lake and the Border Lakes of southern Ontario (near the Minnesota border). However, there is no direct evidence for whether his mother spoke Ojibwe, and if so what variety she spoke, in any source I have found; based only on his family history and without recourse to the vocabulary itself, Bottineau may therefore have spoken Northern Minnesota Ojibwe, Border Lakes Ojibwe, southern/eastern Southwestern Ojibwe, or Eastern Saulteaux, or something representing a mixture of two of these. It’s also less likely but theoretically possible that he spoke a more eastern variety like Odawa.

Here I will present and discuss the features in the vocabulary which may have dialectal significance, that is, those features which have been identified elsewhere as being associated only with a particular dialect, or of having significant regional variation which includes variation in the region we are concerned with. I have primarily used four sources in this regard, though I have consulted others as well, which will be cited when relevant. These are: Rand Valentine’s wide-ranging survey of Ojibwe dialects in Canada (Valentine 1994), the dialect codes and dialect affiliations of the speakers associated with audio clips and example sentences in the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary (OPD), the discussion of dialect variation within Southwestern Ojibwe, including Northern Minnesota Ojibwe and Border Lakes Ojibwe, found in Sullivan (2016), and the dialect codes in the Freelang Ojibwe Dictionary (FOD). I also checked the standard dictionaries of Mille Lacs Ojibwe, Eastern Ojibwe, and Odawa, the texts from the Oshkaabewis Native Journal and Treuer (2001), the texts William Jones collected at Bois Forte (northern Minnesota), Thunder Bay (north shore of Lake Superior), and Leech Lake (north-central Minnesota) at the turn of the 20th century (Jones 1917, 1919), the grammar and dictionary of eastern varieties of Southwestern Ojibwe published by Frederic Baraga in the mid-1800s based on work starting in the 1830s (Baraga 1850, 1853), old works on Eastern Ojibwe (Wilson 1874) and Wisconsin Southwestern Ojibwe (Verwyst 1901), a text written by native speakers of Wisconsin Ojibwe in the mid-1800s (Nichols 1988b), the texts collected by J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong at Red Lake in 1911 (Josselin de Jong 1913), and an extensive Ojibwe vocabulary and grammar sketch compiled in the late 1880s by the Red Lake minister Sela Wright (Wright n.d.), plus some other resources. However, there are a few drawbacks with relying on some of these sources, and with this exercise in general, that I must note up front.

While Valentine’s survey produced an enormous amount of information on Ojibwe dialects in Canada and is over 1,000 pages long, he was still, by necessity, confined to investigating a finite number of features (a few hundred) and communities (56), including mostly working with only one or two speakers from each community. He was also limited to studying Canadian dialects, and so was only able to include one American community, Red Lake, which shows a number of differences from more southern and eastern Southwestern dialects (but on the plus side is one of the most important communities for us to be investigating with regard to the Bottineau material); this lack of documentation of American dialects can be supplemented with the extensive existing materials on Southwestern Ojibwe in other sources, however. Meanwhile, the Freelang Ojibwe Dictionary assigns dialect codes based on the community affiliation(s) of the sources each word was taken from,^[15] but unlike Valentine the dictionary team has not been able to canvass a large geographical area to try to determine the actual distribution of any given terms—they can only go by what is attested in published sources, plus some exposure to the different varieties of American Ojibwe.

This brings us to a larger problem, which is that a term or morphological feature or whatever could easily exist in many places where it has simply not yet been recorded, because there are only so many people working on documenting the language in writing, and only so many historical sources to consult. As noted by Valentine (1994:436), the existence of intra-dialectal and intra-community variation means some forms may be missed by even a reasonably thorough study of a given area. Relatedly, in many places, there are of course multiple options for how to express a given concept, and a speaker being surveyed may only provide one answer, so only talking with a few speakers from a given community could easily fail to catch an alternative form which is commonly used in that community; since Valentine was limited to surveying at most two or three speakers from each community, there are a number of instances of this in his work—and it’s by far the most extensive and detailed survey the dialectology of any Algonquian language (probably of any American Indian language)!

Finally, there is the issue of historical change. The distribution of a given feature today might not have been—and indeed in many cases surely cannot have been—the same a century and a half ago. To take one example, the demonstratives maaba “this (AN)” and maanda “this (INAN),” among others, are unique to Odawa, and one of the handful of extremely distinctive morphological features that allow one to almost instantly tell if a given text is in Odawa versus Eastern Ojibwe. (There are additional phonological features which help with distinguishing spoken Odawa and Eastern Ojibwe.) Yet this was not always the case. While these forms are indeed attested all the way back in Old Odawa, maanda was also found on the north shore of Lake Superior in the late 1700s to at least the 1850s, both maaba and maanda were used in Eastern Ojibwe as spoken near Sault Ste. Marie and Garden River, ON into the 1870s, and a field researcher found maanda in the Eastern Ojibwe of Scugog, ON as late as the 1890s (Wilson 1874:27, 380; Pentland 2002:341; Rhodes 2004:371). Frederic Baraga, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Chrysostom Verwyst, documents written by native speakers, and more all show that Michigan/Wisconsin Southwestern Ojibwe also once had the related though slightly distinct forms maabam and maandan corresponding to Odawa maaba and maanda in the mid 19th century up to at least the early 1900s (e.g., Verwyst 1901:187: maabam bakwezhigan minopogozi “this bread (AN) tastes good”; Verwyst 1907:109: Iwapii Jesus maandan ogii-inaan ogikinoo’amaaganan, gii-aawechiged “At that time Jesus said this to his disciples, relating a parable”). Clearly, maaba(m) and maanda(n) were once considerably more widespread in southern Ojibwe—up to the northern shore of Lake Superior—than they are today, and anyone trying to draw firm conclusions on the dialectal provenance of an Ojibwe work from the same time period as the Bottineau vocabulary was collected, based on the presence of these pronouns, would be on thin ice.

With all those warnings and caveats out of the way, let’s get to recklessly speculating anyway! First, it will no doubt be useful to have a map of the general location of some of the places that will be referred to—forgive the inexactitude and clutter! (For a general, very approximate broader map of Ojibwe dialects, see here)

Click to expand.
Some locations relevant to Bottineau and his dialect, many of which will be referred to in the discussion. (Ignore the vertical black line down the middle of the image, it’s just a crease from a book.) It’s anachronistic in showing boundaries based mainly (though not entirely) on modern reservation/reserve boundaries and locations, and not all the historical areas inhabited by a given group, and for that matter mostly showing modern tribal bands and nations rather than the bands which existed in Bottineau’s time. However, the very approximate territory occupied by the Red Lake Band between 1863 and 1889 is shown (based on Treuer 2015:57), rather than the modern Red Lake Reservation, and some other territories are expanded slightly to reflect, though to a limited degree, the greater expanses controlled by groups at the time. The very approximate American territory of the Turtle Mountain Band between 1863 and the unilateral creation of the diminished reservation in 1884 (based on Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. United States, 23 Ind. Cl. Comm. 315 (1970), at 322-323, 324; White Weasel 1994:151; and Shaw 2004:9, 12, 19, figs. 2, 5, 12) is indicated by the lighter blue shading; some Turtle Mountain people ranged beyond this area intermittently, to hunt bison, etc.
 
In the discussion—because the two are often not distinguished in my sources—I will sometimes conflate the specific community of Ponemah with the Red Lake Reservation of which it is a part, even though many of the people from Ponemah don’t identify as “Red Lakers” (Sullivan 2016:40). The same goes in some cases for the different districts and communities encompassed by “Mille Lacs,” “Leech Lake,” and “Bois Forte.”

Let me first summarize again what we know about Jean Bottineau’s family background and likely linguistic influences (some of which I have not detailed previously), without any recourse to the vocabulary. We know that Jean Bottineau was the son of Pierre, whose mother, Margaret, was a full-blood Ojibwe of the Pembina Band whose family were Red Lake Ojibwes from just south of Lake of the Woods on the Minnesota-Ontario border and who maintained close ties with the Red Lake Band, and that she and hence Pierre were therefore likely native speakers of a Northern Minnesota variety of Ojibwe that was at least close to Red Lake Ojibwe and/or Border Lakes Ojibwe. What I don’t know is anything substantive about the identity of Jean’s mother, other than the fact that she was of mainly Ojibwe ancestry and not from the same area as Pierre. Given Pierre’s absences from home during Jean’s youth, I think the most likely strongest influences on his Ojibwe would be any Ojibwe spoken by his mother (if she spoke it), by his paternal uncles—he lived near one uncle, Sévère, and had extensive contact with another, Charles—and perhaps by other extended family such as his paternal grandmother. While his grandmother and his uncles would have (probably) spoken Northern Minnesota Ojibwe, I don’t know what his mother spoke, and so we now turn to the vocabulary for further insight.

(For the record, I conducted the majority of this investigation before I researched Bottineau’s genealogy and family history—beyond knowing that he was from Pembina, was part of the Turtle Mountain Band, and lived most of his life in or near Minneapolis—so the conclusions here were genuinely made independently, and not subject to significant potential confirmation bias.)

Some of the potentially relevant cases are unfortunately of limited use. I’ve excluded cases whose lack of relevance is very clear, but retained borderline cases, which means the list is still quite long. For space reasons, and since many people are likely to be uninterested in the details of each case, I’ve moved the list of potentially relevant forms, and discussion of them, to a separate document, which you can find HERE. If these details don’t concern you, feel free to skip ahead to the summary immediately below, where the genuinely most relevant and revealing cases are briefly reviewed, and their ultimate significance discussed (though in a few places I will allude to something that is mentioned in the document).

First, we can dismiss a few possibilities immediately. Jean’s dialect of Ojibwe shows no connections whatsoever with the more southern and eastern varieties of Southwestern Ojibwe, as spoken in Wisconsin, western Michigan, and central to southeastern Minnesota. In every instance in which northern Minnesota and the Border Lakes show one variant of a feature and southern/eastern Southwestern Ojibwe shows a different one, the form attested by Bottineau aligns with the north. A large host of lexical and other differences also show Bottineau very clearly did not speak anything close to Odawa, Oji-Cree, Algonquin, Northwestern Ojibwe, etc. The question, then, is whether his speech aligned most closely with (1) Eastern Saulteaux (here defined as Saulteaux spoken in (south)eastern Manitoba), (2) Border Lakes Ojibwe (this includes the speech of Nett Lake, MN, part of Bois Forte, extensively documented in the texts in Jones 1917, 1919), or (3) the speech of northern Minnesota, and more specifically Red Lake.

Of these options, we can relatively easily rule out one: Bottineau did not speak Saulteaux. Several features fairly unambiguously show this. (If a trait is found in all or virtually all Saulteaux communities, I consider it likely to be old enough that it’s relevant for our purposes here.) These include particularly: the use in all of Saulteaux of waasenigan instead of waasechigan as the word for “window”; a word borrowed from English “pussy” or French minou (via Plains Cree) in all of Saulteaux for “cat” instead of Bottineau’s gaazhagens; the root zhiiw- in all of Saulteaux meaning “sweet” instead of “sour”; and “night” expressed as dibikan instead of dibikad in nearly all of Saulteaux, including the relevant communities. It may also include Valentine’s finding that nearly all of Saulteaux, save for a couple western communities, lacked phonemic nasal vowels (which Bottineau had). The animacy of “potato” also distinguishes Bottineau’s speech from that of Eastern Saulteaux (and several Border Lakes communities), and aligns it with some eastern Border Lakes communities, some Northern Minnesota communities, and points further south and east. While Bottineau’s speech clearly did not derive from a dialect ancestral to any modern Saulteaux dialect, it did have at least two, and probably three, Saulteaux features not shared by Border Lakes or Minnesota Ojibwe: “onion” ending in -mizh instead of -wVnzh (also shared with some other dialects), “skin” being of the form -zhagay instead of -zhaga’ay (also shared with Northwestern Ojibwe), and sporadic lowering of /i/ to [e] word-finally and in some other contexts (cf. T. Miller 2016 for /i/-lowering to [e] sporadically throughout the word and regularly word-finally for many Eastern Saulteaux speakers) (basically shared with Odawa, Nipissing Algonquin, and to a much lesser extent older Red Lake Ojibwe, for which see footnote 16).

Teasing out the relationships between Bottineau’s Ojibwe and the Ojibwe documented at Red Lake and the Canadian Border Lakes is more subtle, and requires combining a number of features. In three cases, Bottineau apparently agrees with Border Lakes Ojibwe against Red Lake: “cent, penny” is based on the Initial ozaaw- instead of miskw-, “neck” is -gway instead of -kwe(’i)gan, and the morpheme (n)ando-/(n)andaw- lacks the initial /n-/, which at this time was probably a feature found primarily or only in the Border Lakes (including Nett Lake at Bois Forte) but not at Red Lake or further south. Both of the first two examples must be qualified, though. First, most Border Lakes communities have biiw- as the Initial for “cent,” agreeing with Saulteaux, but ozaaw- is found at Lac la Croix; its presence there suggests that it may be present at Bois Forte as well, though I don’t know this. More significantly, while miskw- is more common in Southwestern Ojibwe, ozaaw- is also found, was used as far south/east as Wisconsin in Bottineau’s day, and is not marked with a dialect code by the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary (OPD) that would exclude it being present at Red Lake. Second, -gway was not directly attested in Valentine’s survey at all, though it is a variant of a form, -gwayaw, which was; the latter is absent from most of the Border Lakes, but it is found at Whitefish Bay. The impression left by these cases is less that Bottineau’s speech had a clear affinity with the Border Lakes region, and more that these are terms whose distribution has shifted slightly over the past few centuries, and relics of terms that were once more common in the area are now found in scattered Border Lakes communities and/or as rarer synonyms in some of Southwestern.

In any event, in more cases Bottineau’s speech, while not being unique to Red Lake, unambiguously conforms with Red Lake against the Border Lakes, or at least most Border Lakes communities. Such cases include: “hungry” as bakade instead of another term (and bakade not meaning “skinny”; shared with Southwestern); zhiiw- meaning “sour” instead of “sweet” (shared with other southern dialects; the specific form zhiiwaa may now be confined to Red Lake, although it was apparently more widespread in Bottineau’s time, though perhaps not as the dominant form); and “horse” being expressed with both mis(h)tadim and bebezhigoonhgazhii (while Benton-Banai’s narrative and Clark and Gresczyk’s work may suggest this is not actually distinctive of Red Lake now, the older sources I’ve seen certainly suggest mis(h)tadim was not present in southern/eastern Southwestern Ojibwe up through at least the turn of the 20th century, and the existence of both terms simultaneously was confined to northern Minnesota); as well as perhaps the presence of nasal vowels, which Valentine found to be present in the more southern and eastern Border Lakes communities but absent from Whitefish Bay and communities to its north and west, though I’m not sure how much confidence to place in this. It also includes “much, many” expressed as (probably) niibowa instead of niibiwa. Today the former is found in most of Southwestern Ojibwe but when Bottineau was born it seems to not have been a feature of Wisconsin or Michigan Ojibwe or all of Minnesota Ojibwe, and was likely only present at Red Lake and probably central and north-central Minnesota.

There are also several cases in which Bottineau’s dialect seems to match one community in particular within our focus area, and that community is Red Lake. These are: the form of numeral Initials in derivation, as attested in the terms for “sixty,” “seventy,” etc., and the pattern of nasal spreading, as well as probably “brain” as -(w)iindib instead of -(w)iinindib or another term, and “deer” lacking a final vowel in the singular, as waawaashkesh. At the very least, the last two features distinguish Bottineau’s Ojibwe from Border Lakes Ojibwe and agree with Red Lake Ojibwe.

Note too that the most significant features, for our purposes, should be those in which Bottineau’s form represents an innovation rather than a retention, and in several of these cases it clearly is an innovation. This is most clearly the case with nasal spreading and “brain,” and probably “deer.”

Combining all the overlapping pieces of evidence (forms specific to Red Lake, forms shared with Red Lake and northern/western dialects but not those to the south/east, and forms shared with Red Lake and southern/eastern dialects but not those to the north/west), it seems relatively safe to conclude that the dialect which Bottineau spoke, while of course not identical to modern Red Lake Ojibwe nor directly ancestral to it—and not unexpectedly, given his and his family’s connections with Lake of the Woods, the Red River country, Pembina, and Turtle Mountain, sharing several features with Border Lakes Ojibwe and Eastern Saulteaux—is more closely related to Red Lake Ojibwe than to any other dialect. The implications of this will be discussed further below.^[16]

Influence From Other Languages

In this section I will address two very different topics: the influence of other languages on Bottineau’s Ojibwe; and Bottineau’s command of English versus French.

As regards the first point, there are several Plains Cree loanwords which can be identified in the vocabulary, some of which are also mentioned in the Notes. Not including words which historically speaking are Cree loans but are very widespread or widely attested in Ojibwe, these are:

1. doomini[di(?)]zo (<tûmînî́so>) “he rubs grease on himself,” doominigaade (<tûmînî́gadä>) “to oil, grease,” and doominigan (<tûmînî́gan>) “wagon-grease, machine grease etc.,” pg. 47. As discussed in Note T, the native Ojibwe Initial is noom-, and doom- here is a loan from Cree tōm-. Oji-Cree has independently borrowed the same Initial.
2. <mistawáya=usíbí> “Red River of the North” = Mistawayaawiziibi(?), pg. 31. The general Ojibwe name for the Red River is Misko-Ziibi or Miskwaagamiiwiziibi, and as noted in Note X, the term Bottineau gave must be a Cree borrowing based on its shape alone. As explained in more detail there, <mistawáya> originally represented the name for Fort Garry, and the most likely explanation is that it derives (with metathesis) from Cree mistahi-wā[skahikan] “big house,” a common name applied to any local European fort. The only attestations of this name I’m aware of are from this vocabulary, Gatschet’s field notes from Red Lake, Sela Wright’s vocabulary/grammar, and a 1914 monograph by Alanson Skinner on the Plains Ojibwes of Long Plain First Nation. Despite its sparse attestation, the term (with somewhat varying meanings) at least at one point must have been widespread in the Red River region southeast as far as Red Lake; I don’t know if it or any derivatives of it have survived.
3. -{i}shkiwan (<îshkíwan>) “nose,” pg. 35. There are a few native Ojibwe terms for “nose,” most commonly -jaan(zh) and -zhangwan. For this term, cf. Plains Cree -skiwan “nose, snout” Woods Cree oskiwan “moose nose” and -skowan “animal nose,” Swampy Cree -skiwan “bill of a bird, beak,” and Moose Cree -skiwan “bill of a bird, beak; nose.” Valentine (1994:796) recorded one Western Saulteaux community, Muscowpetung, SK, which has independently borrowed the Plains Cree term as -skiwan (though alongside native -jaan). I’m not aware of other attestations of the root in Ojibwe.
4. oshkon (<ûshkun>) “liver” [actually meaning “his/her liver”], pg. 35. This is in fact followed on the same line by the variant form <û́kun>, which represents the native Ojibwe term okon “his/her liver.” Oshkon is from the Cree cognate oskon ~ oškon with the same meaning. I’m not aware of other attestations of this root in Ojibwe.
5. Finally, Bottineau’s Ojibwe (nick)name itself—evidently Obi(i)skwadoons or Obi(i)skwadens—may contain a Cree loan, if it meant something like “Humpy” and referred to a hunchback, as was mentioned in footnote three and as will be discussed in the future post on Bottineau.

There is also, as is discussed extensively in Note Q, a partially anglicized or (more likely) gallicized pronunciation for the name of the fish species muskellunge (Esox masquinongy), and, as noted above, the plausibility that Bottineau’s apparent pronunciation of nasal(ized) /ɛː/ as [æ̃ː] was due to influence from Métis French.

The second topic to discuss is Bottineau’s competence in English and French. Bottineau was technically born in the Canada but lived his entire life, as far as I know, in the United States, was educated in the United States, and held a prestigious profession, attorney, in which thorough knowledge of proper and precise English is essential. Clearly he was a fully fluent speaker of English. (I’ve read some of his legal briefs, letters, transcripts of his oral testimony, etc., and his English appears entirely native, and his legalese is as impeccable as any other lawyer’s at the time.) Given his partial French ancestry, however—his father was half French Canadian and a native speaker of French, as was his uncle Charles with whom he worked closely for many years, and his mother was also either Métis or at least of partial French Canadian ancestry—we should expect that he spoke French too. And in fact, there are several pieces of evidence that Bottineau was a native speaker of French but probably did not learn English until some time into his childhood, and that he preferentially spoke French with relatives and at home.

As will be illustrated in the rest of this section, some of that evidence is found in our vocabulary itself, but there is also plenty of external evidence. First, Bottineau’s daughter, Marie Baldwin, is described as “speak[ing] French as fluently as English” (Barkwell 2014:1, quoting The Quarterly Journal of American Indians; Houghton 1918:173 contains the same language but does not explicitly cite a source). Marie also served as an English-French interpreter during testimony by Jean’s uncle Charles as part of a lawsuit in which Jean was the plaintiff, and during the defense attorney’s voir dire of her abilities as an interpreter and knowledge of French, she stated: “We always did speak French in the family when my mother was living, and my father spoke French and speaks French almost entirely now” (TOR Bottineau v. O’Grady, at 74). And of course the fact that Charles needed the help of an interpreter shows he was not fluent in English, although he actually understood some of the questions posed to him and answered them in English (leading the opposing attorney to then question if an interpreter was really necessary); when asked to describe his competence in English versus French, he said: “I do not understand a great many words of [English]. I understand enough sometimes, but sometimes I get mixed up in what I say. . . . I know something of English, but I understand French better” (id.). Thus, Jean Bottineau’s daughter spoke French fluently, the uncle he worked closely with and lived with for many years spoke French fluently but not English, and his daughter testified that he himself consistently spoke French at home. Finally, during the same trial, Bottineau himself was being cross-examined, and after he repeatedly gave answers to a question that were confusing and contradictory, the obviously exasperated attorney asked him, “You speak English perfectly, don’t you?” Bottineau gave the somewhat enigmatic reply, “I understand it when I see it in print,” though he clearly understood and used it at a native-like level of fluency, and had testified in English thoughout the trial, as the attorney observed (“Q. You have testified in English in this case? A. Yes, sir”) (id. at 281).

So, there is a good deal of external evidence—both some circumstantial evidence related to Bottineau’s ancestry, ethnicity, and family, but also some pretty unambiguous statements given under oath—that Bottineau was a native speaker of French who used it preferentially, and although fluent in English, was probably not a true native speaker. Indeed, as already noted, there are several instances in the vocabulary (and in another vocabulary collected by Gatschet) which provide further evidence and suggest that Bottineau may have been slightly more comfortable with and confident in French in certain domains, despite having spoken English since childhood.

These instances are those cases where French words or phrases are used by Gatschet to gloss an item, rather than English. Admittedly, this evidence might be questioned, since Gatschet himself spoke French fluently and maybe(?) natively (if not, he certainly learned it in childhood, much earlier than he learned English). Nonetheless, even if we lacked external sources about Bottineau’s use of English and French, Gatschet’s general practices as well as the precise contexts of the French words in the Bottineau vocabulary would strongly suggest that they were supplied by the latter and copied by Gatschet, rather than being supplied by Gatschet. For one thing, and perhaps most crucially, Gatschet does not use French words or glosses or sentences in any of his other field notebooks, as far as I’m aware. David Costa (p.c.) reports that he can’t recall any instances of this in Gatschet’s extensive Miami-Illinois or Shawnee notes, and that it would be very out of character for him, and I have not noticed any examples of it in any of Gatschet’s other Ojibwe field notes from other consultants (with one exception, discussed below). With that in mind, let’s look at the actual examples of French words, phrases, and sentences in this vocabulary, and in another vocabulary where Gatschet essentially attributes them to Bottineau.

The first instance of French in our vocabulary is the inscription at the top of the very first page, describing the consultant and setting of the session: “Given by M^r Jean Bapt. Bottineau, || à Minneapolis, Minn., de la bande de || Pembina – Chippewē, 28 May, 1878.” One thing to note here is that the description begins in English, not French—it only switches to French after introducing Bottineau. Again, in none of his other vocabulary collections or personal notes that I have seen or am aware of does Gatschet use French headings or descriptions of consultants, the location of the fieldwork, or anything else. The strong impression left is that Gatschet asked for Bottineau’s information, and wrote down verbatim what Bottineau said to him, which was spoken in French, though the description of the location of the session also being in French is a little harder to explain, and may just have been a result of Gatschet’s brain switching into “French mode” as he was writing.

The other French words in the vocabulary all occur as glosses for Ojibwe words which in many instances also have an English headword which in some cases may have been written by Gatschet before asking for the Ojibwe translation. These are: en haut [“high up, above”], page 29; le petit gourmand [“the little glutton”] and gourmand [“glutton”], page 33; rassasié [“satiated, full”] and rassasiement [“satiety, fullness”], page 55; espèce d’aigle [“species of eagle”], page 59; and huard and plongeon [“loon, Gavia immer”], page 59. (One final French word, the Canadian French term “pichou” on page 33, has been written by Gatschet to compare it with the Ojibwe word for “lynx, Lynx canadensis,” <pishú> bizhiw, which it is cognate with.)

“En haut” is part of the same left-hand entry as the English term “high” (<high, en haut>) and at least theoretically could have been written by Gatschet before asking for the translation, though there would have been little reason for him to do so. “Le petit gourmand” occurs as one of the glosses for the word for “cat” (which does indeed literally mean “little glutton”): to the right of the English headword “cat,” the Ojibwe equivalent is given as <gáshagäns ; pl. gáshagänsag> followed by the gloss <„selfishness“, „le petit gourmand“>. “Gourmand” is the European headword (to be translated into Ojibwe) two lines down. The two terms on page 55 are both part of the European headwords, which are respectively <Meat: rassasié> and <rassasiement>. The words on page 59 both occur in the context of a list of Ojibwe clan names which Bottineau provided to Gatschet which were then glossed/translated into English, rather than the other way around as elsewhere in the vocabulary. The Ojibwe word for golden eagles, giniw, is translated <kílio ‐ bird , espèce d’aigle>, and the Ojibwe word for loon, maang, is translated <loon ;   huard   french (plongeon?)>.

Of these cases, as noted, “en haut” seems the most likely to have been supplied by Gatschet, but given all the other evidence this is still very unlikely, especially since there are other cases in the vocabulary where it’s clear Gatschet didn’t write the English/European headword first before asking for a definition, but rather wrote out the entire entry at once after discussing it with Bottineau. It’s possible “espèce d’aigle” was also supplied by Gatschet, since he may be quoting from another source (unknown to me) for the term <kílio>, which may in turn have been so glossed in that source; possibly Bottineau merely told him a giniw was a kind of bird, or didn’t know what the name referred to at all other than being a clan, and Gatschet filled in the information later from this other source. Still, in the right-hand column, so to speak, of page 55, the definition of giniw is further to the left than any of the other words, with the word “bird” located about as far right as many of the other definitions begin (see image below), so it’s also possible that the definition Bottineau provided to Gatschet was something like, “It’s some bird, une espèce d’aigle,” which Gatschet wrote down at the time, and then added “kílio” to the left of this when he looked it up later.

The arrangement of the definition/gloss of <kînî́u , kînî́^u> compared to other terms in the same list (from page 59). The full line reads “kînî́u , kînî́^u | kílio ‐ bird , espèce d’aigle.”

But the most likely possibility would seem to be that Bottineau supplied both “kíliou” and its gloss. At the time, the Algonquian loanword quiliou/kiliou was used by some Canadian French speakers (Kohl 1985:398 attributes it to voyageurs); Bottineau probably noted that giniw had an equivalent in his dialect of French, which Gatschet wrote down, along with the translation as given by Bottineau.

The entry for maang “loon” (also visible in the above image, immediately below the line for giniw) reads: “mā́ng , mā́^ng | loon   ;   huard   french (plongeon?).” Since the first word given in the translation is the English “loon,” presumably this was supplied by Bottineau (though it may have been added by Gatschet after he’d obtained the French term from Bottineau, come to a decision about what it referred to, and wrote the whole thing—English and French—out at once). It would appear that Bottineau (also?) commented that the French name was “huard,” which Gatschet wrote down (“huard french”), but which he was confused by, since this reflects a Canadian French usage. At the time, in European French, which is what Gatschet spoke, “huard” referred to sea eagles, particularly the white-tailed eagle, Haliaeetus albicilla (Académie Française 1879:896; TLF; “Huard”), and Gatschet therefore added the more universal French term for loons, “plongeon,” as a query. (One thing to keep in mind is that page 59 is unusual in that Bottineau was providing both Ojibwe words AND their definitions, and not simply providing the Ojibwe translation for an English prompt given to him by Gatschet—the fact that he seems to have spontaneously offered a French translation here is thus significant.)

The most obvious case where Bottineau supplied an answer in French is the entry for “cat.” As we’ve seen, after giving the Ojibwe term, Gatschet wrote the glosses “selfishness” and “le petit gourmand.” These are literal translations of the Ojibwe name, which Gatschet would have had no way of knowing without Bottineau telling him. Furthermore, “selfishness” is not a good translation of gaazhagens, but “the little glutton” (“le petit gourmand”) is completely accurate. Given that “glutton” is a relatively uncommon word, the most reasonable assumption is that Gatschet asked for the translation of “cat” in Ojibwe; Bottineau provided it, then mentioned its literal meaning, but struggled to do so in English, and so after attempting to approximate it with “selfishness,” provided the French translation instead, whose precise English equivalent he did not know. (The entry “gourmand” which appears two lines further down can be explained as Gatschet simply asking for the Ojibwe term for the word Bottineau had given him [stripped of the part meaning “little”], as Bottineau had given it.)

The final instances of Bottineau apparently supplying Gatschet with French glosses come not from this vocabulary, but from a vocabulary which Gatschet collected from Kansas Odawa consultants in 1887-1888 (MS 237 = Gatschet 1887-1891), but which he discussed with Bottineau in December of 1891, who assisted him with some of the material, as briefly alluded to at the beginning of the post. The first part of MS 237 (pages numbered 3-40) consists of texts in Odawa, with English glosses for each Odawa word written in smaller print on the line below, and the arrangement makes it clear that, as expected, Gatschet took down each entire text first, and then later went through it word-by-word with the consultant to get translations for the words. In fact he did not end up obtaining interlinear glosses for all portions of the texts. On the text which runs from pp. 18-40 (“Articles of agreement between The three tribes,” apparently narrated over several days), the English glosses are almost entirely absent from page 33 onward. Midway down page 32, there is the marginal note: “From here Translat'n || by Bottineau || Dec. 1891.” Although Bottineau only gave glosses for a bit less than half a page of text, it’s very revealing that one of the glosses is in French: <kayä> (gaye, “and, also”) is glossed as “ainsi” (in context this is a fairly reasonable gloss).

Although I can’t claim to have examined all of them extremely closely yet, I have not found any other French glosses in the Odawa texts in MS 237—with one exception. On page 24, the verb <witäpwäwat> (wii-debwewaad, in context, “that they are [only] honest”), it appears, was initially glossed “to speak your mind, (compel?)”; above this there was then added “in earnest, particular || (to urge Bott.),” showing that Gatschet consulted Bottineau on this word whose precise translation he was clearly uncertain of. And below the initial gloss, there is also listed: “(dire la vérité, O.)” [i.e., in Ojibwe, as opposed to Odawa]. There is another word on the same page, and others in the notebook, whose gloss is also attributed to Bottineau (“B.”). It’s almost certain that the gloss “dire la vérité” (“tell the truth”) was provided by Bottineau as the Ojibwe equivalent of the translation Gatschet had previously been given for the Odawa word (“Well in Ojibwe it means . . .”).

The final place Bottineau’s name comes up in MS 237 is in a list of words which Gatschet had extracted from the preceding texts and was apparently attempting to discover more information on, mainly their inflections. On page 56, regarding the word <manitōns>, drawn from page 24, Gatschet writes the following:

manitōns       Bott. says in Odj. this is a^n^ little bug insect or worm       entrant dans le corps, et causant des ulcères , Dc. 13, 1891. aussi les vers dans le corps des enfants et des adultes ; not the tape-worms.[17]

Again, we have an instance that really only makes sense if Gatschet was writing down the words which Bottineau spoke to him, and those words were spoken in French, not English.

From the material he provided to Gatschet, we thus have further confirmation that Jean Bottineau was at least slightly more comfortable speaking French than English. (I will note that I actually made this investigation and wrote this entire section before discovering the Bottineau v. O’Grady transcript, so the testimony in it had no influence on my conclusions—it was just a nice confirmation!) When not being prompted by English words, he sometimes gave a French word, or sentences, as a definition for an Ojibwe one, and in at least one case (probably two, the second being “rassasié” = “satiated”) was apparently unable to bring to mind the most appropriate English gloss of an Ojibwe word (“glutton”) and had to resort to French.

To close, while I mentioned it above, I also want to reiterate that generally speaking Bottineau’s command of English, including formal and legalistic English as attested in his writings and in transcripts of his oral testimony, is impeccable and indistinguishable from that of any native speaker educated as a lawyer. For example (S. Doc. 444, at 158):

[W]e do hereby respectfully express that the said alleged agreement . . . together with all the amendments thereto which may be pending before Congress for ratification, has never been authoritatively acknowledged or recognized by said tribe of Indians or by any of the representative men thereof, and they strenuously protest against its ratification by Congress upon the ground that it was . . . procured under the protest of and against the will and consent of the chief and the councilmen . . . who are the only authority recognized by the tribe for the transaction of the tribal affairs; and especially upon the further ground that the compensation stipulated to be paid to them in said agreement is inadequate, unreasonably too small, and does unjustly discriminate against them, as compared with the prices accorded and paid to their neighbor Indians for similar rights and interests and for similar lands.

Translation Choices

Given the many morphosyntactic differences between English and Ojibwe, in a number of instances Bottineau was forced to make decisions on how to translate a given English construction—for example, whether to translate “we” or “our” using an inclusive or exclusive form. The most significant instances in which such choices arose were first person plurals, dependent nouns, and infinitives. One might expect that Bottineau would have been relatively consistent in his translation choices for each English construction, but this was only sometimes the case. I’ll discuss each construction, and Bottineau’s choices in how to translate it, in turn.

Past Tense

First, however, let’s begin by looking at a construction in which there’s a close Ojibwe analogue to English, and where Bottineau was therefore relatively consistent in his translation, namely past tense (including present perfect) verbs. Gatschet provided 15 English prompts containing a verb in the past tense or perfect aspect. One marginal case (“the fire will have gone out before we return,” pg. 45) isn’t a simple past tense, but a future perfect, and consequently was appropriately translated by Bottineau with the future preverb da-. In the remaining 14 instances, Bottineau used the Ojibwe past tense preverb gii- (which in actual discourse usage doesn’t line up perfectly with the English past tense in all cases, but is the obvious translation equivalent) 11 times. On page 37, he reworded the prompt as “his life ended” = “he’s dead” and translated it ishkwaa-bimaadizi, lit. “s/he stops[/stopped] living” (with no past tense preverb). On page 49, there are three instances in the English in which someone “killed . . . deer”; in the first two instances (together on one line, the first line of the page) Bottineau used gii-, but several lines down, for “each of us killed many deer,” he did not. On page 53, on two successive lines there are the prompts “we have put him [a corpse] away” and “we have put him above”; Bottineau seemingly translated the first without gii-, but the second with it, but I think he actually used the past tense with both: see discussion in the following section.

First Person Plural

Corresponding to English’s general first person plural category, Ojibwe, like other Algonquian languages, distinguishes between inclusive and exclusive first person plurals. In any English prompts where the translation called for a first person plural, therefore, Bottineau could choose to use either an inclusive or an exclusive form, and there is a clear pattern to his choices in this regard. There are only two words in which Bottineau needed to provide a 1pl possessor form of a noun (“our heads” and “our hair,” both pg. 33); in both cases he used an inclusive plural (gishtigwaaninaan, giinizisinaan). In contrast, there are ten instances where the English prompt included a verb with a 1pl subject, and in seven of these instances Bottineau unambiguously provided an exclusive form (“we are making salt” pg. 27, “we boil salt water” pg. 27, “we killed a deer” pg. 49, “we kill many deer” pg. 49, “each of us killed many deer” pg. 49, “we have put him [a corpse] above” pg. 53, and “we dry fish” pg. 63). “The fire will have gone out before we return” on page 45 uses a conjunct form, and it isn’t possible to tell from Gatschet’s transcription <ia^ng> whether Bottineau used the inclusive -iyang or exclusive -iyaang. For “the fish we tie up in bundles” on page 63, Bottineau replied with a reworded—though confusing and ungrammatical—response, evidently intended to mean “the fish are tied together in a bundle” or the like, which avoided a first person plural.

In only one instance does Bottineau appear to unambiguously translate a 1pl verb with an inclusive form, but there is good reason to think even this is not what it initially seems. The instance in question is “we have put him [a corpse] away,” transcribed <gína ínnanan> by Gatschet, which appears on the line immediately preceding “we have put him above” on page 53. Generally speaking, the most natural interpretation of Gatschet’s transcription would be gina’inaanaan, with inclusive gi-, lit. “we (INCL) safely store him/her away.” However, given that the very next line contains exactly the same verb, with the same subject in the English prompt, it seems highly unlikely that Bottineau would completely switch its conjugation—two ways, in fact: the verb on the next line is transcribed <ningina-inanan> = ningii-na’inaanaan, with exclusive ni(n)- and past tense gii- (lit. “we (EXCL) safely stored him/her away [up above]”). Since in addition both English prompts use the past tense, and since as noted above Bottineau was fairly consistent in translating past tense prompts with gii-, there’s another way to interpret <gína ínnanan>, in my view the more likely interpretation: it represents ngii-na’inaanaan, with the <gí> representing the past tense preverb gii-, not the inclusive prefix gi-, and with the exclusive prefix either realized as a syllabic nasal [ŋ̍-] which Gatschet didn’t hear (this apparently was a problem for him in his Miami-Illinois fieldwork, on occasion [Costa 1991a:37-38]), or possibly simply realized in this instance as voicing of the initial /k/, as occurs regularly in Michif and at times in Plains Cree and some varieties of Ojibwe.

Dependent Nouns

A third translation choice which confronted Bottineau was dependent nouns, that is, nouns which cannot stand on their own, but require a possessive prefix to be a complete grammatical word. Bottineau’s dialect of Ojibwe lacked the possibility of inflecting for an unspecified possessor, so the most logical options for translating such terms would be either to use a third person possessor (e.g., okaad “his/her leg” for English “leg”), or to use the bare stem with no possessive prefix (e.g., -kaad “leg”) even though this would not be a complete word. Bottineau in fact used both of these options, as well as a third one, the bare stem plus an initial /i-/. Unlike the previous cases, for dependent nouns his use of one strategy over another is both more inconsistent and seemingly more random.

Gatschet gave 31 English prompts of a noun which is a dependent stem in Ojibwe. There were also three prompts for body part terms whose status as a dependent noun in Bottineau’s speech is not completely certain: “shoulder” on page 35, “body” on page 37, and “brain” on page 39; all three were probably dependent, and translated as 3sg possessed forms. Bottineau’s clear preference was to translate dependent stems as third person possessed forms; of the 31 prompts where the dependent status of the noun is clear, Bottineau translated it with a 3sg possessed form (probably) 21 times (there are a couple forms with complications but it’s not worth getting into; see Note K for one of them), as the bare stem six times, and as the bare stem plus an initial /i-/ four times. Of these, there is one obvious pattern: the bare stem plus /i-/ occurs when the noun stem begins in a sh+stop cluster: <ishtî́guan> “head” (stem -shtigwaan, pg. 33), <ishkî́shig> “eye” (stem -shkii(n)zhig, pg. 35), <îshkíwan> “nose” (stem -shkiwan, pg. 35), and <ishkắshin> “claw, finger nail” (stem -shka(n)zhiin [pl.(?) or obv.(?)], pg. 37). Because Ojibwe does not have normal words with initial /ʃk/ or /ʃt/ clusters (other than a few interjections/expressive words), these are then actually cases of Bottineau translating the English noun with the Ojibwe bare stem, but pronouncing it with a prothetic initial /i/ to avoid an illegal consonant cluster.

There does not, however, seem to be any pattern to explain the cases in which Bottineau provided the bare stem rather than the 3sg possessed form. He provided the bare stem for “tongue,” “heart,” “hand, finger,” “testicle,” and “woman’s privates [= vulva].” He also sort of did this for “clan” (= totem/doodem), except for leaving the epenthetic -d- that comes between the personal prefixes and the stem (pl. <dodḗmag> = -d-oodem-ag). For “clan,” the fact that the immediately preceding request was for the translation of “his clan” may have influenced him into providing a distinct response which contrasted with “his clan”; alternatively, doodem may already have been used by this time on its own as a non-dependent word equivalent to English plain “clan, totem,” as it is today (at least for some speakers). In the other cases, though, I don’t see any common factor, either phonological or semantic. Bottineau gives the bare stem for “testicle” and “[vulva]” but the possessed form for “penis” (the immediately preceding entry); he gives the bare stem for “hand, finger,” but the possessed form for “arm” (which even begins with the same CV sequence, and was also the immediately preceding entry!) and probably for “foot.”

Infinitives

A final English construction where Bottineau was forced to make a choice in the Ojibwe translation was infinitives. Ojibwe has no direct equivalent to English infinitives, though there are some constructions which can translate English infinitives in specific instances, such as conjunct verbs with the irrealis/future preverb ji- or da- in purposive and a number of irrealis constructions, e.g., Mii dash gakina gii-pi-izhaawaad jiimaanan ji-waabamaawaad ezhinaagozinid “So they all came in their canoes to see how he looked” (Pinesi 2011:36-37).

It would appear that Bottineau used two, or possibly three, general strategies for translating English infinitives: normal third person singular independent order inflection of the verb; or an unspecified subject form, in either the independent or conjunct order. There are also three (four) instances where he may have used an imperative form. Additionally, he used these same strategies to translate English adjectives (which correspond to verbs in Ojibwe) and, in some cases, abstract nouns. I will give a quantitative analysis first, before actually presenting the evidence that Bottineau was indeed using unspecified subject forms, since the latter is often not obvious, and requires discussion.

There are 25 instances of English prompts containing infinitive verbs (excluding those where no translation was given or where the translation uses a derivational morpheme to express what English needs a multiverb collocation to say, namely “he feigns to be sick,” which Bottineau just translated using the AI derivational suffix -kaazo “pretend to (be)”). In several instances Bottineau gave multiple alternative translations, or volunteered an Ojibwe word glossed as infinitive, so the actual number of Ojibwe equivalents to English infinitives is 30.

Most of these are intransitive verbs; the breakdown of verb category in the Ojibwe translation is: 17 VAIs, three VIIs, five VTAs, and five VTIs. (I have not counted <minikuéwing> minikwe⟨wing⟩ “to drink” [pg. 53] because I don’t know how to interpret the ending, unless it’s a mistranscription of the abstract noun minikwewin “[the act of] drinking.” Because I’m not positive what it represents, I’m also leaving it out of the discussion which follows.) The three VIIs are all plain independent singular forms, e.g., “to appear” = <náguat> = naagwad “it appears,” though one of them is interesting in that it’s translating an English transitive verb, and contains a derivational passivizing suffix: “to oil, grease” = <tûmînî́gadä> = doominigaade “it gets greased.” One of the VTIs is in a subordinate purposive clause, and therefore uses the ji-prefixing strategy mentioned above, with a PROXsg»INANsg verb in the conjunct order: “he uses fire to dry” <íshkude otabadshíto tchibása^ng> = ishkode odaabajitoo[n] ji-baasang (“s/he uses fire to dry it”).

Of the remaining 26 verbs, the following translations are found:

Frequency of different Ojibwe verb forms used by Bottineau to translate English infinitives.

Despite the relatively small sample size, some patterns should quickly be apparent. First, the imperative forms are very infrequent, and as will be discussed below, it’s possible that some or all of them are not really imperatives. Second, use of the third person (proximate animate) subject forms is very circumscribed: the only category in which they appear is independent order VAIs, and no transitive verbs appear with any subject other than an unspecified person (plus one potential imperative VTI with a 2sg subject). Third, in the remaining cases, there’s no pattern favoring independent or conjunct order verbs over the other; Bottineau genuinely seems to have chosen the independent or conjunct randomly, at least as far as I can tell. In several entries he even gave Gatschet both the independent and conjunct forms, as in “to shit” (pg. 39) = both <mî́si> (= miizii “s/he defecates, shits [not vulgar],” 3sg subject, independent) and <mísing> (= miiziing “that/if there is defecation, shitting; that/if one defecates, shits,” unspecified subject, conjunct), and “to put a corpse away” (pg. 53) = both <na-ínna> (= na’inaa “s/he is safely stored away, one safely stores him/her away,” UNSPEC»AN.PROXsg, independent) and <na-ínnind> (= na’inind “that/if s/he is safely stored away, that/if one safely stores him/her away,” UNSPEC»AN.PROXsg, conjunct).

What about the patterns when Bottineau used an Ojibwe verb to translate an English adjective or noun? In the case of adjectives, these are all expressed using independent order singular II or AI verbs, as appropriate. (Descriptive verbs predicated of people were usually given in Gatschet’s prompts as English copular constructions with predicate adjectives, e.g., “he is dirty,” rather than as bare adjective prompts like “dirty”; Bottineau translated the latter with inanimate subjects, and the former, as expected, using VAIs. Several cases in which a bare adjective was used in the English prompt, but where semantically it must or most naturally would take an animate subject, were also translated with VAIs, e.g., “healthy” [pg. 51], or “rassasié” [“satiated,” pg. 55].) The one exception to the VII being in the independent order is in the temporal clause “when strawberries are ripe” (pg. 61), which conditions conjunct marking on the verb. In one case, “intoxicating (drink),” Bottineau appears to translate the adjective (or noun? It’s not very clear what Gatschet was trying to elicit) as an imperative VAI, <kiwashkuébin> = giiwashkwebiin “be drunk!” (pg. 55), although I suspect this is actually an unspecified subject form (thus, “there is drunkenness, one is drunk”); see discussion below.

Most of the nouns in question are temporal nouns, referring to seasons, times of day, etc., which are expressed with verbs (independent or conjunct) or adverbial particles in Ojibwe, depending on the context. Bottineau primarily translated these using conjunct VIIs (e.g., “midnight” = <abî́ta tibíkak> = aabitaa-dibikak “when it is midnight,” pg. 41), but sometimes as independent VIIs, when appropriate (e.g., “day” = <gíshigat> = giizhigad “it is day(time), a day,” pg. 41). Note that it’s possible that some or most of the “conjunct VIIs” are actually adverbs, due to a change in the conjunct marking of many of these verbs in Bottineau’s speech which will be addressed below. A few of the “nouns” in English are descriptive NPs (at least equivalent to an attributive adjective + noun) which correspond to Ojibwe verbs, e.g., “salt-spring, salt water,” which are usually appropriately translated by Bottineau with independent II verbs—in this example, <shiwitágami> = zhiiwitaagami “it is salty water.”

There remain several nouns translated by verbs, however, which are neither temporal nor phrases like “salt[y] water.” These are all intransitive, and are mostly translated with singular independent order forms (“red skin” [= “s/he has red skin,” though it’s not clear whether this actually is a verb, since as written it’s missing a Final], “co-itus” [= “s/he has sex”], “sound of thunder travelling over” [= “it makes noise/can be heard passing along”], “the smoke” [= “it is smoky”], etc.). In “rain,” which Bottineau translated with an independent VII gimiwan (“it is raining, it rains,” pg. 45), it’s not clear whether Gatschet was asking for the noun or the verb in the first place, although he was probably asking for the noun, since he writes non-conjugated English verbs as to-infinitives elsewhere. Bottineau recast “chronic sickness” as an independent singular AI verb plus adverbial particle (<û́ndshita akû́si> = onjida aakozi, lit. “s/he is sick often,” pg. 55). Finally, in two certain cases (probably three), Bottineau instead translated the noun with an unspecified subject VAI (“birth” [= “that/if there is birth happening, that/if one is born”], “eating” [in the terms for meals, lit. “that there is eating, that one eats”], and probably “resting place” [= “that/if there is resting, that/if one rests”?]).

It remains to actually substantiate my claim that the unspecified subject forms are unspecified subject forms. In the case of the VTAs and of the conjunct VAIs and VTIs this should not be controversial, and is the only reasonable interpretation of the forms (e.g., VTA independent: “to put a corpse away” = <na-ínna> = na’inaa, pg. 53; VTA conjunct: “to make drink, to give to drink” = <miná-ind> = mina’ind, pg. 53; VAI conjunct: “to drink” = <minikuäng> = minikweng, pg. 53; VTI conjunct: “to give name” = <ishĭnikádaming> = izhinikaadaming, pg. 49). What is harder to demonstrate is that the VAI and VTI independent forms are unspecified subject forms. In every case, these forms, which in the relevant dialect(s) of Ojibwe end in /-m/, end in a superscript <ⁿ> in the Bottineau vocabulary.

My conclusion that these are unspecified subject verbs rests on three considerations. First and most obviously, there is the parallelism with the unspecified subject forms which Bottineau widely used when translating English infinitives as Ojibwe VTAs, conjunct VAIs, and conjunct VTIs; there is no reason to expect he would not also translate them using unspecified subject forms with independent VAIs and independent VTIs in the same manner. Second, there are a handful of cases in the vocabulary where a known final /-m/ is written with a superscript <ⁿ>, such as <nóⁿgoⁿ> for noongom “now” (pg. 45), which suggests that Bottineau may have sometimes pronounced final /-m/ as nasalization of the preceding vowel, or at least it was heard by Gatschet as such, his difficulties with nasalization already having been noted above. Finally, Gatschet sometimes wrote a morpheme the same way consistently, if he had identified it as a morpheme. For example, it was noted above that the animate plural suffix is always written by Gatschet with a final <g> (with only one exception, on the first page), even though all the other evidence in the vocabulary shows that Bottineau must have pronounced it with a voiceless [k] on at least some occasions. My best guess is therefore that Bottineau sometimes pronounced the AI/TI independent unspecified subject suffix -m as final vowel nasalization, for whatever reason, and that Gatschet generalized this to all instances where he heard something similar as a translation of an English infinitive.

One possible objection to this conclusion would be to argue that the forms in question are 2sg imperatives in /-n/, which in VTIs are very similar to the base stem of the verb. The strongest evidence for this is that there are several instances where an infinitive is translated by Bottineau with a form ending in <n>, which presumably is an imperative (two VAIs, one VTI, plus one adjective translated as a VAI [“intoxicating,” mentioned above]). However, in all four actual examples of prompts with English imperatives (five Ojibwe tokens), the final /-n/ is always written <n> by Gatschet, never with a superscript <ⁿ>. Furthermore, explaining away all these forms as imperatives fails to account for the fact that in all the conjugational categories where the unspecified subject suffix is something other than /-m/ (VTAs, conjunct VAIs, and conjunct VTIs), Bottineau translates an English infinitive with an unspecified subject form 100% of the time. Given this, it’s ultimately inconceivable that he did not translate infinitives using unspecified subject forms in independent order VAIs and VTIs at least some of the time, and the forms in final <ⁿ> are the only candidate for this. The only real question, in my mind, is whether the forms translating infinitives (and an adjective) which I have classified as “imperatives” because they were written with final <n> were really imperatives, or whether in some or all cases they were also independent unspecified subject forms which Gatschet misheard.

Oddities, Inconsistencies, Non-Idiomatic Constructions, and Ungrammaticalities

As has been alluded several times already, there are some examples in the vocabulary of non-“standard” Ojibwe, some examples of technically grammatical but non-idiomatic constructions, and a number more that are outright ungrammatical. In the retranscribed version of the vocabulary, the ungrammatical and non-standard entries are generally marked, and often commented on in the Notes, but the non-idiomatic ones are generally not. In this section I will discuss these sorts of forms more thoroughly.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that many instances of non-idiomatic constructions are likely artifacts of overly direct translation from English, rather than representing lack of fluency or errors per se on Bottineau’s part. Such over-fidelity to English is a common problem in such a fieldwork setting, particularly considering Bottineau was a fluent speaker of English since childhood. Likely examples of this phenomenon include, for instance: ishkode baashkineyaamagad for “the fire is smoking” (pg. 45, with the noun preceding the verb, where the more natural word order, if the noun is present at all, would generally be for it to follow the verb), biinad nibi for “that water is clean, pure” (pg. 47, where only the basic inanimate term for “be clean” is used, rather than the one specifying clean bodies of water: biinaagamin i’iw nibi or similar would be more natural), and “the ground is full of metal” expressed with aabikokaa aki (pg. 29, where the portion meaning “metal” is just the Medial for “metal,” abstracted out from names for specific metals, and so the verb of abundance it creates [with the suffix -kaa] is not a complete word, and where aki for “ground” here is not very specific and lacks location marking; one more natural possibility would be something like anaamakamig biiwaabikokaa “there is lots of iron [or, ‘there are many pieces of metal’] underground,” among others [NB: this may actually need to be something like anaamakamig dazhi-biiwabikokaa]).

One other issue to consider, before looking further at the examples of non-standard, unidiomatic, and ungrammatical forms in this vocabulary, is whether any of them were introduced by Gatschet rather than by Bottineau. Both Costa (1991a:37, 2003:22) and Whittaker (1996:375) discuss shortcomings with Gatschet’s recordings of other Algonquian languages (Miami-Illinois and Sauk, respectively). In Costa’s view, Gatschet was simply not a very good Algonquianist, in the sense of having a good feel for Algonquian grammar—and this was two decades after his collection of the Bottineau vocabulary, a period which included additional, though limited, fieldwork on Ojibwe dialects and some other Algonquian languages, and extensive fieldwork on Shawnee—which led him to sometimes create spurious forms. Whittaker (1996:375, n. 11) describes this issue in Gatschet’s Sauk field notes:

Every so often, the entries in Gatschet’s notebooks suggest that he attempted to determine the stem of a noun or verb on the basis of a single form available to him, and then to construct sample inflected forms on the basis of this, rather than of specific forms provided by speakers. In this fashion a number of ungrammatical, indeed impossible, forms appear scattered among plausible and verifiable ones.

Costa (2003:22) also states that “much spurious data, often of his own creation, is to be found in Gatschet’s [Miami-Illinois] notes,” and that Whittaker’s “observations . . . match with remarkable accuracy what I have observed of Gatschet’s Miami-Illinois materials.” To take one example, Gatschet’s Miami-Illinois notes include a few conjunct verb forms with personal prefixes (e.g., <ndaixkwiáni> for “I am hungry,” instead of conjunct *<aixkwiáni> or independent *<ndaixkwi>), an impossible combination in Algonquian (Costa 1991a:38).

This is obviously a serious issue, and means it’s not always easy to tell whether an incorrect form was indeed provided by Bottineau or simply assumed by Gatschet. Given the practices described above, there no doubt are some incorrect forms in the Bottineau vocabulary for which the blame should be laid at Gatschet’s feet, not Bottineau’s. One example I consider quite likely is briefly mentioned in Note H, namely a queried animate plural form given for “living plant in water” (pg. 29: <winibig (pl. winibígog?)>), where “living plant in water” is probably to be interpreted as “water [stagnant enough that it permits] plants/algae to grow there,” and where the noun, since it refers to a body of water, would not normally be pluralized, but in any case is certainly inanimate. Since this entry occurs in connection with the name of the Winnebagoes (Ho-Chunks), whose name in Ojibwe of course does take an animate plural suffix, I believe Gatschet was simply confused here, and thought that the word describing a kind of body of water was fully homophonous with the ethnonym derived from that term, including taking the same plural suffix; he evidently did not understand the difference between inanimate and animate gender in Algonquian languages at this point, though he surely noticed there were two different kinds of plural suffixes.

Nevertheless, there are two factors which suggest that these forms must have been minimal, and that the Bottineau vocabulary therefore can still tell us a great deal about Bottineau’s speech. First, when Gatschet collected it he had, as far as I know, no prior exposure to Ojibwe, and little if any exposure to any Algonquian language. He barely attempted to elicit any sentences, phrases, or any sort of grammatical features or categories in the course of his session with Bottineau, beyond plurals. He had almost nothing to go on, then, in constructing forms of his own of the types described by Whittaker and Costa. Second, the sheer number of “improper” forms in the Bottineau vocabulary both contain a number of patterns that would have been difficult or impossible for Gatschet to have constructed with the material he had available, as well as simply dwarf the volume of spurious forms which Whittaker and Costa imply exist in Gatschet’s field notes for other languages (and the volume of such forms I’ve found on cursory examination of Gatschet’s other field notes of Ojibwe). There are simply too many, of all different sorts, to allow for any conclusion other than that Bottineau was responsible for the vast majority of them.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the questionable forms themselves.

Non-Standard Forms

In several cases, Bottineau has forms which are not “standard” Ojibwe, but are not errors. Rather, they reflect apparent regularization of some grammatical structures and a resultant reduction of allomorphy. The two most obvious and notable examples involve the conjunct suffixes on nasal-final AI stems, and various resolutions of pseudo-/n/-final II stems.

The AI conjunct suffixes in Ojibwe are 1sg -aan, 2sg -an, 3sg -d, 3pl -waa-d, etc. The great majority of AI stems end in a vowel, and when any of these suffixes which begin in a vowel are appended to the stem, an epenthetic -y- is interposed between the stem and suffix, e.g., aakozi “s/he is sick,” aakoziyaan “that/if I am sick,” etc., but aakozid “that/if s/he is sick,” aakoziwaad “that/if they are sick.” If the AI stem instead ends in a consonant (always a nasal), the conjunct suffix is simply added to the stem without modification, except that the 3sg suffix -d becomes -g and the 3pl suffix is preceded by an epenthetic -o-: thus, e.g., bangishin “s/he falls down,” bangishinaan “that/if I fall down,” etc., but bangishing “that/if s/he falls down,” bangishinowaad “that/if they fall down.”

While not terribly significant, this does obviously create allomorphy in the conjunct suffixes. As mentioned in Note A, the vocabulary shows that Bottineau’s speech eliminated this allomorphy by generalizing the more common -yaan, -d (etc.) variants, and connecting them to nasal-final AI stems with the epenthetic linking -i- which is regularly used in combining any morphemes that would result in a consonant cluster (with a few archaic, irregular exceptions). Thus, for the conjunct conjugation of dagoshin “arrive (AI)” (pp. 45-47), Bottineau provides: <tagushini/ā́n> 1sg (-i-yaan instead of -aan), <tagushiniắn> 2sg (-i-yan instead of -an), <tagushinĭ́t> 3sg (-i-d instead of -g), <tagúshenia^ng> 1pl (-i-ya(a)ng instead of -a(a)ng), <tagushiniég> 2pl (-i-yeg instead of -eg), and <tagusheniwát> 3pl (-i-waad instead of -o-waad). While this is the only verb in the vocabulary attesting this, it seems reasonable to assume that Bottineau had these forms for all nasal-final VAIs, thus making conjunct AI endings the same on all verbs.^[18] (However, the one other potential such verb in the vocabulary seems to attest the ending 3pl -owaad, not the restructured -iwaad: <nisabómoad> “when [they] go down stream” = niisaaboonowaad, pg. 61 . . .)

The second prominent example of “non-standard,” restructured forms involves certain VIIs—primarily verbs related to time(s) of the day and year and to properties of liquids—whose stems end in /-n/ in the independent order, but irregularly drop this /n/ from their stem in the conjunct, e.g., onaagoshin “it is evening,” but conjunct onaagoshig “when it is evening” (onaagoshiØ-g) not ^xonaagoshing (onaagoshin-g). In the Bottineau vocabulary, all such verbs have been regularized to eliminate the allomorphy of the verb stem. For verbs which involve time periods, the stems now end in /n/ in both the independent and conjunct. Thus, for example, on page 41 “evening” appears as both <unagû́shin> (= onaagoshin, independent) and <unagû́shîng> (= onaagoshing, conjunct).

In Eastern Ojibwe, Odawa, and Nipissing, this allomorphy has been eliminated in the other direction, by removing the /n/ from the independent, thus, e.g., onaagoshi “it is evenining” (Valentine 1994:131, 853), and this is evidently also the strategy found in the Bottineau vocabulary for verbs describing liquids, as seen in <shiwitágami> “salt-spring = salt water; salty [said of] liquids” (= zhiiwitaagami “it is salty liquid,” pp. 27, 57—though I should note there are some problems of interpretation of this form that I don’t have space to get into—instead of standard zhiiwitaagamin; cf. conjunct zhiiwitaagamig = zhiiwitaagamiØ-g). It may also be attested in <wînágami nî́bî> “muddy water” on page 47, but this could be interpreted as either wiinaagami nibi “the water is muddy” with a reanalyzed verb, or as wiinaagami-nibi “muddy water” with “muddy” expressed as a prenoun.^[19]

Non-Idiomatic Constructions

There are many constructions given by Bottineau which range from slightly awkward sounding, or just having better-sounding alternatives available, to being so un-idiomatic that they border on or might be considered ungrammatical. As discussed above, it’s surely the case that some of these are the expected result of translating the English prompt too literally (such as by retaining the original English word order or retaining equivalents to all the words in the English prompt even when it is overly specific to do so), and while in a number of instances one can make reasonable guesses about when this was the case, this is not always clear.

One of the most dramatically non-idiomatic examples, to the extent that it’s ungrammatical, can illustrate the difficulties of determining this, as well as of distinguishing between potential errors of Bottineau’s and those introduced by Gatschet. On page 53 is the entry, “he lives in a cave,” with the Ojibwe given as <pimádisiⁿ waníkaⁿ> and the latter word then glossed as meaning “in a dug-out, hole.” This represents bimaadizi(m[?]) waanikaan, which is wrong on several levels, including the term used for “live in a certain place” (bimaadizi only means “live” in the senses of “be alive” or “live one’s life in a certain manner”); the absence from the verb of a relative root specifying location, or barring that, the use of a verb which acts morphosyntactically as though it contains such a root; the apparent inflection of the verb as an unspecified subject form (so, lit. “there is living, a cave”) rather than 3sg subject form; the lack of a locative suffix on the noun; and the word order (the noun virtually always must immediately precede the verb in this type of construction). The noun used is also, generally speaking, not a great equivalent for “cave,” since it normally refers, as the gloss on the same line indicates, to an excavated hole or pit. “Cave” is usually waazh, which also refers to an animal’s den. However, Wright’s vocabulary and grammar sketch of the Red Lake Ojibwe of the mid to late 1800s translates “In winter the bear lives in a cave” as <I-ma wă-ni-kan-ĭng tu-ni-zi mû-kwû be-bo-nĭn-i-nĭk> = Imaa waanikaaning danizi makwa bebooninig (Wright n.d.:135). So a couple actual, natural ways of expressing the prompt “he lives in a cave” in Bottineau’s dialect would probably have been waanikaaning danizi or waanikaaning daa.

One thing to note about this entry is that it immediately follows the entries for “life” (bimaadiziwin) and “to live” (<pimádisiⁿ> = bimaadizim “there is living, one lives” [unspecified subject form]). Bottineau’s choice of verb for the entry in question, therefore, may well have been influenced by the context of the immediately preceding translation requests; it’s also entirely possible, if not likely, that Gatschet misheard or miswrote the verb to have a final <ⁿ> like the preceding entry which Bottineau never pronounced, if Gatschet did not just copy the verb over from the preceding entry himself.

Some other non-idiomatic constructions seem more likely to be the result of over-fidelity to the English prompt when translating—some potential examples of this have already been given above. Other possible examples could include, for instance, “backbone, dorsal spine” which is translated as opikwan okan, which again is not merely unidiomatic but ungrammatical, and just literally means “his/her-back his/her-bone.” I’m not positive what the actual word for “his/her backbone/spine” in Bottineau’s dialect should have been, since there are several words for “backbone” or “spine” in Ojibwe, although Wright (n.d.:7) and Jones et al. (2011:59, 80, 88) suggest it would most likely have been odatagaagwan. Of course, while this example was surely at least in part a result of literally translating from English and demonstrates some lack of command over Ojibwe derivational morphology, it would not have been possible without Bottineau failing to know the native word for “backbone” in the first place.

In any event, in other cases a “wrong” form being due to literal translation from English is less obvious, and the explanation could just be that this was an area where Bottineau did not have firm control over idiomatic, native Ojibwe usage. For reasons of space, and also due to my own lack of firm control over idiomatic Ojibwe (as well as because some words may have changed a bit in meaning over the years, or in some dialects), I’m not going to catalogue every potential instance here; just be aware that there are additional examples which I have not marked in the retranscribed vocabulary.

Ungrammatical or Impossible Forms

In addition to forms that are merely unidiomatic, the vocabulary also contains a very substantial number of forms which are outright ungrammatical, or otherwise impossible. I will first discuss a somewhat motley collection some key examples, before turning to the four areas where these forms are most evident: plural concord, obviation, noun plurals, and word stress (though the question of obviation comes with a significant qualification), in addition to discussing Bottineau’s apparent lack of productive participle formation.

One quite significant example of an ungrammatical form may have been more widespread in Bottineau’s speech, but since there is only one entry where the feature could have occurred, there’s no way to be sure. The feature in question is negation marking on verbs. Failing to inflect a negative verb for negation is ungrammatical. (There are some qualifications to this in certain northern and western Ojibwe dialects, but nothing relevant to what the speech of Bottineau’s family and community would have been.) In the one example in our vocabulary with a verb following a negative particle, however, Bottineau gives the positive form of the verb: “healthy” (pg. 51) is given as <kawínakúsi> = gaawiin aakozi (not s/he.is.sick); this should instead be gaawiin aakozisii with the negative suffix -sii on the verb.

Now for some other more isolated ungrammatical examples:

• The list of conjugations for “have an offspring” (pg. 23) has a few oddities; one is that in most cases the verbs are missing an internal syllable -nii- (e.g., nindoojaanis instead of nindooniijaanis for “I have an offspring”), for which I don’t have a great explanation, though see footnote 20 below. The other problem is that the form with a 2sg subject is incorrectly conjugated. VAIs which end in a short vowel, as “have a child” does, drop this vowel in the 1sg and 2sg conjugations, but retain it in the 3sg or when further suffixes (including for plural subjects) are added—thus, oniijaanisi “he, she has an offspring” and nindoo[nii]jaanis are correct. But the 2sg form, “you have an offspring,” is given as <kîdudshánissî> = gidoo[nii]jaanisi, when this should be gidooniijaanis. This seems like one of the better candidates for an incorrect form which is due to Gatschet’s interference, or at least writing down what he was expecting to hear rather than what Bottineau really said.^[20]
• The word given for “stallion” on page 25, aabewasim, would seem to be impossible. It consists of the correct Final for “dog/horse,” -asim, but the Initial, “aabew-” is also a Final, meaning “male, male animal,” NOT an Initial. The Initial should be naabe- (“male, male animal, buck”), and the resulting word naabesim. (Possibly Bottineau mixed up the Final -aabe, the Initial naabe-, and the separate word/Initial ayaabe(-) “buck, bull ungulate”?) Despite having the “correct” form of the Final for “dog/horse” in the singular, the plural given for this word is also incorrect, but this issue will be addressed below.
• On page 25, the plural of <winû̆´ka> “it is soft” is given as <winûkawag> “they are soft.” While I don’t know what the initial <wi> of this verb represents, the remainder is nookaa “it is soft, tender,” which is a VII, i.e., a verb with an inanimate subject. However, the plural form Bottineau provides uses the animate plural (AI) suffix -wag. The actual form for “they (INAN) are soft” should be ⟨wi⟩nookaawan.
• In “he washes himself with soap” (pg. 47), both verbs are in the independent order (giziibiigii giziibiiga’igan odaabajitoon = he.washes.himself soap he.uses.it), but the second should be conjunct (thus, aabajitood), or else there needs to be a some sort of pause after the first verb to render the second two words part of a different clause (i.e, “he washes himself; he uses soap,” which is unlikely to be what Bottineau was going for).
• There are numerous problems with both the form/grammaticality as well as the proper interpretation of <unawádshin upînig> “he roasts potatoes” on page 49. Some are discussed in Note Z, and another is addressed below in the section on obviation.
• On page 63, “we dry fish” is given as giigoonyag nimbaaswaamin, with the TA stem baasw- inflected for 1pl.EXCL»PROXpl (independent order) with the first person (= exclusive) prefix ni-, the “direct” (animate third person object) theme sign -aa, and the 1pl suffix -min. However, the inflection of ni-…-min for 1pl.EXCL is only for VAIs and VTIs; the correct inflection in VTAs is ni-…-aa-naan, plus in this case a marker for the plural object, -ig, so giigoonyag nimbaaswaanaanig. (The inflection ni-…-aa-min is used for 1pl.EXCL»PROX inflection in Oji-Cree and Western Algonquin, but not in other dialects.) That this was the correct inflection for Bottineau is borne out by examples elsewhere in the vocabulary which use this very inflection, e.g., ningii-nisaanaan “we killed [a deer]” (pg. 49).

Participles

Ojibwe participles are the equivalent of and serve as relative clauses as well as forming more nominal-like words which often become lexicalized as new nouns. They use conjunct morphology—though in some dialects certain of the suffixes differ from normal conjunct suffixes—and they also either have a relativizing preverb, usually gaa-, before the verb, or apply the ablaut process known as “initial change” (which involves either changing one vowel to another or infixing an /-aj-/ sequence) to the first vowel of the verbal word. There is reason to think that Bottineau did not have a productive process of participle formation, only retaining some fossilized participles, though this is difficult to determine confidently because there are basically only five data points in the vocabulary to go by. These are the terms for “west” (pg. 41), “where are [were] you born?” (pg. 53), “flour” (pg. 55), “baked/cooked bread” (pg. 55), and “white man” and “white woman” (pg. 27).

The form Bottineau gives for “west” is a participle formed using the preverb gaa-: gaa-bangishimong, lit. “where the sun sets.” The interpretation of the form he gives for Gatschet’s prompt “where are you born?” is ambiguous: for the verb, Bottineau gives gaa-nitaawigiyan, which could either be a present tense form with the relativizing gaa- and mean “that you are born,” or a past tense form with the past tense preverb gii- plus initial change (hence, /iː/ → /aː/) and mean “that you were born,” though it is more likely to be the second option, with Bottineau rather naturally interpreting Gatschet’s “where are you born?” as really asking for a translation of “where were you born?” (assuming Gatschet even phrased it that way, as opposed to just writing it incorrectly in the notebook). For both “flour” and “baked bread” Bottineau provided improper collocations, bakwezhigan biisizid and bakwezhigan giizizod, which taken literally mean something like “wheat/bread, being ground” and “wheat/bread, being baked,” but biisizid and giizizod, the conjuncts of “it (AN) is ground up fine” and “it (AN) is baked/cooked,” are plain conjunct forms, not participles as are required here. (The correct forms for Bottineau, given the time and place, would probably have been baasizid-bakwezhigan and gaazizod-bakwezhigan; cf. Baraga’s [1853:85, 500] <bássisid pakwejigan>/<bassisid pakwejigan> “flour” and [1853:133] <Gasisod pakwejigan> “baked bread” and Wilson’s [1874:235] <páusezid> + <buhquázhegun> “flour.”)

Finally, the forms for “white man” (waabishkiiwed inini, pl. wayaabishkiiwed ininiwag) and “white woman” (waabishkiiwekwe, pl. wayaabishkiiwekweg) are totally bizarre, as discussed at length in Note AF. I will simply repeat here most of what I say there. The forms Bottineau has given do reflect one of the terms for “white person,” which is based on the participial form of waabishkiiwe “s/he is a white person.” The singular form for “white man” is unproblematic: waabishkiiwed inini does mean “white man” (lit. “man who is white”) in Northern Minnesota and Border Lakes Ojibwe. But the plural form is not: the participle ungrammatically retains the conjunct third person singular ending -d (so literally “men who he-is-white”), and now takes initial change (waa- → wayaa-) as found in the more southern and eastern varieties of Southwestern Ojibwe in both the singular and plural of this word; the same thing occurs in the word for “white woman.” It’s as though the use of initial change has replaced the use of a third person plural conjunct/participial suffix to mark plurality in participles.

It seems pretty clear that the use of participial morphology of whatever kind was erratic at best, and Bottineau doesn’t seem to have known what the morphology was actually used for—hence its absence in “flour” and “baked bread,” and partially in “white man,” plus the weird use of initial change as an ersatz plural marker in “white man”/“white woman.” While as noted it’s very few examples to judge by, the impression one gets is thus that Bottineau did not have participialization as a productive grammatical process, but retained it in some essentially fossiziled forms. The term for “west” is clearly lexicalized (the normal lexicalized form similar to Bottineau’s is e-bangishimog, with e- rather than gaa-, but both forms mean “where the sun sets” [or more literally and charmingly, “where it (the sun) dances down”]), and “where were you born?” is also a question that would be likely learned early on as a unit, certainly not something Bottineau would need to construct extemporaneously. Similarly, the terms for white people are lexicalized, even though Bottineau has somehow combined the northern and southern forms together. In the final two cases, of “flour” and “baked bread,” Bottineau did not use participial morphology at all.

Plural Concord

A number of clauses in the vocabulary show lack of plural concord between a verb and associated argument. Lack of plural concord between a verb and its subject is apparently found twice on page 45 in two contiguous entries, “because the wood is wet” (misan nibiiwan onji with plural misan “firewood” and singular nibiiwan “it is wet”; this should be misan nibiiwanoon onji) and “this firewood is dry” (misan baatemagad / baatemagad misan, again with plural misan but singular baatemagad “it is dry”; the verb should be baatemagadoon). One simple possible explanation for this would be that in Bottineau’s speech, misan had been reanalyzed as a singular noun, like English “firewood” (and perhaps directly influenced by singular mass nouns like English “firewood” and invariant singular/plural nouns like French bois (de chauffage)). This would surely have been helped by the fact that “firewood” is an irregular noun in Ojibwe in the first place, with singular mishi but plural misan. In fact, just such a reanalysis has taken place for some speakers of modern Nishnaabemwin, where msan is now mass “firewood” or singular “piece of firewood” with a new, regular plural msanan. An additional form in our vocabulary with an incorrect plural verb form, although it’s not an issue of plural concord per se, is that the entry for “yellow” on page 25 is given as: “osáwa, pl. osáwa” (where the plural should be ozaawaawan, not ozaawaa), but this seems more likely to be an oversight, misunderstanding, or miswriting by Gatschet than a mistake by Bottineau.

There are also several examples of lack of plural concord between verb and its object, and here there are no easy explanations for the incorrect forms other than errors by Bottineau. On page 49 there are several of sentences relating to people killing “many deer.” While in the Ojibwe translations, the noun “deer” is always plural (waawaashkeshiwag), in none of the cases is the verb inflected for a plural object: “I kill many deer” waawaashkeshiwag ninisaa (should be ninisaag), “we kill many deer” waawaashkeshiwag ninisaanaan (should be ninisaanaanig), and “each of us killed many deer” waawaashkeshiwag ninisaanaan dedibinawe (should be ninisaanaanig). On page 51 there are three sentences expressing “I burnt my [body part],” one of which (“I burnt my hair off”) is correct, but the other two have multiple problems. One problem concerns the verb used, which may either be the VTA jaagizw- “burn someone” or the VAI jaagizo “burn up,” but which in either case is inappropriate to use with inanimate body parts as objects (or . . . weird obliques). If the verb is the TA, then the first sentence, “I burnt my arm,” also lacks plural concord since the Ojibwe translation actually has ninikan “arms,” and the entry should then read ningii-chaagizwaanan ninikan (or properly, with a TI verb, ningii-chaagizaanan ninikan) or universally singular ningii-chaagizwaan ninik (or properly, with a TI verb, ningii-chaagizaan ninik), not ningii-chaagiz ninikan. The fact that “I burnt my arse” uses the locative form of “anus,” ninjiidiing, though, suggests these are in fact meant to be VAIs—which would help explain why the verbs otherwise appear to be uninflected except for person prefixes—and so mean something like “I am burned, [it’s] on my anus” and “I am burned, my arms” (still unidiomatic, though I think something like ningii-chaagiz omaa ninjiidiing and ningii-chaagiz omaa ninikaning would be fine?)

Two final examples of lack of plural concord between a verb and one of its arguments are found on consecutive entries on page 63. The first, “we dry fish [pl.]” (giigoonyag nimbaaswaamin) was mentioned above because it also uses the incorrect conjugation for a VTA 1pl.EXCL»PROX independent form in general; in addition to this, though, it is missing the plural object suffix -ig, and should be giigoonyag nimbaaswaanaanig. The second entry, “the fish we tie up in bundles,” is a mess on multiple levels. Bottineau was apparently attempting to rephrase it as “the fish are tied up together in bundles,” but produced giigoonyag maamawi-gashkapide⟨^ng⟩, in which the verb is II, not AI, and ends in a -ng sequence which I’m not positive how to interpret (possibly the conjunct AI unspecified subject inflection?). In any case—even ignoring that the wrong verb class altogether is being used—it’s not an ending compatible with a plural subject or object. If Bottineau was trying to say “the fish are tied up together in bundles,” something like maamawi-gashkapizowag igiw giigoonyag would at least be grammatical (although I’m not sure how idiomatic it is, since I get the sense that maamawi- wouldn’t really be used here, but . . . my instincts on this should be considered close to worthless). Additionally, there is no plural concord on the plural “participle” of “white man,” but as discussed above this is more complicated.

While there are thus a significant number of cases where plural concord is lacking, there are three examples where it is present and results in grammatical phrases/clauses. The first is “the thunder is rolling, is noisy” on page 45, which is literally “the Thunderers call out/are heard” (noondaagoziwag Animikiig). The other two examples are in two contiguous temporal phrases on page 61, “when strawberries are ripe” (apii ode’iminan editegin) and “when the fish go down stream” (apii giigoonyag nisaaboonowaad). Some things should be noted about the “correct” forms, however. First, “the thunder is noisy” was almost certainly a set phrase for Bottineau and not a separate verb and its nominal subject which he had come up with separately himself.^[21] The two temporal phrases on page 61 are thus the only real examples in the vocabulary in which Bottineau correctly conjugates a verb with a plural subject or object expressed as a separate nominal. They also have one thing in common which is not shared by any of the other, incorrect examples: the verbs are conjunct, not independent. Unfortunately the very small number of total examples to judge from means I don’t know whether this means Bottineau had better command of pluralization of conjunct verbs and maintained plural concord with them but had lost it for independent verbs.

Obviation

One of the more difficult aspects of Algonquian grammar for someone more comfortable with European languages like English or French to master is obviation. While there are not many opportunities to manifest this, it still seems clear from the vocabulary that Bottineau had little or no command over obviation, and almost always gave forms which did not have marking of obviation where it is grammatically required. (But see footnote 22 linked further below for some important qualifications.)

Of the seven Ojibwe responses where obviative marking on a noun is grammatically required, Bottineau provided full, correct obviative marking just once and failed to provide it five times; the final case is ambiguous. Furthermore, the “correct” form is probably not actually an instance of Bottineau correctly using obviation, as will be discussed. The seven responses are:

• “His, her offspring” oniijaanis, pg. 23. This breaks down as o-niijaanis = 3-child, but any animate third person which is possessed by another third person must be obviative, so this is ungrammatical. The correct form would be oniijaanisan, with the obviative suffix -an.
• “She has born [sic] 4 children” gii-nitaawigi’aan niiwin abinoo(nh)jiiyag, pg. 53. While the initial verb here is partially correct (showing the animate third person object/“direct” theme sign -aa followed by the obviative suffix -an = -aan, but incorrectly lacking the third person prefix o-; possibly it was pronounced but Gatschet just failed to hear it?), since the mother is proximate, any other third persons in the clause—in this case her children—must be obviative and marked as such, which they are not (instead simply taking the animate plural suffix). The correct form in Bottineau’s dialect would be ogii-nitaawigi’aan niiwin abinoonhjiiyan. (This would usually be more natural with the numeral niiwin or the entire object NP preceding the verb instead [niiwin ogii-nitaawigi’aan abinoonhjiiyan, etc.], but I don’t think it’s strictly ungrammatical for the full NP to follow the verb.)
• “She has born [sic] twins” niizhoodeg ogii-nitaawigi’aan, pg. 53. This immediately follows the preceding entry, and the same comments basically apply, except that here the verb is entirely correct. The correct form for the whole would be niizhooden ogii-nitaawigi’aan.
• “His clan” odoodem, pg. 59. Since “clan, totem (doodem)” is an animate noun, once again it must be obviative if possessed by another third person, but is not. The correct form is odoodeman. Incidentally, we know that “clan” continued to be an animate noun in Bottineau’s speech because the plural is given on the same page as doodemag.
• “Spirit of dead” [also means “soul”] ojichaag, pg. 63. It’s not completely clear if this is a possessed form, “his/her soul/spirit,” or an ad hoc or reanalyzed independent noun, “soul/spirit.” The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary and Nishnaabemwin Online Dictionary only list a dependent noun, stem -jichaagw-, in which case this would have to represent a possessed form, and therefore have to take an obviative suffix (as ojichaagwan), making Bottineau’s form incorrect. However, the Freelang Ojibwe Dictionary lists ojichaag as an acceptable non-dependent stem in Southwestern Ojibwe, which is borne out by a couple attestations of its use as an abstract noun which I’ve found (e.g., here), and (Gichi-)Ojichaag seems to be used in some Christian works as a non-dependent stem to refer to the Holy Spirit. If Bottineau’s “ojichaag” is just a non-dependent “soul/spirit,” then it is not ungrammatical because there’s no possession by another third person that would trigger obligatory obviation.
• “His [Nanabush’s] grandmother” on page 65 is given as both ookomis and Ninabozho ookomisan. The latter is correct (with the obviative suffix -an since again we have an animate third person possessed by another third person), but the former lacks the obviative suffix and is thus incorrect.

Some further comments are in order on the “correct” form, the phrase Ninabozho ookomisan “Nanabush’s grandmother.” This is probably not a true, conscious correct use of obviation by Bottineau; rather, like “thunder is noisy,” he likely picked up “Nanabush’s grandmother” as a set phrase, rather than strictly as two separate words. In the Nanabush myth cycle, his grandmother is by far the most important other character (along with his wolf kinsman). Nanabush’s mother dies in childbirth, and many stories from the cycle begin with Nanabush being raised by his grandmother. She is the only other humanlike character he ever interacts with in a consistently positive manner and/or for an extended period of time, and the only character with whom he has any sort of close, meaningful bond (again, excepting the wolf kinsman). Her constant presence in the stories means that “Nanabush’s grandmother” is a phrase which is certainly not infrequent. It should thus not be especially surprising if Bottineau could provide the Ojibwe for “Nanabush’s grandmother” without grammatical errors, but fail to do so when attempting to simply provide the Ojibwe for “his grandmother.” The other possibility is that the <okómis> on the same line as Ninabozho ookomisan is just an attempt to give the bare stem for “grandmother” without any inflection (i.e., underlying |ookomis| instead of third person possessed |o-ookomis(-an)|), just as Bottineau gave a number of inalienably possessed body parts in the form of their bare stem.^[22]

A final case that is in some way an example of incorrect usage of obviation is “he roasts potatoes” (pg. 49), which is given as <unawádshin upînig>. As discussed in Note Z, I don’t entirely know how to analyze the verb <unawádshin>, but whatever it is, it’s not a proper PROXsg»OBV form (potatoes are animate), and in any case, given that potatoes are animate, they should be marked here as obviative (opiniin, not opiniig), but are not.

Plurals

Most of the plural forms of nouns which Bottineau gives are unexceptional, but a non-trivial number are either suspect, or truly bizarre and impossible. There are basically three types of aberrant plurals in the vocabulary. First, there are plurals in which a less common plural suffix appears to have been replaced by a more basic/unmarked variant. Second, there are words which appear to have double plural marking, with more than one plural suffix. And third, there are completely incomprehensible forms in which pluralization involves something that is not a possible Ojibwe plural suffix, or some sort of weird alteration to the shape of the noun stem itself in addition to a plural suffix.

The most basic forms of the Ojibwe plural suffixes are -an for inanimate nouns and -ag for animate nouns, but there are a number of different inflectional noun classes which take different plural forms (-n/g, -wan/g, -oon/g, -iin/g, and -yan/g); the shape of the suffix can sometimes be known or guessed from the phonological shape of the noun stem, its animacy, and its semantics, but usually it is not predictable, and a noun’s inflectional class and thus its plural suffix, as well as other inflectional suffixes, must simply be memorized. The first type of case noted above is analogous to the regularization of suffix allomorphy in nasal-final VAI conjuncts and stem allomorphy in pseudo-/n/-final VIIs, in that it appears to merely involve a simplification of the language that reduces variant forms and increases regularity: there are several words in the vocabulary in which one of these more marked plural suffixes has been replaced with the unmarked -an/-ag. These words are:

1. “stallion”: sg. <abéwassim>, pl. <abéwassimag> (should be aabewasimoog) (actually this word has additional problems, as noted above, and should be naabesim +oog), pg. 25.
2. “Sauks”: sg. <Osági>, pl. <oságiag> (implying Ozaagii +yag, instead of Ozaagii +g), pg. 27.^[23]
3. “leather, buckskin”: sg. <pashkuégin>, pl. <pashkuégînan> (should be bashkweginoon), pg. 35.
4. “stomach” (actually “his/her intestine, guts”): sg. <onágish>, pl. <onagíshan> (should be onagizhiin), pg. 35.
5. “posteriors” (actually “his/her anus, rectum”): sg. <odshī́t>/<witchī́t>, pl. <witchítan> (should be ojiidiin), pg. 39.
6. “egg”: sg. <wáwan>, pl. <wáwanan> (should be waawanoon), pg. 41.^[24]

The biggest question about this first category is whether it actually does reflect sporadic simplification by Bottineau (or his family/community), or whether this is a case of Gatschet’s inserting incorrect forms into data otherwise provided by his consultant by overgeneralizing patterns he thought existed, as was discussed above. These forms are indeed probably among the best candidates for such Gatschet-introduced spurious forms in the whole vocabulary; unlike in many other instances of incorrect forms, here Gatschet would have had a clear pattern in the existing data to misapply to other words, since he collected the plurals of almost all nouns and would quickly have determined that all of them ended in either -g or -n, and the most basic were -ag and -an. He would then essentially be doing what I have suggested above that Bottineau was doing.

While I acknowledge this is possible, several considerations militate against it. First and most importantly, the first “overextended unmarked” plural form (“stallion”) occurs on just the second page of the vocabulary, near the top of the page; by that point, counting variantly-transcribed forms within a single entry separately, Gatschet had collected just 13 plural forms, and of these, only three had actually followed the pattern of “stallion” (a consonant-final noun stem with plural suffix -ag [there were no inanimate plurals yet]). It’s hard to imagine how Gatschet could have been making (over)generalizations at this stage of inquiry. Second, a number of entries have “pl.” written, but then lack a plural form, indicating that Gatschet was intending to ask Bottineau for the plural form, but for whatever reason, was not able to; note, though, that he did not in these cases attempt to construct his own plural form. He simply left the space empty. While it’s obviously possible that in other instances in the vocabulary he behaved otherwise, to me this suggests he had so little exposure to Ojibwe or Algonquian at this point that, in spite of his later improper insertion of his own data when working on other languages, here he was not confident enough to do an appreciable amount of this with Ojibwe. And third, these “simplified” plurals are completely in line with both the existence of other more bizarrely wrong plural forms in the vocabulary—which Gatschet almost certainly did not or could not have constructed—as well as other instances of reduction of allomorphy as discussed above. The simplest explanation, absent compelling evidence, is that these forms are due to Bottineau, not to Gatschet.

The second type of aberrant plurals is nouns which appear to have multiple plural suffixes rather than one, with the extra plural suffix(es) always being the unmarked inanimate -an. It’s hard to know what to make of these forms. Someone with an incomplete command of the language replacing more marked forms with less marked ones is very easy to understand and should not be a surprise, but there’s no possible motivation I can conceive of for adding extra inanimate plural suffixes to a few random nouns. Your guess is as good as mine, though it’s interesting that all three examples are body part terms and occur on page 37 (two directly adjacent to each other); note also that two of the six “simplified” plurals are body part terms, and as will be seen below, so are both instances of completely bizarre plurals, and of plural forms which contain additional material in the stem compared to the singular form.^[25] In any event, the three nouns in question are:

1. “arm with fingers” (the form is possessed: “his/her arm”): sg. <unî́k>, pl. <unî́kanan> = sg. onik, pl. onik +an +an (should be onik +an), pg. 37.
2. “hand, finger,” pg. 37. In this case, Bottineau actually provided both the correct plural and the double-marked plural: sg. <nî́nsh>, pl. <nînshî́n> and <nî́nshînan> = sg. -ninj, pl. -ninj +iin and -ninj +iin +an. He also provided the correct plural in another word ending in the same morpheme, “fist” (pg. 37): sg. <pikuákunînsh>, pl. <pikuaku nî́nshin> = bikwaakoninj +iin.
3. “testicles,” pg. 37. This is the most spectacularly weird of the multiply-marked plurals. The singular, or at least the “headword,” is given as <nî́shiwag>, which at least historically is the plural form, -nishiw +ag “testicles.” The plural is then given as <nishiwáganan> = -nishiw +ag +an +an. (One thing to note here is that “testicle” is animate, hence the plural suffix -ag, yet the two extra plural suffixes are both inanimate!) I don’t know whether the historical plural had been reanalyzed as a singular since “testicle” is so often pluralized, or whether Gatschet in fact asked for the translation of “testicles,” as he wrote in the English column, and Bottineau consequently provided him with what he considered the plural form, and then Gatschet asked for the plural of that and Bottineau just . . . added more plural suffixes? Or something? Or maybe the explanation is neither of these.

The third type of aberrant plurals consists of two words in which the plural suffixes simply are not possible Ojibwe plural suffixes and the forms are completely bizarre. The first is “heart” (pg. 35), where the singular is given as <dé>/<té> = -de’. The correct plural of this is the unmarked inanimate plural, -de’an. However, the form given by Bottineau/Gatschet is <ténan>, which I’m not even sure how to interpret. Is the final glottal stop of the stem replaced with /n/ = -denan? Is an /n/ plus the plural suffix just added to the stem = -de’nan (resulting in an illegal cluster)? Is the final glottal stop absent from the stem entirely for Bottineau—but there’s still an unexplained extra /n/ in the plural form (perhaps this would then be another double-marked plural, with the first plural suffix being -n: -de +n +an)? I don’t know.

The second such word, which has even more problems, is “claw, finger nail” (pg. 37), where the singular is given as <ishkắshin> = -{i}shka(n)zhiin, which is the obviative form, not the singular, which would be -shka(n)zh. The form given as the plural appears to read <ishkáshian>, but -{i}shka(n)zhiiyan (or whatever precisely this is meant to represent), with some kind of infix(??), is definitely not a possible plural of -shka(n)zh, not to mention of -shka(n)zhiin, which as noted is not the neutral singular form in the first place. (Besides, “claw, nail, hoof” is animate, so the plural must end in -g; the correct forms are singular -shka(n)zh, plural -shka(n)zhiig.)

I should also mention two other nouns in which the plural suffixes are correct, but in the plural forms the noun stem has addition material added to it which is missing from the stem in the singular. One of these is “forehead” (pg. 37) which was discussed previously in relation to dialect affiliation: the singular <ûdátîg> represents odaatig or odatig (“his/her forehead”), corresponding to the general structure of “forehead” in most dialects although with a different first consonant. The plural <udátîguanan> represents oda(a)tigwaan +an, corresponding to the form of “forehead” for some Red Lake speakers (-kaatigwaan) and which was also once more widespread in Southwestern Ojibwe; this probably represents blending with -(sh)tigwaan “head.” The other noun whose stem differs in the singular and plural but is otherwise pluralized regularly, “eye” (pg. 35), actually takes what appears to be a homophonous ending as “forehead” in the plural(?). The singular is given as <ishkî́shig> = -{i}shkii(n)zhig (correct), and the plural as <îshkî́shiguanan> = -{i}shkii(n)zhigwaan +an(??). Gatschet also writes of the plural, “abbrev[iated] -guan,” which may be a representation of the “correct” plural -{i}shkii(n)zhigoon, or perhaps an alternative plural form in which -oon has been replaced with -wan. The locative form for “eye” (“in the eye, on the eye”) is also given, and in the locative the stem contains the same augmented ending found in the plural stem: <îshkîshiguáning> = -{i}shkii(n)zhigwaaning(??) with locative -ing. Unlike with “forehead,” though, in the case of “eye” I don’t know of any other precedents for an extra ending -aan (the /-w-/ is part of the stem, which only surfaces when suffixes are added), assuming that’s what this is.^[26] It’s also worth noting that in the varieties of Ojibwe which attest(ed) “forehead” as -ka(a)tigwaan, this is the invariant stem for the noun, it does not only occur in the plural and/or locative. Bottineau’s forms are very unusual, and doubtlessly wrong, in this respect.

One final aberrant plural form found in the vocabulary has already been mentioned a few times, namely the use of what at least historically was initial change as a sort of replacement of or addition to actual plural suffixes on the participles meaning “white man” and “white woman” (pg. 27).

Stress

Last but not least, it’s time to discuss what I consider the most striking and unusual aspect of the entire Bottineau vocabulary. The stress marking in the vocabulary is unlike anything found in any Ojibwe dialect I’m aware of, and I’m very unsure of the source of it.

Different Ojibwe dialects exhibit somewhat differing stress patterns, although there is a basic core pattern shared by all of them, in which syllables are parsed left to right into iambic feet, long vowels are stressed, and the last vowel in a word is stressed. This is found in its purest form in, for example, Western Saulteaux and historical Odawa and Eastern Ojibwe: every long vowel is stressed, and all other syllables form iambic metrical feet of alternating weak (unstressed) and strong (stressed) vowels, counting from the beginning of the word or the most recent long vowel. The last vowel in the word also bears stress even if it otherwise falls in a weak syllable. This stress system appears to be a direct continuation of that of Proto-Algonquian.

As noted, other dialects may diverge from this basic pattern in certain respects, but unfortunately stress is an area that has received very little study that I’m aware of, including the question of where primary as opposed to secondary stress falls (see below); the most has been written abut Odawa, and to a lesser extent Eastern Ojibwe. Valentine (1994:155-160) discusses a few such variations. For instance, in Pikangikum Northwestern Ojibwe the basic rules given above apply, but there is an additional rule that two adjacent syllables cannot both carry stress, and in any instances where this would be the case, a vowel to the left of a stressed vowel is not stressed. (Thus, while final syllables are still always stressed, long vowels are not always stressed, unlike in other Ojibwe dialects, and an even more pronounced system of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables often results.) In some dialects, including Oji-Cree and Southwestern Ojibwe, some three-syllable words of the pan-Ojibwe syllable structure (σ_w.σ_s)σ_s (where at least the first two vowels are short; “w” = weak, “s” = strong) take the stress pattern stressed-unstressed-stressed, rather than unstressed-stressed-stressed, though the precise conditioning environments and words affected are not the same in different dialects; in words of the same shape, Red Lake Ojibwe does not stress either of the first two vowels. Oji-Cree also stresses a number of two-syllable words where both vowels are short on the first syllable rather than the second. There are other variations as well, but it’s sufficient for our purposes here to simply note the general Ojibwe stress pattern and the kinds of variation that have been found on it.

In addition, the assignment of primary stress varies among dialects and has been seriously under-documented (in addition to virtually no research on verifying the true acoustic correlate(s) of stress, as T. Miller 2018:127 notes), except for Odawa, where it is agreed to normally fall on the third accented vowel from the end of the word, or else on the leftmost accented vowel. Swierzbin (2003) has argued that in Seine River Border Lakes Ojibwe it generally, though not always, falls one foot to the right of the the primary stressed vowel in Odawa, i.e., on the penultimate accented vowel, or on the final vowel in two-syllable words when both vowels are long, but I have misgivings about several aspects of that study’s design, and Swierzbin’s data could also be taken to indicate that the primary stress (based on pitch, rather than duration) simply falls on the final syllable of a word in most cases. The latter conclusion would match T. Miller’s (2017, 2018:58-61, 127-130) preliminary findings that in Manitoba Saulteaux primary stress, marked by rising pitch and intensity (2017:[10], 2018:127), seems to fall on the final syllable (and that there is no consistent secondary stress at all), while Swierzbin’s conclusion would match Pentland’s (1992:2) claim that while in Odawa primary stress falls on the antepenultimate accented vowel, “in most Ojibwa dialects the second-last [accented vowel] receives the word-stress.”

My own general impression of Southwestern Ojibwe is that primary stress, associated with higher pitch, seems to most often fall on the final syllable, but can sometimes be “pulled” backwards onto a preceding long vowel instead; while in Red Lake Ojibwe it fairly consistently falls on the final syllable, though there seems to be some variation among speakers. I’ve tried doing a little bit of instrumental analysis in Praat, but all this is mainly impressionistic, so should not be considered remotely scientific. My marking of primary versus secondary stress in this post (based on Red Lake Ojibwe, since it is closest to Bottineau’s dialect) should therefore not be treated as fully representative or fully reliable.

In any case: in our vocabulary, there are words where the stress marking accords with general Ojibwe stress principles, most often where stress marking is applied to a long vowel. However, in a large number of cases, the marking reflects a stress pattern in which the penultimate syllable is stressed, regardless of its metrical position, vowel length, or anything else. This is found in words throughout the vocabulary, but it is easiest to notice and illustrate in singular/plural pairs, or other instances where two entries or two words within an entry differ by the addition of a one-syllable suffix.

This begins, in fact, with the very first word of the vocabulary, “man” (pg. 23): sg. <înnî̆´nî>, pl. <innîníwag>, implying iníni, *ininíwag, with the stress moving one syllable to the right to remain on the penultimate syllable upon the addition of a suffix (as opposed to correct inìní/inínì, ininiwág). I could give many further examples, but a modest number should suffice to make the pattern clear:

• “woman,” pg. 23: <í’hkuä>, pl. <i’hkuä́wag> (*íkwe is impossible; a two-syllable word with an initial short vowel and long second vowel is always: unstressed-stressed)
• “fox,” pp. 27, 59: <wágush>, pl. <wagúshag> (*waagóshag is impossible because the short /o/ immediately follows a long vowel and so cannot carry stress; note how the long vowel is marked as stressed in the singular when it is penultimate, but not in the plural when it is now in the antepenult)
• “tooth,” pg. 35: <wípît>, pl. <wipítan> (*wiibídan is impossible for the same reasons as *waagóshag)
• “corpse,” pg. 37: <tchī́pai>, pl. <tchipáyag> (again, *jiibáyag is impossible for the same reasons as *waagóshag and *wiibídan)
• “belly,” pg. 39: <omíssat>, pl. <omissádan> (*omisádan is impossible; proper stress of a word of this shape would be omìsadán)
• “fat [n.],” pg. 47: <wî́nin>, “he is fat,” pg. 51: <winínû>, pl. <wininúag> (= wiinin / wiinino / wiininowag [which should be stressed wììnín/wíínìn, wììninó, and wììninowág]; this is a particularly clear example since it involves three forms, with the accent moving forwards to the new penultimate syllable each time)
• “sick,” pp. 51, 57: <akû́si>, pl. <akusî́wag> (once again, *aakózi is impossible)
• “well,” pg. 51: <mînuáya>, pl. <minuayáwag> (*mino-áyaa is impossible for the same reason as *íkwe)

Many other impossible forms with marked penultimate stress could also be cited for which there aren’t contrasting forms, e.g., “noon” (pp. 41, 55) <nawákue> (= *naawákwe, again with a stressed short vowel immediately following a long vowel) and “squirrel” (pg. 65) <adshitáma> (= *ajidámoo, impossible due to metrical rules: this must be parsed as (a.ji)(da.moo) = ajìdamóó). There are also a number of examples of words consisting of two short-vowel syllables that have stress marked on the first (= penultimate) syllable (e.g., <nî́bî> “water” [nibi] pp. 27, 47; <nípo> “(he is) dead” [nibo] pg. 37; and <ánung> “star” [anang], pg. 41); though in Oji-Cree some of these do take initial stress, this is not the case in Southwestern, Red Lake, or Border Lakes Ojibwe.

As a matter of fact, stress is marked on the penultimate vowel even on the anglicized or gallicized version of the word for “muskellunge”: <mä́shkúlaunsh>. Regardless of whether the influence here is from English or from French (on which see Note Q), the penultimate vowel would be an inappropriate location for even secondary stress. If the word were stressed like English, it should take primary stress on the first syllable and perhaps secondary stress on the final syllable; if stressed like French, it should take stress on the final syllable.

While in the vast majority of cases where stress is marked “incorrectly” it is marked on the penultimate vowel, there are a few exceptions, most notably the term for “fire,” ishkode, where it is almost always marked on the first vowel.^[27]

This phenomenon is the most mysterious part of the vocabulary for me, because I am quite unsure what the explanation for it is. There are several possibilities we might consider:

1. Did Gatschet’s native languages interfere with his perception of where stress occurred? Gatschet would have been a native speaker of Bernese Oberlander Alemannic. I’m not completely positive if he also spoke European French natively; Pentland (1979:276, n. 24) says he did, though I haven’t come across other unambiguous statements to that effect. Even if he did not, he would have acquired French very early, and it was one of the languages he was completely fluent in. Given the time period, he probably is less likely to have been a native speaker of Standard German, though he was fluent in it as well, and again would have acquired it in childhood as the regional acrolect. He probably would not have been a native speaker of anything else, though he apparently knew Spanish well (Mooney 1907:563; Vignaud 1908:112), and he learned Ancient Greek and presumably Latin in school (and given his theological studies, perhaps some Hebrew?). He was not entirely fluent in English when he immigrated to the United States ten years prior to collecting the Bottineau vocabulary, but was certainly fluent in the language—not to mention using and hearing it daily—by 1878. But unfortunately for this first hypothesis, none of these languages have consistent penultimate stress systems that could have realistically interfered with or influenced Gatschet’s perception of Bottineau’s Ojibwe. Swiss German, Standard German, and English have complex stress systems in which stress normally falls on one of the last three syllables of underived words (preferentially on heavy syllables) and certain affixes affect stress placement; see the corresponding footnote for a somewhat more detailed description if you’d like, but suffice it to say that in none of them does the distribution of penultimate stress match the environments in which Gatschet recorded Bottineau’s Ojibwe as having penultimate stress.^[28] The other language Gatschet knew best or spoke natively, European French, had final stress except on schwas. And let’s just say it’s very unlikely that Spanish or Ancient Greek or Latin or Hebrew stress would have influenced his perceptions in any way, even ignoring the fact that they also don’t have regular penultimate stress/accent (other than Spanish to a certain but not at all regular extent).
2. Was Gatschet just bad at hearing stress? Perhaps the languages he spoke didn’t influence his perception of where stress should fall, but Gatschet was still bad at hearing stress in general? There are several problems with this hypothesis. For one thing, it doesn’t explain why he would so frequently hear stress on the penultimate syllable, instead of on random vowels, or on long vowels. For another thing—and this of course applies to hypothesis one above as well—we don’t just have this one vocabulary to judge Gatschet’s ear; he collected multiple other vocabularies and texts in Ojibwe from other individuals, as well as vocabularies from over a hundred other languages. And these show that while he occasionally made errors, in general he was able to distinguish stress just fine. In his Odawa field notes that I’ve looked at, stress is almost always marked correctly; the stress marking in his Miami-Illinois field notes normally corresponds with the marking of other recorders, including other linguists; and LeSourd (2021:195) describes the stress-marking in his Passmaquoddy fieldnotes as “sufficiently accurate as to be quite useful” even if he didn’t realize Passamaquoddy has distinctive pitch. On the other hand, in his brief notes taken in 1883 from an Ojibwe-speaking priest who had served at White Earth and later Red Lake (Gatschet 1883), while words tend to have stress accurately marked, there are some, especially the animal and (animal-based) clan names at the end, which are marked with penultimate or initial stress (which usually is equivalent to penultimate stress, but not always) or otherwise incorrect stress, e.g.: <mákua>, pl. <mákuak> “bear” (= makwa +g, pg. 180); <má-ingan> “wolf” (= ma’iingan, which should be ma’ììngán/ma’ííngàn, pg. 180); <pī́shiu> “lynx” (= bizhiw, pg. 180); and <náme>, pl. <naméwak> “sturgeon” (= name +wag, pg. 179, with consistent penultimate stress under suffixation!), but cf. the correct form <namé> on pg. 180. See number four below for more discussion.
3. Did Bottineau apply the stress of a more dominant language to his Ojibwe? Since as we’ve seen there are some signs that Bottineau was not a completely compentent speaker of Ojibwe, perhaps he applied the stress system of a language which was more dominant for him when speaking Ojibwe? Unfortunately here we run into the same problems as in hypothesis one: there are no languages that fit the bill. The very different and complex stress system of English, in which basically stress on penultimate syllables is dependent on syllable weight, lexical class, and specific affixes, was summarized in simplified form in footnote 28. Unlike European French, Canadian French does have some words with penultimate stress (those with long vowels in the penultimate syllable), but these are not terribly common and seem to be a recent development, and besides, if this were the model for Bottineau’s Ojibwe stress it would also raise the major question of why his stress is so aberrantly de-linked from vowel length. As I noted near the beginning of the post, I have no idea whether Bottineau spoke Michif; if he did it’s unlikely that his Michif would have been any stronger than his Ojibwe, but the point is moot because Michif’s original stress system was evidently partly from Cree and partly from Métis French, supposedly falling on the antepenultimate syllable in Cree words (though see number five below for a different view of Cree stress, which would presumably be relevant to old Michif stress as well) and the final syllable in French ones.
4. Was this the stress system inherited by Bottineau from his family/community? If so, this could either have been due to external influence or to a completely internal change. An internal development, either among Bottineau’s ancestors/community or by himself, is possible and can’t be ruled out. Since Josselin de Jong’s texts reveal a stress system basically the same as in modern Red Lake, Southwestern, and Border Lakes Ojibwe, this would seemingly have to have happened after the separation from Red Lake, but as noted in number two above, Gatschet’s vocabulary from an Ojibwe-speaking priest who was working at Red Lake at this time shows several forms with “incorrect”—often penultimate—stress, so it’s possible that in the 18th-19th centuries this was a real feature of at least some Red Lake speakers and their descendants. However, it’s hard to understand why this would occur. The new stress system not only completely divorces stress from vowel length (or, barring that, things like syllable weight more generally) but eliminates the general parsing of words into iambic feet from the left edge; both these characteristics are, as far as I know, found in all Ojibwe dialects that have been described, even if the dialects differ in details and may have some exceptions.^[29] For the most part there are few conceivable external influences either. Métis French, English, and Michif have already been addressed; Jean’s father Pierre is reported to also have spoken Dakota (where the accent is usually but not always on the second syllable), as well as several other Siouan languages whose accent systems I have less information on, but certainly none of these were one of the more dominant languages for him, and they would not have had any effect on his pronunciation of Ojibwe, which he spoke natively. There remains one possible influence, though:
5. What about Cree? Plains Cree, like some other varieties of Western Cree, is usually said to have primarily—though not completely consistent and predictable—antepenultimate stress (e.g., Cook 1991; Wolfart 1996:430-431), which would seem to rule it out as a potential candidate for influencing Bottineau’s Ojibwe as well. However, using instrumental analysis of several frequent nominals from a large corpus of natural speech, Muehlbauer (2006) argues that Plains Cree accent generally falls on the penultimate syllable, and is associated with falling pitch (F0), and that linguists who are native speakers of other languages (basically English, German, and Korean) have generally perceived the antepenult as stressed precisely because of its higher relative pitch. If this analysis is correct, Plains Cree could very well have been the impetus behind the unusual stress system of Bottineau’s Ojibwe. The most likely context would be that his Métis ancestors and relations acquired this stress system. While Bottineau’s Native ancestry was Ojibwe and not Cree, virtually all early Red River Métis, regardless of their Native ancestry, spoke Plains Cree at least as the regional lingua franca. Some of Michif’s first speakers were thus Métis of Ojibwe descent who spoke both Ojibwe and Plains Cree, and probably some full-blood Ojibwes as well. I unfortunately don’t know what the stress pattern of Ojibwe as it was spoken at Turtle Mountain was, but even if not a feature of Turtle Mountain or Métis Ojibwe speech generally, frequent penultimate stress could still have been a feature of Bottineau’s more immediate family, given their close ties to Pembina and the Red River Valley, and the many Métis and other Michif speakers they would have known both at Turtle Mountain and elsewhere. While Muehlbauer’s argument seems plausible, the base of data is ultimately quite small in terms of number of words; but the biggest problem with this possibility that immediately strikes me is the question of why Gatschet would successfully hear penultimate stress much of the time when the stress system involved was of such a character as to strongly prejudice speakers of European (and most other) languages into hearing it on the antepenult? (I can confirm that Plains Cree really, really sounds like it has antepenultimate stress to my native-English-speaker ears, despite knowing the results of Muehlbauer’s study.)

Ultimately, only the last of these possible hypotheses seems to hold any potential—and it is still very uncertain!—and some can be ruled out entirely. But another thing to note is that while stress is “incorrectly” marked on the penultimate a great deal (and also correctly marked on the penultimate in additional instances), there are also a large number of cases where stress is marked as we would expect for a “normal” Ojibwe dialect. In some cases, as noted, this marking corresponds to marking long vowels as stressed (e.g., <gáshagäns>, pl. <gáshagänsag> “cat” = gààzhagéns, gààzhagènság, pg. 33; <uχgā́d>, pl. <uχgádan> “leg” = okáád, okààdán, pg. 35; and <wíyau>, pl. <wíyawan> “body of man” = wììyáw/wììyawán, pg. 37). These could either be instances in which stress remained on a long vowel in accordance with “normal” Ojibwe rules, or could be cases where stress was actually on the penult but Gatschet just heard it on a long vowel because at the word level, vowel length is the primary perceptual correlate of stress in at least most non-pitch accent Germanic languages. One instance where it seems pretty likely that the stress marking is due to Gatschet hearing a long vowel as stressed, rather than stress actually being on a vowel other than the penult, is the word for “boy” (Ojibwe gwiiwizens +ag, properly stressed gwììwizéns, gwììwizènság/gwììwizénsàg), given as <kuiwuísäⁿs>, pl. <kuiwuisä́ⁿsag> on pg. 23 with consistent (and in the singular, impossible) penultimate stress, but on pg. 45 as <kuí-usäⁿs>, with the first long vowel marked as stressed. Assuming Bottineau pronounced this word phonemically the same way each time, then Gatschet’s transcription on page 45 must represent him mishearing stress as falling on the first-syllable long vowel. And this suggests that at least some of the other instances in which non-penultimate long vowels are marked as stressed are also incorrectly marked by Gatschet and those words were really pronounced by Bottineau with penultimate stress.^[30]

In still other cases, though, stress is marked “correctly” not just on long vowels but also on short vowels which carry stress due to their metrical position, i.e., an even-numbered syllable in a sequence of two or more short-vowel syllables, and/or the last vowel in the word, though some of the examples are still suspect (e.g., <û’htáwag>, pl. <û’htáwagan> “ear” = *otáwag [should be otawág] but correct otàwagán, pg. 37; <kawakadúso>, pl. <kawakadúsuag> “he is meager, lean, poor” = *gawaakadózo [seems to be gawààkodozó] but correct gawààkadòzowág, pg. 51; <wapinágusí>, pl. <[wapinágusí]wag> “he looks pale” = wààbinààgozí/wààbináágozì, but incorrect plural [should be wààbinààgoziwág/wààbináágoziwàg], pg. 51; and <kînî́u>/<kînî́^u> [“golden eagle”] = giníw, pg. 59). There are also a few cases where stress is not marked as penultimate, but is still “wrong,” e.g., <animúsh>, pl. <animúshag> and <animúshäⁿs>, pl. <animū́shäⁿsag> “young dog” = correct animósh but incorrect *animóshag, *animóshens +ag (pg. 31; though it’s conceivable these words had acquired a long vowel in Bottineau’s dialect, thus anìmòòshéns, anìmòòshènság, etc.); and <kakígan>, pl. <kakíganan> “male chest” = should be -kààkigán, -kààkiganán (pg. 35).

The real picture that emerges from the transcriptions in the vocabulary, then, is a situation where Bottineau frequently used penultimate stress where no other known variety of Ojibwe does or did, but that sometimes stress followed older, “correct” patterns, often aligning with an ultimate or pre-penultimate long vowel—or else the vowel length in these cases was salient enough that Gatschet perceived it as stress, and unfortunately it’s impossible in most cases to know how frequently that may have been an issue. I haven’t noticed any pattern, phonological or otherwise, to the words where stress is marked as penultimate versus those where it isn’t, although I haven’t spent a great amount of time looking into that, so someone more perceptive than me or with more time might uncover something I didn’t. The stress system was therefore apparently considerably more chaotic and confused than “a preference for penultimate stress” would imply. As I said at the outset, I’m unsure of the model for this stress system; the best candidate is Plains Cree (or Michif) influence at some point, but that’s far from certain. All I can say with certainty is that from a pan-Ojibwe perspective, including the Ojibwe of Red Lake and the Border Lakes, it’s extremely deviant. If anyone has any ideas on this subject, please let me know.

Summary

It is apparent from all the foregoing that while Bottineau knew some Ojibwe, he was not a completely fluent speaker. In some cases, this manifested itself in morphological simplifications and the replacement of more marked allomorphs by less marked ones; in some cases as an inability to use idiomatic constructions; and in some cases as a complete lack of command over (or probably full awareness of) some grammatical feature, including, plural concord, to some extent plural marking on nouns, as well as probably participles and negation marking on verbs, and perhaps obviation. Bottineau’s stress system was also apparently unlike that of any other known Ojibwe variety, with frequent—but by no means consistent—penultimate stress, though the cause of this is uncertain, and may or may not have any relation to his lack of full command of the language.

All this being said, it’s important to note that Bottineau clearly did know a great deal of Ojibwe. He knew enough vocabulary to provide a wordlist to Gatschet in which hardly any responses suggest that he might not have known the proper word to use in translating the English prompt, and in which he was able to break down many words into component morphemes and identify their meanings. He knew enough grammar to produce sentences such as “the fire will have gone out before we return” (including in this case with idiomatic word order and use of conjunct inflection, in spite of the regularized/simplified conjunct ending used) and phrases such as “when the fish go downstream.” He knew enough about the basic ways in which Ojibwe tends to express various concepts to sometimes reword a prompt of Gatschet’s into a more natural-sounding, idiomatic Ojibwe equivalent, as when he translated “the sun dries up the creek” with ziibiins iska(a)te (very lit. “the creek’s water level goes down due to the sun/heat,” with the sun’s action expressed via a verb Final -ate or -aate [either is possible] rather than the introduction of a separate noun, pg. 49). And he knew enough Ojibwe that he felt confident in serving as a consultant for a linguist looking for information on the language.

This should not really be a surprise. Bottineau’s father, the grandmother he may have lived near for some period, an uncle he lived near as a child, and an uncle he worked closely with for much of his life, all spoke Ojibwe natively. Bottineau’s wife spoke Ojibwe as well, apparently natively, and their daughter Marie seems to have acquired enough Ojibwe from her mother to understand it, and spoke it with her.^[31] Bottineau worked for about 30 years as the attorney for Little Shell III and some of the Turtle Mountain Band, much of that time certainly spent in Minneapolis and Washington, but much of it also in direct intercourse with numerous members of the band who did not speak English or French, including Little Shell himself, who it is clear placed a huge amount of trust in Bottineau. Bottineau may not have been able to converse in Ojibwe like an expertly fluent native speaker—i.e., never producing grammatical errors or unidiomatic constructions—but, it seems likely that he could converse in it to a quite reasonable degree, and surely understood it perfectly.

Bottineau’s Ojibwe: Lack of Fluency, or Obsolescence?

So. If this was the state of Bottineau’s Ojibwe, what can that tell us about Bottineau himself? His Ojibwe—with its simplifications, lack of some complex grammatical categories and difficult aspects of morphosyntax, and incomplete mastery of some idiomatic usage, but with a strong vocabulary and apparently native or close to native phonology—calls to mind two kinds of semi-speakers. One is people who speak a language which is rapidly undergoing major obsolescence and thus widely regularizing irregularities (cf., e.g., Teeter 1995) and shedding the more complex elements of its grammar while more closely approximating the socially dominant regional language in both general grammatical categories as well as how concepts are encapsulated and expressed (cf., e.g., Valentine 1994:10). In some communities where Ojibwe is at this stage, we do in fact find younger speakers who have lost or avoid using more esoteric categories like some verbal modes, the loss or significant reduction of noun incorporation and classificatory morphemes, and so on.

Did this first situations apply to Bottineau? Quite simply, no. There’s absolutely no evidence that Pembina or Turtle Mountain Ojibwe was undergoing obsolescence in this period, nor that any of Bottineau’s ancestors were anything less than fluent speakers. There are a number of pieces of evidence. First, not only did Little Shell and many other members of his council, as well as Pembina chiefs like Bottineau’s cousin Misko-Makwa, still need interpreters during interactions with government officials and other white outsiders, but it’s clear from the record that so did the vast majority of Turtle Mountain members, both Ojibwe and Métis, though some of the Métis, particularly those who had come from the Red River Settlement, probably did not speak Ojibwe, only Michif and in some cases Cree and/or French. One of the defendants in Bottineau v. O’Grady, for example, was asked, concerning a large council meeting of a few hundred people he attended, “what language did they speak?” and replied: “Chippewa. One or two spoke French, but most all of the Indians spoke Chippewa and I spoke English [through an interpreter].” When asked, “Did any of the Indians talk English?” he answered: “No sir; I don’t remember a single one talking English that day” (TOR Bottineau v. O’Grady, at 197). The witness went on to agree that based on the situation and his experience there, “all the Indians [present] understood Chippewa” (id. at 198), and most of the people at that council were in fact Métis. One of the Ojibwe men from that meeting was deposed for the same suit and needed to use an Ojibwe interpreter (id. at 91). Other testimony from the suit also supports the fact that most Ojibwes and Métis of Ojibwe descent at Turtle Mountain spoke Ojibwe among themselves and could not speak English (or often French) (e.g., id. at 56, 114, 122). The points made by Marmon (2001:123-124, 2009:105-106) regarding the actions of the anti-Little Shell coup plotters, including the interpreter Joseph Rolette, and government officials during the McCumber negotiations, assuming his analysis is correct, show that the actions of the various players make the most sense on the assumption that no one on the traditional tribal council could speak or understand much if any English.

Second, Bottineau’s uncle Charles, with whom he was very close, served as an Ojibwe interpreter on several occasions and was a member of the eventually deposed tribal council, while his father Pierre also assisted during some treaty negotiations, served as an interpreter, and is described by multiple sources as speaking Ojibwe, including by a young man who accompanied him on one surveying expedition and who awoke one night during a fierce blizzard to find Pierre stoking the fire and “singing in Chippewa . . . to give us entertainment” (Johnston 1915:416). And finally, despite the Ojibwe residents of the Turtle Mountain reservation being significantly outnumbered by, and often looked down upon by, the Métis, the Ojibwe language survived on the reservation until just a few years ago; although many Ojibwes had switched to speaking Michif long ago, this process most plausibly began after the start of the reservation period.

As one additional consideration in light of Bottineau’s family history, the Ojibwe of Red Lake was certainly not undergoing obsolescence at the time. Indeed, Ponemah is the U.S. community in which the state of the Ojibwe language is healthiest, and the one place where it’s used daily by any appreciable number of people in the community, though by now it is endangered there as well.

It’s highly unlikely, then, that the nature of Bottineau’s Ojibwe reflects any sort of widespread obsolescence-related changes to the language by other Pembina or Turtle Mountain or Red Lake speakers, including older members of his own family. Bottineau’s native-like command of Ojibwe phonology also suggests this, since in obsolescence situations, younger semi-speakers frequently have altered pronunciations which approximate the dominant regional language. For instance, many younger speakers of Lakota have lost “the contrasts between aspirated, unaspirated, and glottalized stops” (Parks and Rankin 2001:114).

But there is another type of speaker that Bottineau’s Ojibwe brings to mind: the grandchildren of immigrants, or other people who spoke a language other than English, living in an English-speaking country. The first-generation immigrant(s) in this scenario (I’m just using “immigrant” as a convenient shorthand here, but this can of course include various other similar situations) obviously speak another language natively and usually learn English to some extent, but often not fully fluently. Since they usually are not entirely comfortable with English and use their native language at home, their children become fluent native speakers of both English and the “old country” language. But their children, despite often also being exposed to both English and the “old country” language growing up, usually only become fully fluent speakers of English; they are never forced to speak a language other than English in order to communicate with their parents or peers. However, very often they do become passive speakers of the other language, who can understand it quite well due to the exposure to it growing up, the possible need to use it with their grandparents, and perhaps other influences from other members of their community.

Bottineau’s known biography fits this “third-generation immigrant” model very well. His grandmother was a full-blood Ojibwe woman who spoke the language natively and fluently, as did her Métis sons. Pierre, Charles, and the other Bottineau children, however, despite being strongly culturally Ojibwe-Métis in many ways (Pierre was described as an expert bison hunter, for instance, and of course they all spoke Ojibwe and French) and taking an active role in tribal politics—Charles in particular, but Pierre as well—nonetheless significantly integrated into Euro-American society. Pierre not only served as a guide for numerous American colonialist expeditions, but was an active and accomplished land surveyor and speculator, helping found numerous townships and acquiring large amounts of land. This second generation would certainly seem to be a close analog to many children of immigrants: brought up speaking both their mother’s native (and Native) language and the languages of the dominant European cultures of the region, and better integrated into the dominant society in which they lived.

And what of Jean Bottineau, of the third generation? Here the parallels are again striking. He spoke decent but not flawless Ojibwe and probably understood it very well, but was evidently not entirely fluent—in other words, a strong passive speaker, but with enough knowledge to converse and make himself understood as needed. His father, the uncle who lived nearby, the uncle he worked closely with, and other extended family members all spoke Ojibwe natively, but most or all of them except for his grandmother also spoke French natively, and Jean grew up around the site of modern Minneapolis, surrounded by English speakers and Euro-American society. If his uncles were significantly integrated into white society while still retaining much of their indigenous/Métis cultural heritage, Jean—or rather “John”—was even more clearly a “normal” member of American society. He did not earn a living serving as a Native guide for expeditions, trekking through snowstorms and hunting for food and building shelters and fires, but as a lawyer in the United States court system. His ability level of Ojibwe matches what we should expect given his life history; he heard it fairly regularly growing up from his father (who was however often absent) and from family members who lived nearby, but the only family member whom he may have needed to use Ojibwe to communicate with was his grandmother (though several facts suggest she spoke at least some French and probably some English), and many if not most of his peers must have been white Americans.

This tells us something else about Jean Bottineau. As I mentioned at the outset, I’ve found very little information on his mother, Genevieve Larence, beyond the fact that she was of 3/4ths Ojibwe ancestry and her family seems to have come from somewhere other than Pierre’s family did. It seems likely, though, that she was not a native speaker of Ojibwe. Had she been, Jean would probably have had significantly more exposure to the language—indeed, his parents might even have preferentially spoken it to one another. Instead, the impression one is left with is that the language used at home was primarily French, and Jean’s exposure to Ojibwe was limited to intermittent interactions with his father as well as with other paternal relatives. It also may be suggested by the fact that, as we’ve seen, Bottineau spoke essentially a descendant of Red Lake Ojibwe, though with some further, not unexpected, Cree and Saulteaux influences; we know Pierre’s Ojibwe mother’s family, like a great many Pembina and Turtle Mountain Ojibwes, ultimately came from the Red Lake area, but Jean’s own testimony implies that his mother and her family did not. (As noted earlier, there is some weak evidence that her family was from Red Lake, in which case Jean’s statement must have meant that she was from Red Lake while he considered his father’s family to be “Pembinas” from the Red River country, or to be from Lake of the Woods, or something similar.) That Jean spoke the language of his paternal relatives, with no apparent major influence from other dialects of Ojibwe or other languages, would then be more evidence that his paternal relatives were his only source for acquiring Ojibwe, at the very least until later in life.^[32]

But I specify “until later in life” for a reason: ignoring his interactions with Little Shell and other monolingual or non-French/English-speaking tribal members, there’s another quite probable source of influence on his Ojibwe: his wife. As I’ve noted, Marie Renville appears to have been a fluent native speaker of Ojibwe and to have spoken it regularly with her daughter, while Jean spoke mostly French. Bottineau married Marie Renville in 1862, when he was 25 and she was about 20. It would be another 16 years until 1878, when Bottineau first began representing the Turtle Mountain Band in legal matters and when he recorded this vocabulary for Gatschet. In those 16 years, despite his own frequent absences from home, he would have been continually exposed, while he was home, to the Ojibwe spoken by his wife and evidently his children. There can be little doubt that this would have had an impact in, at minimum, improving his ability level in Ojibwe, if not influencing the form of Ojibwe he spoke. While as I’ve noted before, I am suspicious of the claims I’ve found so far regarding Renville’s ancestry, she was definitely from Pembina. Beyond that, I can speculate that at least some of her family had origins at Red Lake, but I don’t know that at this point.

Jean Bottineau’s dialect and fluency level, and the specific areas in which his Ojibwe was deficient, thus tell us a good deal about his life, or at least help confirm suspicions we might have had based on the other available, external evidence.

One final thing should be noted, however. Bottineau showed a lack of complete command of Ojibwe, had a comfortable upbringing in the growing Euro-American city of Minneapolis, significant contact with peers who spoke English, and seems to have been highly “acculturated” (for lack of a better term, though this one isn’t great), including working as an attorney, as well as in surveying and real estate like his father and in speculation along with his uncle, and serving as a “justice of the peace, United States and State timber agent, [and] sutler in the U. S. military” (Hewitt and Baldwin 1911:[1]). He did not guide parties through driving snowstorms in the middle of the wilderness like his father did, or take part in the yearly bison hunts.

But despite his acculturation, including his lack of complete fluency in Ojibwe, Bottineau did not turn his back on his father’s people. As they struggled to obtain a just settlement with the government, Bottineau spent more and more time providing counsel to Chief Little Shell, the tribal council, and other tribal members. During and following the debacle of the Ten-Cent Treaty he steadfastly backed Little Shell, provided legal advice and representation, wrote endless petitions and briefs to the government to forestall approval of the Ten-Cent Treaty and obtain alleviation for the terrible poverty on and off the reservation, and worked to help individuals who had been excluded from the tribal rolls. He lived the last two decades of his life in Washington so that he could be closer to the government agencies he needed to communicate and work with, and “spent many thousands of dollars out of his own pocket in the prosecution of these claims, for which he was never renumerated [sic]” (Hewitt and Baldwin 1911:[2]); Bottineau estimated the amount at over $25,000 (TOR Bottineau v. O’Grady, at 28, 65-66), obviously a very large sum at the time, though in fact he did receive some compensation as a result of the settlement of the Ten-Cent Treaty and lawsuit I have repeatedly referenced. While there are, inevitably, some less than admirable aspects to Bottineau’s character, and while his injecting himself into Turtle Mountain politics and some of his actions were controversial among many within the tribe—and may in fact have contributed to the coup against Little Shell—ultimately Bottineau gave his all to the cause he thought was right. Instead of remaining content with a comfortable job as a city lawyer and land speculator, he returned to fight for his family’s people whose language he could not fully speak, and devoted the rest of his life to that fight.

There is no tremendously happy ending here: this was a fight Bottineau would lose in the end. The Ten-Cent Treaty was finally ratified by Congress and approved by the exhausted tribe, the reservation remained miniscule and insufficient to support its often destitute inhabitants and the tribe as a whole, and the people excluded from the rolls were denied their chance at justice.^[33]

Although they must have had at least some degree of difficulty fluently conversing with one another, Little Shell placed his absolute trust in Bottineau. And while Bottineau did not succeed in obtaining justice for the Turtle Mountain Tribe, in one sense Little Shell’s trust was not misplaced. Bottineau did not abandon them.

List: Words Unattested Elsewhere

This list includes all those terms in the Bottineau vocabulary which I have been unable to find elsewhere in print (as well as a couple which I have, when some additional commentary on them seems pertinent), or terms which may be found elsewhere, but not with the definition as given in our vocabulary. Many of these terms are also discussed in relevant Notes. While I’ve checked all the obvious resources I have access to, I have to emphasize that I don’t have access to all relevant resources. There are undoubtedly terms in this list that are in fact attested elsewhere, either in dictionaries or texts I don’t have, or in some old travel journal I neglected to check, or whatever. And no doubt some of these terms are perfectly familiar to plenty of Ojibwe speakers but have just never been written down by someone in a widely available publication. But I still think it’s worthwhile to include this here. One other thing: I have not included terms which are unattested elsewhere because they appear to be complete errors—only those terms which in my judgment were either probably valid Ojibwe words at the time and would have been used by fully native speakers, or may have been idiosyncratic to Bottineau but were (generally) grammatical and were how he intended to say the term and not a mistake.^[34]

In most cases I have also excluded words which are easily derivable from existing, well-attested Ojibwe forms through extremely common and transparent derivational processes but which simply happen not to be attested as far as I can find. For instance, I have not listed zhigaagoonsiwi “he is a small skunk” or zhigaagokaa “it is full of skunks” (both pg. 29), which just contain the noun “skunk” plus in the first case the diminutive suffix and the AI Final of “being” (“be a [noun]”) and in the second case the II Final of abundance (“there are lots of/a large quantity of [noun(s)]”).

For reasons of space, I have listed these words in a PDF document rather than in the post itself; the document may be found HERE.

Conclusions

Here I will simply review some of the major conclusions we can draw from this vocabulary, as well as point to a few interesting facts that to my knowledge have not been noted before:

• Jean Bottineau was somewhere between a passive and fluent speaker of Ojibwe; he could both understand spoken Ojibwe and to some extent speak it, but he could not speak it at a native-like level of fluency, and he spoke a simplified version of it, with elimination of some allomorphy and loss of some grammatical categories, in addition to displaying a lack of command over other grammatical categories. There is not enough grammatical material in the vocabulary, however, to be very precise on the nature of the grammatical simplifications Bottineau used.
• While his command of Ojibwe morphosyntax and idiomaticity was clearly somewhat limited, Bottineau seems to have had quite a good command over the lexicon—not just able to passively understand spoken Ojibwe, but to provide almost all the words Gatschet asked him for, and even to provide literal glosses for some of them, morpheme by morpheme. While Gatschet’s transcription leaves much to be desired from our modern perspective, there is also enough evidence from the transcription to be fairly confident that Bottineau spoke Ojibwe with a native or near-native pronunciation, such as distinguishing long and short vowels and sometimes preaspirating fortis stops.
• The stress system of Bottineau’s Ojibwe as reflected in the vocabulary (discussed here) is extremely unusual and the reasons for this are difficult to say with any certainty. The only possibility I have been able to come up with is that it could reflect influence from Plains Cree (or Michif), though I don’t know whether this influence, assuming the explanation is correct, affected just Bottineau, or his extended family, or larger numbers of Turtle Mountain Ojibwes generally.
• Bottineau’s speech was derived from a Northern Minnesota variety of Ojibwe and most closely related to the dialect spoken at Red Lake (discussed in this document and this section of the post). This fits his known family history, and additionally suggests that his father and paternal relatives were his primary or only exposure to Ojibwe when young.
• One phonological feature of interest in Bottineau’s Ojibwe is an evident allophonic or optional lowering of /i/ in several environments, specifically word-finally (most of these cases occur following /w/ or a coronal fricative or affricate) or preceding a nasal (most of these cases occur following a labial and in the last syllable of the word) (discussed here and in the document on Bottineau’s dialect). Lowering of /i/ word-finally parallels similar processes in several other dialects of Ojibwe, including some Eastern Saulteaux, though the more specific environment here is as far as I know unique, as is the existence of the phenomenon in a Northern Minnesota-derived dialect, though later materials from early 20th-century Red Lake Ojibwe show sporadic lowering of both /i/ and /iː/, but in no discernable specific environment(s) (discussed in footnote sixteen).
• Bottineau also clearly pronounced both phonemic /ɛ̃ː/ and allophonically nasalized /ɛː/ as [æ̃ː] (discussed here). This is plausibly due to Métis French influence (see the point after next).
• Bottineau had “nasal spreading” in at least some words, in which a nasalized vowel denasalized and the vowel in the preceding syllable became nasalized instead. His form of nasal spreading would appear to be an intermediate step between the original system preserved in most Ojibwe dialects and the more innovative nasal spreading some modern Red Lake speakers have, in which the preceding syllable gains a coda segmental nasal, not just a nasalized vowel. (Discussed here and in the document on Bottineau’s dialect.)
• Bottineau spoke both French and English fluently, but there is strong evidence in this vocabulary, as well as other Ojibwe work in which Bottineau assisted Gatschet, that his French was slightly stronger than his English in some domains, and that he was more comfortable speaking French than English. This is confirmed by external testimony, which indicates that he spoke French preferentially and with family members. (Discussed here.) It is almost certain that Bottineau was only a native speaker of French, not English, though he was a fully fluent speaker of the latter and in the domain of highly formal and legal language he was undoubtedly much stronger in English than French.
• Several linguists who have worked with Gatschet’s notes on other Algonquian languages have observed that he seems to have occasionally attempted to create his own forms by generalizing from the existing data he had collected, and inserted these forms into his data, instead of making clear what information came directly from native speakers and what did not. There is very little evidence of this in our vocabulary, but that is probably to be expected given Gatschet’s lack of prior exposure to Ojibwe or, to any real extent, any Algonquian language, and the lack of grammatical forms upon which he could have built such incorrect, invented forms. Unfortunately, given Bottineau’s own lack of full fluency in Ojibwe, it is not always possible to say if a given ungrammatical form is due to Bottineau or to Gatschet, but the patterning suggests that nearly all of them are due to Bottineau.
• This vocabulary contains several words which to my knowledge are unattested elsewhere (see above). Of these, a few are Plains Cree loans—including possibly the beginning portion of Bottineau’s Ojibwe nickname—which is not surprising. In addition, several of the words attested in the Bottineau vocabulary shed important light on words only very sparsely attested elsewhere, or are otherwise very notable. The most significant of these are:
  • Zagaswe for “to smoke (AI),” with a final -e in all inflections. (This is discussed both in the document linked immediately above and in the document on Bottineau’s dialect.) This verb is one of a class of verbs which originally had an ablauting final vowel, continued only in Nipissing Algonquin, and has generalized final -aa in all other dialects except Oji-Cree and some Western Algonquin, which generalized -e. The existence of the same generalization as in Oji-Cree in Bottineau’s speech is remarkable and as far as I know completely unattested for Northern Minnesota or any other community outside Oji-Cree and Western Algonquin.
  • There was a body part term -daan translated “shoulder” in this vocabulary, which I have not found elsewhere. It probably really meant “back of the shoulders” or similar, and provides a possible etymology for the adverb odaanaang “(following) behind, at the back, in the rear; the base or back of something; previously, in the past,” originally meaning something like “at his/her back side.” The word can also be connected to a rare Plains Cree noun, to adverbs meaning “behind, the back of” in Cree and Shawnee, and possibly to broader Algonquian terms related to the sense “behind.” (Discussed most extensively in Note AA.)
  • This vocabulary as well as a couple of other sources allow us to be fairly secure in stating that the local Ojibwe name for (Upper) Fort Garry was †Mis(h)tawayaa; this must have been a loan from Cree mistahi-wā[skahikan] “European fort,” lit. “big house.” The name †Mis(h)tawayaa was then used by at least some Ojibwe speakers to name the Red River of the North, Winnipeg, and the local British administration and British or British-associated people themselves. (Discussed most extensively in Note X.)

Vocabulary Appendix: Uncertain Reading

Gatschet’s handwriting is usually quite legible as far as these things go, and although I’ve succeeded, I think, in deciphering almost every word and character in the vocabulary, the’s one word where I have failed. (Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing out the likely solutions to two other cases I had been unable to interpret!) This is:
 

Uncertain name(?) on page 65.

This note begins: “Hiawatha is not ojibwē.” (Or possibly “Hiawatha is not ojibwē”?) It is then followed by two words/names on top of one another (the bottom one clearly being written first, and the top one added afterwards), and then the name <háyawátha>, with the two <h>’s and the accent over the first <a> subsequently crossed out. The two words/names preceding Hiawatha’s name would seem to be the authority/ies being quoted for (or against?) the claim that Hiawatha, contrary to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, was not an Ojibwe figure. (He was in fact an Onondaga or Mohawk political leader, whose name was Hayę́hwàtha’ [Onondaga] or Aionhwátha’ [Mohawk] [Tooker 1978:424].) The word/name added later, above the first word, looks like “surveilleur.” The bottom (original) word is what I can’t read, but it’s unclear to me if it was actually crossed out, or if “surveilleur” was underlined (as the bottom word is) and this underlining is partially obscuring the bottom word. In any case, the bottom word/name clearly begins with <Co>, contains an <s> in the middle, and looks like it ends in <ling>. I haven’t found any authorities which Gatschet may have been consulting whose names resembled this, but it’s kind of hard to search for when I don’t already know the name. I also haven’t found anything for “surveilleur,” which may be either a description or a name, but again, I don’t know who it might refer to.

Sources Used [click to expand]

(“AA” = American Anthropologist [new series])
(“AIL-M” = Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics Memoir)
(“AIQ” = American Indian Quarterly)
(“AL” = Anthropological Linguistics)
(“APS-M” = Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society)
(“BAE-B” = Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin)
(“CESP” = National Museum of Man, Mercury Series, Canadian Ethnology Service Paper)
(“CWPL” = Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics)
(“HNAI” = Handbook of North American Indians, series ed. William C. Sturtevant)
(“IJAL” = International Journal of American Linguistics)
(“JIPA” = Journal of the International Phonetic Association)
(“JLSM” = Janua Linguarum, Studia Memoriae Nicolai van Wijk Dedicata)
(“ONJ” = Oshkaabewis Native Journal)

Newspaper Articles

• “[No Title].” Little Falls Transcript (Little Falls, MN), June 2, 1893, p. 2. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “About People.” National Tribune (Washington, D.C.), June 15, 1893, p. 5. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “Antropological [sic] Society.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), May 29, 1907, p. 8. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 25, 2020.
• “Burial at Philadelphia.” Washington Herald (Washington, D.C.), March 17, 1907, p. 4. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 25, 2020.
• “Charles Bottineau Dead.” Duluth Evening Herald (Duluth, MN), May 8, 1908, p. 16.
• “The Chippewa Commission.” St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, MN), December 5, 1894, p. 1. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “The Dakotas.” Duluth Evening Herald (Duluth, MN), August 12, 1899, p. 4.
• “Dar Hall Is Cute.” St. Paul Daily Globe (St. Paul, MN), May 31, 1893, p. 1. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “Death Closes Noted Scholar’s Brilliant Life.” Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), March 17, 1907, p. 3. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 25, 2020.
• “The Death Record.” Sisseton Weekly Standard (Sisseton, SD), December 8, 1911, p. 9. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “Died.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 3, 1911, p. 5. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “Dr. Gatschet’s Body Buried in Philadelphia.” Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), March 20, 1907, p. 14. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 25, 2020.
• Drake, Phil, and Nora Mabie (2019). “FINALLY! At Long Last, Little Shell Get Federal Recognition.” Great Falls Tribune (Great Falls, MT), December 20, 2019. Accessed January 16, 2020.
• “L’Echo de Nord-Ouest: Petite Etude sur les Langues des[?] Sauvages de Nord-Ouest.” Le Métis (Saint Boniface, MB), November 18, 1875, pp. 2-3. Accessed via Google News, April 24, 2021.
• “Has Child Kept Away.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), September 6, 1911, p. 14. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “Indian Woman Works for Uncle Sam.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 4, 1910, part 4, p. 8. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• “Judge Bottineau Passes Away.” Duluth Herald (Duluth, MN), December 2, 1911, p. 29.
• “Noted Linguist Dead.” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), March 16, 1907, p. 2. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 25, 2020.
• “Pierre Bottineau.” Echo de l’Ouest (Minneapolis, MN), August 2, 1895, p. 2. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 22, 2020.
• “Vital Records.” Washington Times (Washington, D.C.), December 4, 1911, p. 15. Accessed at Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.

Laws, Court Cases, Government Documents

• 13 Stat. 667. “Treaty Between the United States and the Red Lake and Pembina Bands of Chippewa Indians,” ratified March 1, 1864, proclaimed May 5, 1864. Accessed at The Library of Congress, January 16, 2020.
• 25 Stat. 642 (Pub. Law 50-24). “An Act for the Relief and Civilization of the Chippewa Indians in the State of Minnesota” [= the “Nelson Act”], January 14, 1889. Accessed at The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• 39 Stat. 125 (Pub. Law 64-80). “An Act Making Appropriations for the Current and Contingent Expenses of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for Fulfilling Treaty Stipulations with Various Indian Tribes, and for Other Purposes, for the Fiscal Year Ending June Thirtieth, Nineteen Hundred and Seventeen,” May 18, 1916. Accessed at The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• 43 Stat. 95 (Pub. Law 68-82). “An Act to Provide for the Payment of Claims of Chippewa Indians of Minnesota for Back Annuities,” April 14, 1924. Accessed at The Library of Congress, January 23, 2020.
• Gover, Kevin (2000). Summary Under the Criteria for the Proposed Finding for Federal Acknowledgment of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana. Office of Federal Acknowledgment, Bureau of Indian Affairs, United States Department of the Interior.
• “John B. Bottineau, 01 Dec 1911, District of Columbia, United States.” In “District of Columbia Deaths, 1874-1961.” FamilySearch. Citing reference ID cn 202 175, District Records Center, Washington, D.C.; FHL microfilm 2,115,587. Accessed January 24, 2020.
• Kappler (1904) = “Treaty with the Chippewa—Red Lake and Pembina Bands, 1863.” In Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties. Vol. II: Treaties (1904), ed. Charles J. Kappler, pp. 853-855. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
• Maddux v. Bottineau, 34 App. D.C. 119 (1909).
• Minnesota State Census, 1875. Inhabitants of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, page 299, family 405, line 36. “John B. Bottineaux” [sic]. Minnesota Historical Society Census ID 637938. Accessed January 23, 2020.
• Minnesota State Census, 1885. Schedule 29. Inhabitants of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, May 16, 1885, page 10, family 74, line 37. “Jean B. Bottineau.” Minnesota Historical Society Census ID 637887. Accessed June 27, 2019.
• Minnesota Territory Census, 1850. Schedule I. Free inhabitants of Saint Anthony, Ramsey County, September 15, 1850, page 155(?), family 314, line 3. “John Bottineau.” Minnesota Historical Society Census ID 637890. Accessed July 15, 2019.
• Minnesota Territory Census, 1850. Schedule I. Free inhabitants of Pembina District, Pembina County, September 9, 1850, page 15, family 99, line 26. “Francois Renville.” Minnesota Historical Society Census ID 4367109 [in catalog as “Francais Renville”]. Accessed January 11, 2020.
• Minnesota Territory Census, 1850. Schedule I. Free inhabitants of Pembina District, Pembina County, September 9, 1850, page 15, family 99, line 30. “Marie Renville.” Minnesota Historical Society Census ID 4367133. Accessed January 11, 2020.
• S. Doc. 154 = 55th Congress of the United States, Senate, 2nd Session. Document No. 154, “Petition and Memorial of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, in the State of North Dakota, Praying for the Reference of Their Claim . . . ,” February 23, 1898. Accessed at SHAREOK, July 30, 2019.
• S. Doc. 444 = 56th Congress of the United States, Senate, 1st Session. Document No. 444, Papers Relative to an Agreement with the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota, June 6, 1900. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
• Skibine, George T. (2009). Summary Under the Criteria and Evidence for Final Determination Against the Federal Acknowledgment of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana. Office of Federal Acknowledgment, Bureau of Indian Affairs, United States Department of the Interior.
• TOR Bottineau v. O’Grady = Transcript of Record, Bottineau v. O’Grady, Supreme Court of the District of Columbia (No. 25245). Filed May 1, 1909 and printed September 2, 1909 for Maddux v. Bottineau, App. D.C., October 1909 term (No. 2018). Washington, D.C.: Judd & Detweiler.
• TOR United States ex rel. Detling v. Work = Transcript of Record, United States ex rel. Detling v. Work, Supreme Court of the District of Columbia (No. 70417). Printed for United States ex rel. Detling v. Work, App. D.C., October 1926/January 1927 terms (No. 4532). Washington, D.C.: Judd & Detweiler.
• Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians v. United States, 23 Ind. Cl. Comm. 315 (1970).

Books, Articles, Theses, Web Pages, etc.

• Académie Française (1879). Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, vol. 1. 7th edition. Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot et cie, imprimeurs de l’Institut de France.
• Afable, Patricia O., and Madison S. Beeler (1996). “Place-Names.” In Languages, ed. Ives Goddard, pp. 185-199. HNAI vol. 17. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
• Albers, Patricia C. (2001). “Plains Ojibwa.” In Plains, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie, pp. 652-660. HNAI vol. 13. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.
• Andrews, Kenneth R. (1994). Shawnee Grammar. Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina.
• AOCD = [Nichols, John D.], ed. (2014). ᑭᑎᓯᑭᓯᐍᐏᓂᓇᐣ: Anihshininiimowin Oji-Cree Dictionary (Severn River and Winisk River). Part Two: English to Oji-Cree. August 2014 draft edition. Sioux Lookout, ON: Kwayaciiwin Education Resource Centre.
• Aun nish e naubay [= Patrick Gourneau] (1993). History of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. 9th edition. [Belcourt, ND]: [Self-published].
• Bakker, Peter (1997). A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 10. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Bakker, Peter, and Robert A. Papen (1997). “Michif: A Mixed Language Based on Cree and French.” In Contact Languages: A Wider Perspective, ed. Sarah G. Thomason, pp. 295-363. Creole Language Library 17. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/cll.17.12bak.
• Baraga, Frederic (1850). A Theoretical and Practical Grammar of the Otchipwe Language . . . . Detroit: Jabez Fox.
• Baraga, Frederic (1853). A Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, Explained in English . . . . Cincinnati: Jos. A. Hemann.
• Baraga, Frederic (1878). A Theoretical and Practical Grammar of the Otchipwe Language for the Use of Missionaries and Other Persons Living Among the Indians, by R. R. Bishop Baraga: A Second Edition, by a Missionary of the Oblates. [Ed. and revised, Albert Lacombe.] Montreal: Beauchemin & Valois.
• Baraga, Frederic (1878-1880). A Dictionary of the Otchipwe Language, Explained in English, by R. R. Bishop Baraga: A New Edition, by a Missionary of the Oblates. Part I: English-Otchipwe, 1878; Part II: Otchipwe-English, 1880. [Ed. and revised, Albert Lacombe.] Montreal: Beauchemin & Valois.
• Baraga, Frederic (1990). The Diary of Bishop Frederic Baraga: First Bishop of Marquette, Michigan, eds. Regis M. Walling and Rev. N. Daniel Rupp, trans. Joseph Gregorich and Paul Prud’homme. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. [2001 paperback edition.]
• Barnard, Charles H., and John Jones (1987). Farm Real Estate Values in the United States by Counties, 1850-1982. Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture. Statistical Bulletin No. 751. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
• Barkwell, Lawrence J. (2014). “Bottineau-Baldwin, Marie Louise.” Louis Riel Institute. Accessed at Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture, Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, November 16, 2019.
• Barkwell, Lawrence J., ed. (2018). Metis Dictionary of Biography: Volume L. Louis Riel Institute. Accessed at Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture, Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research, November 16, 2019.
• Beatty, Michael A. (2001). County Name Origins of the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
• Beckman, Jill, Michael Jessen, and Catherine Ringen (2013). “Empirical Evidence for Laryngeal Features: Aspirating vs. True Voice Languages.” Journal of Linguistics 49(2): 259-284. DOI: 10.1017/S0022226712000424. Preprint version available here.
• Benton-Banai, Edward (2011). “Indinawemaaganag.” Transcribed by Diane Amour. ONJ 8(1): 88-102.
• Blackbird, Andrew J. (1887). History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan, a Grammar of Their Language, and a Personal and Family History of the Author. Ypsilanti, MI: The Ypsilantian Printing House.
• Bloomfield, Leonard (1958). Eastern Ojibwa: Grammatical Sketch, Texts and Word List, ed. Charles F. Hockett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Booker, Karen M. (2009). “Gatschet, Albert Samuel.” In Lexicon Grammaticorum: A Bio-Bibliographical Companion to the History of Linguistics, general ed. Harro Stammerjohann, p. 515. 2nd edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Chapter DOI: 10.1515/9783484971127.502.
• Bottineau, J[ohn] B. (1909). Letter to J. N. B. Hewitt, August 4, 1909. Manuscript 3968, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
• Bottineau, J[ohn] B. (1910a). Letter to Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, February 16, 1910. In “Letters and Notes Collected by J.N.B. Hewitt.” Folder 11, Manuscript 1647, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.
• Bottineau, John B. (1910b). Letter to Kanick, Awanaquot, John Vandal, and Joe Rolette, and all other persons interested, November 4, 1910. Revision of letter of October 14, 1910. [Published under title: “Revised Letter of November 4, 1910 from John B. Bottineau, Solicitor . . . to Mr. Kanick, Chief, et al., Members of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians . . . .” Minneapolis: Leader Printing Company.]
• Bray, Martha (1964). “Pierre Bottineau: Professional Guide.” North Dakota Quarterly 32(2): 29-37.
• Bright, William (2004). Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• Burt, Larry (1987). “Nowhere Left to Go: Montana’s Crees, Metis, and Chippewas and the Creation of Rocky Boy’s Reservation.” Great Plains Quarterly 7(3): 195-209.
• Cahill, Cathleen D. (2013). “Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin: Indigenizing the Federal Indian Service.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25(2) / AIQ 37(3): 65-86 (The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies: A Special Combined Issue of SAIL and AIQ, Summer 2013). DOIs: 10.5250/studamerindilite.25.2.0065 and 10.5250/amerindiquar.37.3.0065.
• Campbell, George Monroe (1940). Campbell’s Original Indian Dictionary of the Ojibway or Chippewa Language. Minneapolis: Campbell Publishing Company.
• Campbell, Lyle (1973). “Gatschet’s Classification of Mayan Languages.” IJAL 39(4): 250-252. DOI: 10.1086/465273.
• Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 4. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Campbell, Lyle, and Marianne Mithun (1979). “Introduction: North American Indian Historical Linguistics in Current Perspective.” In The Languages of Native America: Historical and Comparative Assessment, eds. Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, pp. 3-69. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Chosa, Joe (2003). “Giiwasewin.” Transcribed by Beth Tornes. ONJ 6(1): 82-83.
• Clark, Jim (1998). “Ayaabadak Ishkode.” Transcribed and translated by Anton Treuer. ONJ 5(2): 14-17.
• Clark, Jim (Naawigiizis), and Rick Gresczyk (Gwayakogaabo) (1998). We’re in Ojibwe Country / Ojibwe-Anishinaabewakiing Gidayaamin: A Phrasebook in the Chippewa Language, with Emphasis on the Traditional. Minneapolis: Eagle Works.
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1. ↑ Descriptions include: “He is certainly more nearly devoid of all idea of courtesy and social decorum than any man I ever met” (James Pilling,* quoted in Landar 1974:161, n. 3); “Gatschet I saw at least once in Washington, but he seemed as shy for an old man as I certainly was for a young one, and we did not get far. He rarely attended meetings” (Kroeber 1993:46); “Having no gift for speaking or organization, he seldom participated in scientific gatherings, but preferred to work alone and by his own method. In fact it was practically impossible for him to collaborate upon a joint undertaking” and “Under the surface, unknown to all but his most intimate companions by reason of many peculiarities of temperament and foreign habit, he carried the soul of a poet and the heart of a little child” (his friend, James Mooney: Mooney 1907:566).

   Mooney also emphasized that Gatschet was “[l]oyal in his friendships, . . . and held a promise an obligation,” and discussed his love of nature (ibid.). It seems clear from Mooney’s description that he must have spent a good deal of time with his old friend as the latter was dying: “He found his chief relaxation in long country walks, and in the last weeks of his life, when strength and memory were gone, his thoughts were of the mountains, and he imagined himself climbing the Alps with the sister of his childhood” (pp. 566-567). Mooney—like Gatschet, “shy and reticent” (Hinsley 1981:215), outside the “inner circle” of Powell, with whom he rarely saw eye-to-eye, and, as the child of Irish Catholic immigrants, well familiar with the experience of being a “foreign” outsider and facing discrimination from others—had much in common with Gatschet, and the two had much, beyond their research interests and theoretical bents, that they must have bonded over. Landar’s (1974:160) suspicion that Mooney “was Gatschet’s best friend” is probably correct. (It may be noted that Mooney wrote Gatschet’s obituary in the journal American Anthropologist as well as delivered his eulogy to the Anthropological Society of Washington, and was one of three colleagues to deliver a eulogy at his funeral, alongside the then-director of the BAE, William Henry Holmes, and Gilbert Thompson of the USGS [Mooney 1907; “Antropological [sic] Society”; “Dr. Gatschet’s Body Buried in Philadelphia”].)

   *[Letter to Wilberforce Eames, October 10, 1888, pg. 2. Eames Papers, New York Public Library.]

2. ↑ The NAA also contains several documents which include correspondence between Bottineau and another important Bureau of American Ethnology researcher, J. N. B. Hewitt. A close friend of Bottineau’s who would move into his house around the time of his death (probably immediately afterwards) (Tooker and Greymont 2007:89; Cahill 2013:72) and would write his obituary, Hewitt was one of two early BAE employees who were themselves of Indian heritage, Hewitt being of partial Tuscarora descent and raised on the Tuscarora Reservation in New York; he was also an exceptionally skilled linguist, whose practices and theoretical orientation were far ahead of his time, though his major published work was ethnological/cultural in focus (Rudes 1994).

   Bottineau’s close contact with Hewitt and perhaps to some extent some other members of the BAE is also illustrated in a letter which Bottineau wrote in late 1910 to Kanick, the man he was attempting to get installed and recognized as the new chief of the Turtle Mountain Tribe after the death of the previous chief, Little Shell. Imploring Kanick multiple times to call a council and have himself recognized in the written minutes of the meeting as Little Shell’s rightful successor, Bottineau assured him that once he had done so, “[w]ith these papers of endorsement I shall secure your certificate, first from the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute [Walcott] and from the Director of the Bureau of Ethnology [Francis Webb Hodge], which will answer all purposes, being such evidence of your position as must be recognized by law” (Bottineau 1910b:7). Bottineau may have already discussed this matter with Hewitt and formulated a plan to try to obtain Hodge’s and Walcott’s approval, though the plan seems quite unrealistic.

3. ↑ Jean Bottineau was frequently referred to as “John” (including by himself), especially in American legal documents. I will refer to him as “Jean” here because that’s how he identified himself to Gatschet, as well as to others who were not dealing with him in his capacity as an American lawyer. At least his father and uncle pronounced the surname in a Métis French manner, as something like [bʊtʃɪ'nuː], to judge from the note from Daniel Johnston (1915:411), who accompanied them on an expedition in the 1850s, that it was “pronounced Birchineau.” Jean may have pronounced it this way as well.

   I will discuss his Ojibwe name in more detail in the post dedicated to him, but will note here that I’ve found attestations of two different ones, both probably nicknames: he signed and gave his name as “O’Bisquodonce,” which may have meant something like “Humpy” and referred to a hunchback he had; alternatively, it possibly referred to the intestines, colon, or rectum (TOR Bottineau v. O’Grady at 101; Bottineau 1910b:7, 9; Grey 1932:3). Another writer, who probably used his daughter Marie and Hewitt as sources, implies one of his names was <Ozawidjeed>, which must represent Ozaawijiid “Brown/Yellow Anus” (Houghton 1918:169). As bizarre as this name might seem, Ojibwe nicknames can be quite deprecating at times, and there was actually another historical Ojibwe man with the same name, an inhabitant of Portage la Prairie (and thus probably ultimately descended from Pembina and/or Red River Ojibwes), listed as <Oosaochit>, translated as “Yellow Anus” (Garrioch 1923:94).

4. ↑ There is virtually no contemporary documentation of the sociolinguistic situation with regard to Michif—hardly any white writer even unambiguously noted the language’s existence until the 1930s, and it did not come to the attention of linguists or any significant number of other outsiders until the 1970s, despite the fact that it must have existed since the early 1800s; it simply remained unknown to Euro-Americans and Euro-Canadians for much of its existence. Unfortunately this means we have to guess a bit about how widely it was understood or spoken by the Turtle Mountain Ojibwes in Bottineau’s day. There is at least one mention of it from 1875, published in the short-lived newspaper Le Métis, which indicates that at this time, Métis of French descent widely used it, but it’s unclear exactly to what extent Métis of British descent did so yet (“L’Echo de Nord-Ouest,” pg. 3; part of the translation is from Rosen et al. 2020:2990, who, however, mistranscribe some of the words; underlined words are instead italicized in the original; unfortunately I’m unable to make out a few of the words, and have left out that clause; all spellings are sic):
   

   Les Metis français et Anglais de Manitoba et de la Saskatchiwan ont adopté cette langue [Cris], et quoique parlant bien le français ou l’Anglais, ils aiment entreux a s’entretenir en cette idiome . . . . On a dù remarquer bien souvent, surtout les Métis français qui, en parlant Cris entre eux, ont pris l’habitude d’y mèler une foule de mots français— A vrai dire ils forment leurs phrases, moitié français et moitie Cris—C’est en quelque sorte une autre langue, qui parait bien risible à ceux qui n’y sont pas habitués. Ordinairement on se sert du Cris pour les verbes, les adjectifs—et du français pour les substantifs. v.g. Ki ki wabamaw tchi, mon cheval? As tu vu mon cheval? Kispin ki wi-miyin ton fusil nista mon couteau ki ka miyitin, si tu veux me donner ton fusil, je te donnerai mon couteau.

   The French and English Métis of Manitoba and Saskatchewan have adopted this language [Cree], and although they speak French or English well, they prefer to talk amongst themselves in this language . . . . It has often been observed [or, ‘We have often noted’] that especially the French Métis, when speaking Cree amongst themselves, have taken on the habit of mixing in a host of French words—actually, they form their sentences half in French and half in Cree. It is in some sense another language, which seems rather comical to those who are not accustomed to it. Normally they use Cree for verbs and adjectives, and French for nouns, e.g., Ki ki wabamaw tchi, mon cheval? [Kikī-wāpamāw cī mon cheval = Kikii-waapamaaw chii moñ zhwal] ‘Have you seen my horse?’ Kispin ki wi-miyin ton fusil nista mon couteau ki ka miyitin [Kīspin kiwī-mīyin ton fusil, nīsta mon couteau kika-mīyitin = Kiishpin kiwii-miiyin toñ fiizii, niishta moñ kotoo kika-miiyitin], ‘If you want to give me your gun, I will give you my knife.’

   Considering this, at least a good portion of the Métis at Turtle Mountain must have spoken Michif by Bottineau’s day.

   Despite the fact that Michif is (warning: significantly oversimplifying here) Plains Cree with Canadian French nouns and noun phrases, as noted there is strong evidence that many of its first speakers were Ojibwes and Métis of Ojibwe ancestry. Because of this, I don’t consider Bottineau’s Ojibwe ancestry to be probative in determining whether he may have spoken or at least understood Michif. There’s a quite decent chance that he did.

5. ↑ The Turtle Mountain Band also included, as has been mentioned, a large number of Métis (who in fact significantly outnumbered the full-blood Ojibwes), both people of Ojibwe ancestry like Bottineau and some others of Cree ancestry.

   The relationship of the “Pembina Band” and “Turtle Mountain Band” is somewhat complex, but basically, the early “Turtle Mountain Band” was essentially composed of Pembina Band members who had moved further west, wintering around the Turtle Mountains which straddle the modern North Dakota-Manitoba border, joined by Métis relatives and compatriots. Their ranks were later augmented by a number of additional Red River Métis abandoning Canada in the wake of the suppressions of the Riel Resistances of 1869-1870 and 1885. In the Old Crossing Treaty of 1863, the Pembina (including Turtle Mountain) and Red Lake Bands ceded to the United States large portions of land in northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota on both sides of the Red River, including the settlement of Pembina. (The Old Crossing Treaty, incidentally, was in many ways an even more awful deal for the Ojibwes who were a party to it than the McCumber Agreement.) Some Pembina Ojibwes and Métis remained in that region for a time, but by the 1870s-1880s many had relocated to join the Turtle Mountain group to the west. Many Americans at the time used the terms “Pembina Band” and “Turtle Mountain Band” interchangeably, and in fact in different places and at different times, Bottineau referred to himself and his family as both Pembina Chippewas and Turtle Mountain Chippewas.

   I should add two terminological notes here. First, my understanding is that many or most Turtle Mountain “Métis” refer to themselves as “Michifs,” not “Métis” (or at least did so until recently). I have retained the term Métis in this post for a few reasons, including: “Métis” is the term most commonly used in the scholarly literature (including some works written by Turtle Mountain Métis) for both Canadian and American Métis; many Turtle Mountain Métis are ultimately of Canadian descent and a number were specifically refugees from the Red River Settlement in the aftermath of the Métis uprisings; it’s convenient to use one term rather than switching back and forth between “Métis” and “Michif” depending on location and time period and specific person; and retaining “Métis” to refer to people can usefully allow for the clear distinction between the people and the “Michif” language. “Métis” and “Metis” are also the terms used by the tribe’s own Heritage Center.

   Second, Bottineau himself was of mixed Ojibwe and French ancestry, but it’s questionable whether it’s appropriate to describe him as “Métis.” The question of exactly who should be considered “Métis” is still a controversial one, but certainly the Métis people of the Red River Settlement, Pembina, and neighboring areas were and are defined by their separate and unique ethnicity and culture, rather than by being genetically part Native and part European. From what I can tell, Bottineau’s father and uncles were culturally Métis to a good extent, but it seems pretty clear that Bottineau considered himself an “Indian” regardless of his “mixed blood” (and his daughter Marie clearly felt the same way about herself), and he was strongly aligned politically with the full-blood Ojibwe faction at Turtle Mountain led by Little Shell, not with the Métis-dominated faction. On the other hand, he did speak Métis French natively and had some other Métis cultural traits. Of course, ethnicity and culture are very complex, and it’s perfectly possible for a person to validly identify with multiple ethnic/cultural groups. In the end, Bottineau probably was culturally “Métis” in some ways, but culturally “Ojibwe” in others (not to mention culturally “Euro-American” in still others!), and there’s no contradiction in this.

6. ↑ In a letter of his, he also makes some reference to his uncle Charles speaking Ojibwe to him (“his last words to me were: ‘I leave you, my nephew, to prosecute our undertaking for our own kinsmen’s sake, Angwah-mezin [= aangwaamizin “take good care!”]’” [Bottineau 1910b:4]; though note that he only quotes a single Ojibwe word, with a suggestion that the rest may have been spoken in French or perhaps Michif), and—somewhat fascinatingly—sprinkles an Ojibwe word into his otherwise quite formal, espistolary English: “I intend to proceed at once to make you a visit to counsel with you and the tribe for the preparation of papers and my Pakamagan [= bagamaagan ‘war club’], to be used in the prosecution of our case against the Government” (pg. 8).

   Several contemporaries that I’m aware of commented on Jean’s knowledge of Ojibwe, but as they did not speak Ojibwe themselves, they would not necessarily have known how much Ojibwe he actually spoke. In his history of Anoka County, MN, Goodrich (1905:52-53) notes that he “submitted” a proposed Ojibwe derivation of the name Anoka “to J. B. Bottineau and his uncle, Charles Bottineau, both well versed in the Chippeway language,” who gave him several comments on this proposed etymology. (The actual origin of the name is Dakota anóka “on both sides” [of the Rum River] [Bright 2004:42], as Goodrich ultimately correctly recognized.) Charles at least was certainly a fluent native speaker of Ojibwe, and served as an interpreter at times. More significantly, Hewitt and Mooney in Hodge (1910:289), in citing Bottineau for the etymology of the name “Potawatomi,” describe him as “speaking Chippewa and Cree fluently.” (This is undoubtedly his friend Hewitt’s contribution.)

   While I’ve emphasized a bit Pierre’s absences from home, it’s worth noting at this point that Jean certainly did spend time around his father; he also had a very close relationship with Charles, sharing in some business ventures with him and working closely with him in their petitions to the government in the aftermath of the Ten-Cent Treaty. Charles was also living at Jean’s home in Washington when the former died, although I don’t know how long they’d been living together; probably it had been since Charles moved to Washington, though I’m unclear on when that was. And as a boy Jean lived next to his uncle Sévère and had some contact with other extended family such as his grandmother Margaret. So there’s no question that he was exposed to a decent amount of Ojibwe throughout his life; rather, the only question is whether it was a sufficient degree and of a nature to make him a fluent native speaker.

7. ↑ It’s not uncommon for connections to be drawn between the two words, in some cases probably aided by the association between prairie land and regular, often anthropogenic fires. Thus, Cuoq (1886:116, n. 2) warns the reader to avoid “confusing ishkode with mashkode, as some have done: they are two quite different words” (“Il ne faut pas confondre ICKOTE avec MACKOTE, ainsi qu’on a fait: ce sont deux mots bien différents”), and some Nishnaabemwin speakers now actually have mshkode for “fire” as well as “prairie.” Additionally, the Hurons, and some other Iroquoians, referred to the Mascoutens (← Ojibwe Mashkodens “[People of the] Small Prairie”) as the <Atsistaehronons> (and many other recorded spellings), meaning “Fire People,” and the French initially followed their lead and called the Mascoutens the “Gens/Nation du Feu” = “Fire People/Nation” (Goddard 1978:671).

   As very little is known about the Mascoutens, no one really knows for certain whether the fact that their name among neighboring Algonquian groups referred to prairies and in Huron to fires is just a coincidence, though Mooney and Cyrus Thomas in Hodge (1907:810-811) do suggest that the Huron term arose from a mistranslation or misunderstanding by the Hurons of the Algonquian name—as have some other commentators dating back to Claude Dablon in the Jesuit Relations, though Dablon didn’t explicitly mention the Hurons (Goddard 1972:128-129; JR 55:198-200).

8. ↑ E.g., Afable and Beeler (1996:191), subsequently cited by Bright (2004:96). For some older sources deriving the name specifically from Ojibwe zhigaagong, see, e.g., Baraga (1853:168), Cuoq (1886:88-89, n. 3), and Blackbird (1887:108).

   The real answer, if you’re curious, is that it’s from Miami-Illinois Šikaakwa, which means both “striped skunk” and “wild garlic,” but which in the placename was referring to A. tricoccum, not skunks, as is abundantly clear from the earliest French uses of the name and from descriptions of the place(s) it was applied to (Swenson 1991; McCafferty 2003, 2005). Incidentally, Miami-Illinois šikaakwa, like Ojibwe zhigaag, is cognate with the English word “skunk,” which was borrowed from a Southern New England Algonquian language with something like */skʌ̃ːkʷ/ (cf. Massachusett <squnck> = †/skʷʌ̃ːk/, here with metathesis of labialization); the terms go back to Proto-Algonquian *šeka·kwa, literally—and delightfully—meaning something close to “pissing mammal” (Siebert 1967:21).

9. ↑ Additionally, <ĕ> almost certainly represents [ə] instead of short [e ~ ɛ] in a few instances, but there’s no real way to know when this was the case. I base this conclusion on (1) Gatschet’s transcription practices with Potawatomi and southern (Kansas/Oklahoma) Odawa, where <ĕ> is used for the reduced vowel [ə ~ ə̆], and (2) his published orthographies of Kiowa, Klamath-Modoc, and Catawba, among other languages, where [ə] (“the primitive vowel” [Gatschet 1882:3]; “The spontaneous or primitive vowel, ‘Urvocal’” compared with English lodger, bungler, German dieser, Männer, French ce, que [Gatschet 1890a:207, 212]; “the neutral [vowel]” [Gatschet 1900:528]) is again written <ĕ>. This seems to have been the regular way Gatschet transcribed [ə] throughout his career.
10. ↑ For instance, Frederic Baraga and Jean-André Cuoq, both of whom, Cuoq in particularly, rarely marked vowel length in their grammars and dictionaries, distinguished the 1sg.CONJ and 2sg.CONJ suffixes, as <-(i)àn> and <-(i)an> (e.g., Baraga 1850:106; in some other places he spells long vowels with various other diacritics), and <-(i)ân> and <-(i)ăn> (e.g., Cuoq 1891:108) respectively. Similarly, Verwyst writes them as <-iān> and <-ian> (e.g., Verwyst 1901:7). Even the Jesuit missionaries of the 17th century very often recorded the difference, using a few different diacritics or spelling oppositions, e.g., <[tagŏchin]ouanbánin> “ſi je fuſſe ou || ſi jeſtois arriué” (dagoshinowaambaaniin “should I arrive”) vs. <[tagŏchin]ouanbănin> “ſi tu” (dagoshinowambaniin “should you arrive”) (Nicolas 1674:16; Daviault 1994:52).
11. ↑ Baraga is in fact very, very explicit that the “four vowels” “a, e, i, o” have invariant pronunciations: “The sound of the vowels never changes; they have always the same sound. . . . a is invariably pronounced as in the English word father . . . . e is always pronounced as in the English word met . . . . i is always pronounced as in the English word pin . . . . o is always pronounced as in the English word note . . . . These rules have no exception in the Otchipwe language. The four vowels are invariably pronounced as stated here” (Baraga 1850:8, emphases in original); his examples include both long and short vowels, and he was aware that a difference between long and short vowels existed. He further expands on such comments elsewhere, for instance: “[The letter ‘A’] has only one sound in the Otchipwe language, that is, the open clear sound of a in English father. I know it is difficult for an English tongue to believe that the letter a has but one sound, because in English it has no less than eight different sounds [quoting Cobb 1825:7: the sounds in “name” = [eɪ] or [eː], “par” = [aː] or [ɑː], “salt” = [ɔː], “glass” = [æ], “wad” = [ɒ], “any” = [ɛ], “-age” = [ɪ], and “liar” = [ə]]. But still it is so . . . . Some writers of Otchipwe works have even invented a particular type to express this letter when it is to be pronounced, (as they say,) like u in sun, but, etc. But this is entirely incorrect. Once more: The letter a has invariably one and the same sound in all the Otchipwe words that contain it” (Baraga 1853:1, emphases in original). This last comment is particularly valuable in demonstrating that Baraga was evidently able to perceive the difference between English [ɑː] and [ə]/[ɜ]; that other writers at the time claimed Ojibwe short /a/ could be realized in the range of the latter phones; and that Baraga was nonetheless emphatic that such was not the case in the dialects of Ojibwe he was familiar with.

    While to my knowledge the early French documentations of Old Algonquin and Old Odawa don’t mention any variant pronunciations for vowels, there are spellings which suggest lax/centralized pronunciations of certain vowels; in particular, /a/ in some inflectional suffixes was not infrequently written <e>. This was basically regularly the case in the animate plural suffix -wag, today generally pronounced something like [wʌk]~[wɤk], which was almost always written <ȣek>/<ouek> or similar (cf. Costa 2008:9, n. 14, citing p.c. from Ives Goddard). Other instances of short /a/ or other vowels were also written as <e> at times, though, especially when unstressed, e.g., “il vit” = “he lives” as <pematissi> = bimaadizi; “pierre” = “stone, rock” as <aſſen> = asin; “couteaux” = “knives” as <mokmaner> = mookomaanar (modern mookomaanan); “droit” = “correct; straight” as <gȣeïak> and <kȣej̈ak> = gwayak; or “derriere le lac” = “the other side of the lake” as <aȣessegami> = awasagaamii (Nicolas 1674:9, 31, 90, 104; Hanzeli 1969:74, 76, 79; Daviault 1994:35, 95, 179 and n. 2, 201 and n. 1, 308). In fact, one of the methods some Jesuits employed to mark the distinction between the 1sg conjunct and 2sg conjunct endings mentioned above (-aan vs. -an) was as <-an> vs. <-en> (e.g., Nicolas 1674:16; see Hanzeli 1969:91 and Daviault 1994:308-309).

12. ↑ In addition to these general spelling tendencies, I can point to at least a handful of specific instances which seem to indicate a very lax/reduced pronunciation of a short vowel (sometimes colored by neighboring consonants or vowels), which support this interpretation. These include: <tenä́niu>/<tenä́nyu> “tongue” (-denaniw, pg. 35), <onáwiyan> “cheeks” (onawayan, pg. 35), <pî́shíkiweyan> “buffalo robe” (bizhikiwayaan, pg. 35; cf. <wágush íwayan> “fox hide” [waagoshiwayaan] with the same morpheme on the same page), <kapagî́shima^ng> “West” (gaa-bangishimong, pg. 41), <ánung> “star” (anang, pg. 41), <ishinikadun!> given as one of two transcriptions of “name it!” along with <ishinikadan!> (izhinikaadan, pg. 49), <kashkibî́de^ng> “tie up” (gashkapide⟨^ng⟩, pg. 63), <Ninĕbŭ́sho>/<nînĕbŭ́shu> “Nanabush” (Ninabozho? Nanabozho?), and possibly <sî́kuan> “spittle” and <pimadî́siwan> “life” (zikowin, pg. 39 and bimaadiziwin, pg. 53; on these last two examples see also discussion of /i/-lowering below).
13. ↑ There might seem to be one exception to this statement: Gatschet always writes <ss> for fortis /sː/, and almost always writes <s> for lenis /s/. However, this is not actually a recording of consonant length. In the entire vocabulary, Gatschet never once writes the lenis fricatives with any sort of voiced character(s)—there are no instances of <z>, <zh>, or <j>. Thus, rather than length, <ss> is undoubtedly intended as an explicit indication of voicelessness, just as in Gatschet’s native German (his native written language anyway) and as in the language he knew best after that, French.

    Actually, the situation may be more complicated than this. Like Ojibwe, most Germanic varieties can be, and frequently are, analyzed as having a “fortis”/“lenis” distinction in obstruents, rather than one based purely on voicing or on (pre)aspiration. Cf., among many other relatively recent works, Keating (1984), Kohler (1984), Iverson and Salmons (1995, 1999, 2003), Jessen (1998), Jessen and Ringen (2002), Stahlke (2003), Petrova et al. (2006), Harbert (2007:42-45), Helgason and Ringen (2008), Beckman et al. (2013), Ringen and van Dommelen (2013), Davidson (2016), and Ouddeken (2016), though note that not all of these follow this analysis quite as I’ve framed it (Keating specifically argued against it, though her data provide support for it), and some are making particular additional theoretical arguments that aren’t important here.

    What is important here is that while in Standard German this distinction is basically instantiated as “fortis” = voiceless aspirated in most environments and “lenis” = variably voiced depending in part on environment (/pʰ/ vs. /b̥/ [b̥ ~ b ~ p], etc.), in Swiss German the distinction is even closer in some ways to that of many Ojibwe dialects, namely between a long fortis series and a short lenis series, both normally voiceless and unaspirated in all positions (i.e., /pː/ vs. /p/ [b̥ ~ p], etc.). In Swiss German the length of the consonant is by far the most important, and often only, correlate of fortition and in some dialects the fortis stops can be up to three to four times the length of the lenis ones, a considerably higher ratio than is the norm in Ojibwe (Kohler 1984:166; Fulop 1994; Jessen 1998:153-154; Kraehenmann 2001, 2003; Fleischer and Schmid 2006:244-245). (Incidentally, the linguistic terms “fortis” and “lenis” [← Latin fortis “strong” and lēnis “gentle”] were coined, or at least introduced for Germanic and popularized, by Jost Winteler specifically in order to describe Swiss German obstruents, two years before Gatschet collected this vocabulary [Winteler 1876; Stahlke 2003:193, 206; Fleischer and Schmid 2006:244].) Swiss German is normally not written, with Standard German used instead—and this was even truer in the 19th century—but in whatever orthography, voiced symbols are used for the lenes and voiceless ones for the fortes. Gatschet would thus have associated graphemic indications of voicing distinctions with phonetic length and perhaps other fortition distinctions. His many years of exposure to other languages including French and his study of linguistics would have enabled him to also understand, recognize, and perhaps produce genuine voicing contrasts in plosives or obstruents, but there’s a real possibility that his native language could have interfered with his transcription practices of Ojibwe and other languages which had length contrasts instead of (or that were more salient and consistent than secondary and optional) voicing ones.

    All that being said, there is plenty of reason to think that at least part of what Gatschet was marking with voiced versus voiceless symbols really was voicing contrasts; the pattern in which lenes are written with voiced symbols intervocalically very often, but with voiceless ones at word boundaries with regularity, is hard to explain any other way, as is Gatschet’s (indirect) comment on the “intermediate” quality of the /t/ in -de’ “heart,” quoted in footnote 14.

14. ↑ In one entry, Gatschet explicitly notes the intermediate voicing quality of a lenis consonant: the entry for “heart” (ignoring the plural) reads “dé , té (between d & t)” (-de’, pg. 35).

    Although Ojibwe speakers now almost always voice lenis consonants intervocalically in normal speech, this was not always the case. While the fortes were originally preaspirated, the lenes were originally optionally voiced, or partially-voiced, intervocalically, and probably mostly voiceless elsewhere, but usually or always voiced after nasals. The early French documenters of Ojibwe as well as other Algonquian languages frequently remarked on how the Indians “confused” “b” with “p” and so on. But this situation continued long after the era of the early Jesuit amateur linguists. Chrysostom Verwyst, for example, writing of the Ojibwe spoken in Wisconsin around the turn of the last century, said: “The following consonants have no fixed pronunciation, viz.: b and p, k and g, d and t, thus some Indians say: manito, others manido [= manidoo ‘manitou’]; totoshabo or dodoshabo [= doodooshaaboo ‘milk’]; geget or keket [= geget ‘truly’]” (Verwyst 1901:4). Baraga had made very similar comments half a century earlier, although his statements actually suggest that while voicing was variable at word boundaries, lenes were usually voiced intervocalically (Baraga 1850:12-13; though he also says the Ojibwes “confound b with p [etc.] . . . not only in the beginning, but also in the middle and at the end of words”). As late as 1941, the Odawa lenes were not consistently voiced intervocalically (or even, apparently, after nasals?): “The lenes are usually voiceless; between vowels and especially after a nasal they are often partly or wholly voiced” (Bloomfield 1958:8). And Tallman (2011) records some Manitoba Saulteaux speakers who still have frequent tokens of voiceless or only partially-voiced intervocalic lenis /p/ and especially /t/ even today. (See also this footnote.)

    A possible but very uncertain reference to the sound change of regularly voicing intervocalic lenis obstruents may be found in a crude dictionary of White Earth Ojibwe written by a George Campbell, a white Minnesotan who served as an Ojibwe interpreter at White Earth. Campbell was exposed to White Earth Ojibwe—which is essentially a variety of Central Minnesota Ojibwe—from the reservation’s establishment in 1868 to the time he was writing in the 1930s, and since he was born at or near Gull Lake (central Minnesota), he probably first learned Ojibwe at Gull Lake before moving with the Gull Lakers to White Earth. The first page of actual Ojibwe words in the dictionary is headed by <TOTEM-DO-DAIM> and then there is the entry (Campbell 1940:13):

    ne-do-daim is the present pronunciation as the language changes as time goes on. Just the word dodaim, a clan; an organization. Ne-do-daim, meaning I belong to that clan; I belong to that organization [it actually means “my clan”]; this is the way it is spoken now days [sic], as many Indian words are changing with the times. The Chippewa language has changed within the two past decades or more to a large extent.

    Unfortunately, Campbell’s cryptic semi-incoherence here (not uncommon in this work . . .) makes it hard to know what the hell he’s actually talking about, but the only thing I can really think of is that he is referencing a change in pronunciation of /nitoːteːm/ from [nɪtoːtɛːm] to [nɪdoːdeːm] at White Earth in the first decades of the 20th century. (Though given evidence from elsewhere in his dictionary, the first person prefix was already widely pronounced as [ɪn-] in this environment rather than [nɪ-], so really this should probably be [ɪndoːdeːm]. . .)

15. ↑ One significant difficulty with using the Freelang Ojibwe Dictionary for this purpose is that the dialect codes which it uses conflate a number of the distinct (sub)dialects which Bottineau might have spoken. Specifically, Red Lake Ojibwe, Border Lakes Ojibwe, Southeastern Saulteaux (south and east of Lake Winnipeg), and the historical speech of the Turtle Mountain Band and their descendants, as well as most of Northwestern Ojibwe, are all subsumed under “Northwestern Ojibwe” (“NW”). Freelang’s dialects and codes are:

    “AL” = Northern Algonquin and Nipissing Algonquin
    “CN” = North of Superior Ojibwe (including Bois Forte and Grand Portage in northeastern Minnesota)
    “CS” = Wisconsin, western Michigan, and Mille Lacs District III (eastern MN) Ojibwe (treated on this blog as subdialects of Southwestern Ojibwe)
    “NE” = basically Eastern Ojibwe and Western Algonquin, but also including Manitoulin Odawa
    “NO” = basically Oji-Cree
    “NW” = see above
    “SE” = basically Odawa except for the Manitoulin dialects
    “SW” = Central Minnesota Ojibwe: Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, and White Earth (subdialect of Southwestern)
    “WO” = Western Saulteaux east to the communities around Lake Winnipeg

    The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary’s dialect codes are a bit more specific, but are used sparingly, and only two Border Lakes communities, Nigigoonsiminikaaning (Red Gut) and Lac la Croix, are represented, the latter extremely infrequently.

16. ↑ The identification of Bottineau’s dialect as most closely related to that of Red Lake might suggest an answer to one minor question mentioned previously, namely whether Bottineau had fortition of obstruents after the past tense and prospective/desiderative preverbs gii- and wii-, which the meager attestations in the vocabulary are not sufficient to settle, though they are at least consistent with him having this fortition. In modern Ponemah Red Lake Ojibwe, fortition is present, but for some speakers is subject to a Grassman’s Law-type dissimilation (= non-fortition) in certain cases (as described by Treuer 2009:11, 2010:17-18, and which can be seen not just in the Oshkaabewis Native Journal but in Ojibwe People’s Dictionary entries) which I’m not aware of in other dialects—though with Ojibwe, who knows.

    However, this was evidently not always the case. In Josselin de Jong’s text collection from Red Lake from 1911 (Josselin de Jong 1913), obstruents following gii- and wii- are virtually always written with voiced symbols, not only when a subsequent obstruent is already fortis. This is the case for each of his five main consultants (excluding Obizaani-Giizhig, who provided him with only a few very short songs which don’t contain the relevant morphemes), who were from various areas of the Red Lake region, e.g.: <gižingénindiwag> = gii-zhiingenindiwag “they hated each other” (pg. 1, Mrs. Lumbar, from Red Lake village), <gābíižigimódžiwínigŏd> = gaa-bi-izhi-giimoojiwinigod “and then he secretly carried her away” (pg. 1, Mrs. Lumbar), <gādāžimigā́dinid> = gaa-dazhi-miigaadiinid “where they (OBV) had been fighting” (pg. 2, Wewonding, from [near?] Ponemah), <wigŏ́ziwād> = wii-goziwaad “they want to move camp” (pg. 2, Wewonding), <ningibažibawa> = ningii-bazhiba’waa “I stabbed him” (pg. 5, Bagone-Giizhig, from [near?] Ponemah), <wādebādžemag> = waa-dibaajimag “that I wish to tell about him” (pg. 5, Bagone-Giizhig), <ogíganónigon> = ogii-ganoonigoon “[someone] spoke to her” (pg. 5, Eshkwegaabaw/Debi-Giizhig, from near Redby), and <Niwizāgaam> = niwii-zaaga’am “I want to ‘go out’ [go to the bathroom]” (pg. 30, Eshkwegaabaw/Debi-Giizhig). All this makes it pretty clear that the Ojibwe spoken at Red Lake in the early 1900s did not have fotition after gii-/wii- in any phonological environment.

    Evidently, the presence of such fortition at Red Lake today has diffused from neighboring dialects where it is present (Southwestern, Bois Forte, Border Lakes, etc.). The interesting part is that fortition is historically older, so Red Lake Ojibwe apparently lost fortition and then regained it in addition to (at least some Ponemah speakers) adding another phonological rule blocking its application in some environments. Because Bottineau’s last Red Lake relatives were several generations prior to him, and Josselin de Jong’s consultants were probably a generation or two younger than Bottineau, it’s still quite possible that Bottineau had fortition and it was then lost sometime between the late 1700s and the mid 1800s (when Josselin de Jong’s consultants were presumably born).

    One other potential link with Red Lake Ojibwe as found in Josselin de Jong’s collection involves the lowering of /i(ː)/. As we’ve seen, Bottineau evidently had an optional lowered pronunciation of /i/ as [e] word-finally and before nasals, and perhaps occasionally elsewhere; there are also two instances where Gatschet spells /iː/ with <é>, though given the rarity and the fact that the two words are related, this is likely to be some sort of unusual pronunciation of the one morpheme (or interference by Gatschet).

    Now, this is intriguing because in Josselin de Jong’s texts, both /i/ and /iː/, which he does not distinguish in writing other than sometimes incidentally through stress marking, are quite frequently written with <e>/<é>. This occurs in the texts from all of his consultants (again, except for Obizaani-Giizhig, whose corpus is very small). I have not attempted to do a deep dive into where this apparent lowering occurs, but it seems to occur in just about any environment, certainly many more than for Bottineau. In some instances Josselin de Jong consistently writes a given word or collocation with this spelling—most notably, the discourse particle plus discourse clitic mii sa are always written <mesa>/<mesá>, while elsewhere mii is written <mi>; the discourse sequencing/contrastive particle idash is always written <edaš>/<edáš>; and the adverb biinish “up to, until, finally” is almost always written <béniš>/<beniš>/<beníš> (but there are a couple exceptions on pp. 26 and 27). A few examples from each of Josselin de Jong’s speakers: <gížinekā̀zo> = gii-izhinikaazo “she was named” (pg. 1, Mrs. Lumbar), <enezígwaninik> = eni-ziigwaninig “when Spring arrives” (pg. 2, Wewonding), <gegoyán> = giigooyan “fish (OBV)” (pg. 3, Wewonding), <wādebādžemag> = waa-dibaajimag “that I wish to tell about him” (pg. 5, Bagone-Giizhig), <enanókenid> = enanokiinid “what he (OBV) was occupied with” (pg. 8, Eshkwegaabaw/Debi-Giizhig), and <džigimódemid> = ji-gimoodimid “who might steal [them] from me” (pg. 24, Eshkwegaabaw/Debi-Giizhig). It’s also reflected in the way Josselin de Jong writes two of his consultants’ names: <Debegížig> for Debi-Giizhig and <Obezā́nigížig> for Obizaani-Giizhig (pg. iv).

    This could be a potentially significant link with Bottineau’s speech, though it would obviously reflect a much broader range of environments where /i, iː/ could be lowered (evidently more like free variation with the high variants more common, but the mid variants still frequent and established in certain morphemes or collocations?). I still consider it tenuous, though, in part because I’m not familiar enough with the older materials from other locations to know how widespread a lowered pronunciation of high vowels may have been, and its reflection in the Bottineau materials is quite different and more circumscribed. It’s perhaps worth noting that Howard (1977), writing a half century later, based mainly on fieldwork at Turtle Mountain, consistently wrote Gichi-Manidoo as <Kítše-mànito> and makizin as <mákesɩ̀n>, though in both cases the vowels may be unstressed (depending on the stess pattern of preverbs/prenouns, or whether Gichi-Manidoo was even treated as beginning in a prenoun) and so <e> here could just be a representation of a reduced/centralized pronunciation of unstressed /i/.

    A more obvious parallel with Bottineau’s lowering of word-final /i/ to [e] is found in the speech of some Eastern Saulteaux speakers, where this process occurs regularly (it occurs inconsistently or not at all for others) (T. Miller 2016). This may represent a cognate process to Bottineau’s and the one documented for older Red Lake Ojibwe, though it’s hard to be certain.

17. ↑ “They enter into the body and cause ulcers. Also the worms [or ‘maggots’] in the bodies of children and adults.”
18. ↑ Note, incidentally, that already this is an example of a feature which must be due to Bottineau, and not to Gatschet introducing spurious forms by attempting to make his own generalizations and judgments on grammatical structure. Virtually no other conjunct verbs occur anywhere else in the vocabulary, and of those that do, none of them are ones that could have served as a model for Gatschet to construct these new, non-standard forms. (None that occur before these pages are AI conjuncts, except for unspecified subject forms, which don’t occur in the paradigm presented here and which Gatschet would presumably not have realized were part of the same inflectional category as these verbs.) The only thing that could have served as a model was an actual knowledge of Ojibwe AI conjunct inflectional patterns beyond what is found in the vocabulary, as well as the Ojibwe morphophonemic rule of /i/-epenthesis, and in 1878 only Bottineau—or his relatives and ancestors—possessed that, not Gatschet.
19. ↑ It’s also conceivable that this transcription represents wiinaagamin nibi with a non-restructured verb and that Gatschet missed the final /n/ of wiinaagamin because the following word started with /n/, but I don’t think this is likely, given some sort of restructuring is found in all the other cases.
20. ↑ This could perhaps also explain the inconsistent absence of -nii-? Except for one curious fact that just muddies the waters further, which involves the word for “cow” as recorded by Sela Wright in 19th-century Red Lake Ojibwe. He recorded it four times, with the spellings <O-tca-ni-bĭ-cĭ-kĭ> (Wright n.d.:70), <O-nĭ-tca-nĭ-bĭ-cĭ-kĭ> (ibid., pg. 79), <onĭtcanĭ-bĭcĭkĭ> (ibid., pg. 85), and <O-ne-jah-ne-be-zhi-ke>(?) (ibid., pg. 179). These spell oniijaani-bizhiki, where oniijaani- means “female quadruped” and is derived from oniijaani(w) “doe, female ungulate,” which itself is related to the word under discussion here, oniijaanisi “have a child” (Wright actually glosses the full word as “A child-bearing ox” several times). But note that in the first of the four attestations from Wright, he writes what must represent ojaani-bizhiki, with the -nii- missing! Thus, it’s possible the -nii- syllable was, for some reason, optional in Red Lake Ojibwe, and perhaps more broadly at least some Pembina/Turtle Mountain Ojibwe, in this period?
21. ↑ A phrase literally meaning “the Thunderers [or ‘the manitous’] are calling/heard” is the normal way of expressing the concept of “thunder is rolling” or the like. Some published examples can illustrate: Kegg (1993:33-34): bi-noondaagoziwag ingiw animikiig “the thunder was coming” [lit. “the Thunderers came calling out”] and Kegg (1993:70-71): indigo enadog wii-niichiiwad, ezhi-naagwak, manidoog bi-noondaagoziwaad agaaming “it looked like it was going to storm; the manitous could be heard across the lake”; John Pinesi (Gaagige-Binesi) in Jones (1919:112-113): <Nāgạdcidạc kī‘pi·ạ·nimi‘kī‘kā; tibickō imāⁿ ayāt pạnạdcaⁿ mī·i·māⁿ kī‘pinōndāguziwād animi‘kīg kī‘piwâbạmāwād unīdcānisiwān> “And after a time there came up a thunder-storm; straight over where the young bird was came the roar of the Thunderers that had come to see their young” [lit. “the Thunderers came there calling out”] and Jones (1919:184-185): <Kīcpin ạnimi‘kīg nōndāgusiwād wīndạmawicin> “If the Thunderers are heard, then do you tell me of it”; Cuoq (1886:305): <Nondakosik onimikik> “les tonnerres se font entendre, il tonne” = “the Thunderers are heard, it thunders”; Lemoine (1909:[485]): <nondâgosiwäk onimikik> “Le [tonnerre] gronde, ve [sic] fait entendre” = “The [thunder] rolls, is heard” and <i nondâgosiwatc onimikik> “bruit dv [sic] la foudre” = “noise of lightning” [lit. “the Thunderers calling out”] and <nondagosik onimikik> “Il [tonne], le tonnerre gronde” = “It [thunders], the thunder rolls” [lit. “the Thunderers call out”]; and the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary example sentence Noondaagoziwag manidoog “The thunder is starting up. [lit: the manitou[s] are calling].”
22. ↑ One important qualification is necessary here: obviation is one of the features of Algonquian grammar which can be altered or dropped by speakers in a fieldwork setting; in effect this parallels how speakers often translate English prompts with sentences with SVO constituent order, following the order of the English prompt, whereas in natural Algonquian speech other orders are more frequent and are driven by discourse factors (e.g., in Ojibwe, as in most Algonquian languages, the neutral order is most commonly verb-initial, with an NP fronted if it’s indefinite, new information, or focused). Cook and Muehlbauer (2006) document this very well for Plains Cree and Blackfoot. Essentially, because obviation is in most cases a discourse-level phenomenon (at least in Cree, many Ojibwe varieties, etc., if not necessarily all Algonquian languages) and elicitation fieldwork generally does not provide any wider context for the phrases or sentences being requested, speakers very frequently fail to use obviation marking in contexts where in natural speech they consistently produce it: “destroying or impoverishing discourse [as in most elicitation tasks] should destroy or impoverish obviation” (ibid., 116-117). For instance, a Plains Cree consultant translated “Solveiga saw a dog” as Solveiga wāp’mēw atim (ibid., 107) with atim(w-) “dog” lacking an obviative suffix (in natural, connected speech “dog” would be atim(w)a here, with obviative -a). In some cases speakers will even “correct” original responses they gave with obviation marking in order to remove that marking. Cook and Muehlbauer do note that as a given speaker becomes more familiar with what fieldwork with a linguist entails, the nature of elicitation tasks, etc., they gradually come to produce obviation more consistently when it is expected, e.g. the same speaker as above, after three more months of fieldwork experience, translated “Jeff saw a dog” as Jeff wāp’mēw atima (ibid., 108)—but there is a “learning curve” of sorts involved (ibid., 109).

    This means that of the responses Bottineau gave which lacked proper obviative marking, the two sentences “She has born 4 children” and “She has born twins,” tell us nothing about his command of obviation (the same goes for “he roasts potatoes,” though that is still wrong in other ways) because they occur in contexts where completely fluent native speakers commonly fail to exhibit it during elicitation. In fact, in both cases the verb is properly inflected with the morpheme indicating an obviative participant (-(a)n) and with the third animate object theme sign (-aa-), which when combined with the former suffix indicates a proximate subject and obviative object; this parallels the Plains Cree cases discussed by Cook and Muehlbauer, where speakers still consistently inflected verbs for obviation even when removing obviation marking from nouns.

    However, three or four of the cases where Bottineau failed to apply expected obviation marking were in the context of the possession of one animate third person by another (“His, her offspring,” “His clan,” “His grandmother,” and possibly “Spirit of dead”); in such cases, the possessum must always be obviative, and this rule is not dependent on any discourse factors. Consequently, even in elicitation speakers with no prior fieldwork experience still almost always apply obviative marking to the possessum. And when they do occasionally fail to apply it, they may catch themselves and offer a correction, e.g., another Plains Cree speaker at first translated “I saw this person’s cat” as niwāp’māw awa opōsīms, with no obviative marking, but then after a moment corrected it to niwāp’māw awa opōsīmsa, with obviative marking, with the comment that it “means the same thing” (ibid., 110-111). Nonetheless, Cook and Muehlbauer also note (ibid., 110, n. 7) that application of obviative marking to a possessum is considerably less frequent in elicitation with Blackfoot speakers.

    Because of other aspects of Bottineau’s speech which indicate varying levels of decreased fluency/competence, and because a number of the examples involved possession, I have treated his almost complete lack of obviative marking on nouns as instances of ungrammatical utterances, but Cook and Muehlbauer’s research suggests that caution is called for here, and the possibility must be left open that Bottineau could use obviation perfectly well, but failed to do so here because of the artificial context imposed by an elicitation fieldwork setting.

23. ↑ I’m counting this as an example of a more marked plural changing to -ag, with the preceding -y- being a morphophonemically required epenthetic segment. Compare Gatschet’s field notes from Kansas/Okahoma Odawa from several years later, in which a significant majority of ethnonyms, many of which end in /-iː/, take plural -yag; this is found in materials from multiple consultants. This is much more frequently the case (basically universal) for ethnonyms for groups for whom the Odawas had not had names prior to relocation to Kansas and Indian Territory, but it also shows up in a couple names for groups for whom Ojibwe speakers had had names for a long, long time, e.g., <Minōminí> “Menominee,” pl. <Minominíyak> (Gatschet 1891:58—instead of Manoominiig; cf. Edwin James’s citation in Tanner [1830:315] of older Odawa <Mahnomoneeg>). These again represent the unmarked animate plural -ag (plus epenthetic -y-, since almost all the ethnonym stems end in vowels) being used by default with new names, apparently regardless of the old pattern where ethnonyms in /-iː/ universally took plural -g. This extension of the unmarked form to new words at the expense of older patterns is essentially what is happening in Bottineau’s “Sauk” form, as well as all the other plurals under discussion, though of course the contexts and what constitute a “new word” are different in the two cases. Compare also the Ojibwe treatment of English personal names and other proper nouns ending in vowels, which frequently take obviative -yan, e.g. Maaniiyan “Mary (OBV),” Dwaanayan “Donna (OBV),” etc.
24. ↑ One other form should be mentioned here, since it doesn’t really fit into the any of the other categories to be discussed below. There are two plurals provided for the word for “chief,” one being the regular plural (<ogimā́g> = ogimaa +g), and the other an incorrect(?) plural, with -wag (<ogîmáwag> = ogimaa +wag); Gatschet writes that the former is a “contr[action]” of the latter (pg. 57). Historically, this is kind of true (the Proto-Algonquian word was *okima·wa, plural *okima·waki), but this was an analogical change which occurred a long time ago, probably before the separation of Ojibwe and Potawatomi. I’m not sure if Bottineau’s ogimaawag represents a somewhat remarkable relic form which resisted the analogical change which otherwise made the plural of all historical *-a·w-final nouns …aa-g (except ogaa “walleye (Stizostedion vitreum)” whose plural remains ogaawag because of the shape of the stem, not shared by “chief”), or if there’s another explanation for it.

    The apparently irregular form of “deer” and its plural are addressed above in the document on Bottineau’s dialect.

25. ↑ While I don’t necessarily have any bright ideas about why this semantic domain might lead to more unusual or incorrect plural forms, it may very well be relevant that each of the multiply-marked plural nouns represents a body part that occurs in pairs or multiples (arms, hands/fingers, and testicles), and so are frequently pluralized. The two body part terms which Bottineau gave “simplified” plurals, by contrast, would be pluralized much more rarely (intestines/guts [which I think is normally singular in Ojibwe, although I don’t have a lot to go by on this] and anus). But there doesn’t seem to be such a pattern that can be appealed to in the case of the “really bizarre/impossible” plurals and “unstable stem” plurals to be discussed in a moment (the heart, claws/nails/hooves, eyes, and forehead).
26. ↑ The other possibility is that this is actually another double-marked plural, -{i}shkii(n)zhig +wan +an. I think this is less likely, partly because the first plural suffix would be -wan rather than the unmarked -an which is otherwise found in all the multiply-marked plurals, and partly because the locative forms are given for English singular prompts, not plural ones.
27. ↑ The examples are <ishkudé> (correct, pg. 29), <íshkodä> (pg. 45, six instances), and <íshkude> (pg. 49). One of the examples on pg. 45 is an entire sentence in which stress is almost perfectly marked except for on “fire”: <tchibuá tagúshenia^ng ta-átawése íshkudä> = †jibwáá-dagòshiniyá(á)ng da-ààtawèsé *íshkodè(?) “the fire will have gone out before we return.” Ìshkodé is actually is a possible pronunciation of the word for at least some speakers, but for the most part it’s one of the most common of a group of words which drops the initial vowel in many dialects (the group of words is not the same in all dialects), which is only possible because of the initial vowel occupying a metrically weak position. In fact, this initial weak vowel loss on “fire” is attested once in the Bottineau vocabulary, in <shkudéya> “its [sic] full of fires” (= (i)shkodeyaa, presumably actually meaning “it/there is a fire” or perhaps “it is fiery”; pg. 29). It was also a feature which made its way into the Ojibwe- and Cree-based trade jargons/pidgins of the region, since “fire,” including “liquour, alcohol” (lit. “fire-liquid”) were almost always written by traders and explorers without an initial vowel. Examples include John Long’s (1791) <Scuttaywabo>, <Scótaywábo>, <Squittaywábo>, etc. for alcohol (← ishkodewaaboo, e.g., pp. 68, 113, 134, 225, 276, 293), <scotté wigwas>, <Scótay wigwass>, etc. for “fire bark” (← ishkode + wiigwaas, pp. 79, 116, 228, 276), and <Squitty>, <scotay> for “fire” (e.g., pg. 276), among others; and Alexander MacKenzie’s (1902:clxii) <Scou tay> for “fire” (given as both the “Algonquin” and Cree [“Knisteneaux”] terms, a good indication it is actually from trading jargon/pidgin).
28. ↑ Standard German and English both have complex systems in which stress is not fully predictable but can in most cases be predicted based on a number of factors, primarily syllable weight/(historical) vowel length, lexical class, and affix properties (“stress-sensitive”/Class I vs. “stress-neutral”/Class II), and differing between the two languages in details. Basically, primary stress falls on one of the final three syllables of an underived word under a vaguely Latin-like set of rules and different suffixes have different effects on stress retraction or attraction; these stress systems are the result of the original pan-Germanic rule of primary stress on the initial root syllable being broadened to a set of more Romance-like rules due to the massive influx of Latin and Romance loanwords beginning in the Middle Ages (Lahiri et al. 1999:335-388; Zonneveld et al. 1999; Harbert 2007:79-84; Hulst 2010:441-449). To oversimplify and ignore many exceptions and the effects of affixation, penultimate stress generally occurs in German if: (1) the vowel in the final syllable is schwa, or (2) the penult has a diphthong or (at least historical) coda consonant and the final syllable is not (at least historically) heavy. Penultimate stress generally occurs in English if the penult has a coda consonant or a historical long vowel (generally but not always with the restriction that the final syllable is not heavy—if it is, then it is usually stressed). These tendencies don’t match the appearance of penultimate stress in the Bottineau vocabulary, including particularly stress advancement as suffixes are added, though they do mean that like Bottineau’s Ojibwe as recorded by Gatschet (in many instances) but unlike other varieties of Ojibwe, stress in Standard German and English is sensitive to the right edge of the word, not the left.

    Unfortunately I don’t understand German so I can only make use of sources in English and don’t have as much information on the stress systems of Swiss German varieties. In particular, I don’t know the stress rules of Bernese Oberlander Alemannic. However, I’ve found English descriptions of stress for a few other Swiss German varieties. The fullest available description is for Thurgovian, a High Alemannic dialect spoken in Thurgau (and thus not especially similar to Beatenberg German). Thurgovian’s stress is described by Kraehenmann (2003:170-212, 217), and is similar to that in Standard German and English. Syllables can be heavy or light; a final syllable is heavy if it contains a long vowel or diphthong or ends in a cluster, and a non-final syllable is heavy if it contains a long vowel, diphthong, or vowel plus coda sonorant. Stress falls on the rightmost heavy syllable, and on the antepenultimate syllable if neither the final nor penultimate syllable is heavy. However, in words with a schwa in one or both of the final two syllables, stress falls on the syllable to the left of the (leftmost) schwa, except that a heavy syllable still attracts stress. As in German and English, these are largely tendencies rather than firm rules, and there are a number of exceptions, which “most[ly] . . . have in common . . . a strong tendency for initial stress” (Kraehenmann 2003:188). In any event, these rules result in Thuringian German having penultimate stress, in general, when: (1) the penultimate is heavy and the ultimate is light, or (2) the vowel of the final syllable is schwa.

    Other Swiss German varieties for which I’ve found brief notes on stress placement are mostly, like Thurgovian, High Alemannic dialects, not Highest Alemannic like the speech of Beatenberg. Two analyses of stress patterns in Highest Alemannic dialects—Obersaxen Walser German and the closely related Valais (Walliser) German—are summarized by Leemann (2012:78-82), but his descriptions are very brief, incomplete, and confusing. Nevertheless, I assume it is most likely that the stress patterns in Beatenberg German were/are similar to those of Thurgovian (and other Swiss German varieties, from what I can tell) and to a lesser extent those of Standard German and English.

29. ↑ The closest analog I know of from a nearby Algonquian language is Miami-Illinois (whose accent system is described by Costa 2003:98-122, from which the examples below are taken), which may be Ojibwe’s closest relative after Potawatomi. Like Ojibwe and Potawatomi, Miami-Illinois inherited the Proto-Algonquian pattern in which every syllable with a long vowel, as well as every even-numbered syllable in a sequence of two or more syllables with short vowels, is prominent or strong, and other syllables are weak; weak vowels in Miami-Illinois were often deleted word-initially and were devoiced when preceding a preaspirate (h+obstruent cluster), and there were some other phonological rules sensitive to the strong vs. weak syllable distinction as well.

    However, at some point in Miami-Illinois’s history, it developed a new stress rule independent of the strong/weak syllable distinction. The new stress system can basically be summarized with three main rules: (1) the vowel which takes primary stress is the penultimate vowel and every other vowel counting leftwards takes secondary stress (e.g., nípi <nípi>/<nípĭ>/<nī́pi> “water”; ansiwàtaakáni <ziwátakáni> “seed”); except that (2) if the penultimate vowel is devoiced, it cannot carry stress, and so stress falls on the final vowel (in disyllabic words, e.g., mahkwá <maxkwá>/<makwá>/<ma‘kwá‘> “bear”; nihswí <n’swí>/<nĭsswí>/<ni‘swí>/<ns·wî·> “three”) or on the antepenult (in other words, e.g., níílihsa <nirissa>/<nélissah>/<nelsʋ>/<nĭˊlsa> “my hair (pl.)”; kíílihswa <kilixsoua>/<kī́l‘swaⁿ> “sun, month”); and (3) if the preantepenultimate syllable is long, the antepenultimate syllable is stressed (as long as it is voiced), rather than the penult (e.g., eehsípana <ässípana>/<äsépana>/<‘ä‘sī́pᴀnaⁿ> “raccoon”; kiihkeelímaka <kĭˊkälĭˊmaka> “I know him/her”).

    So there is certainly precedent within Algonquian of switching from an Ojibwe-style accent system to one which retains aspects of that system while stress is primarily on a new syllable—in this case, like Bottineau’s speech, the penultimate—sensitive to the right rather than the left edge of the word (and as will be noted shortly, Plains Cree has also acquired a stress system sensitive to the right edge of the word and divorced from vowel length). I should stress (no pun intended) this is the only similarity between the Miami-Illinois and Bottineau stress systems; Bottineau shows penultimate stress even in many cases where Miami-Illinois would not (e.g., cf. Miami-Illinois mahkwá “bear” with Bottineau’s <mákŭă> “black bear” [pg. 59; this should be makwá in “normal” Ojibwe as well]). He also, as will be noted below, has some vowels marked with “correct” Ojibwe stress that would be incorrect for Miami-Illinois (e.g., <gigishéb> “morn[in]g” [gigizhéb], pg. 55).

30. ↑ This is complicated by another instance I have noticed (though I have not systematically looked for examples) where Gatschet evidently writes a word with the stress marked in two different places, but where this cannot be attributed to vowel length interference. On page 23 (and page 47), as cited above, the singular “man” (inini) is given as <înnî̆´nî> and <inî́ni>; on page 23 the plural of this (ininiwag “men”) is given as <innîníwag>, with advancement of stress marking to the new penultimate syllable. However, on page 27 there is another recording of the plural, this time with stress marking remaining on the “correct” syllable: <inî́niwăg>. This might undermine the conclusion that Gatschet’s marking of “correct” stress on non-penultimate long vowels was sometimes due to mishearing.

    On page 33 there is what seems to be yet another recording of the plural, again with the stress marking remaining on the “correct” syllable: <iníniwag>, but this entry has additional complications. Gatschet doesn’t actually gloss this last word as “men,” but as “we are men.” Another possible interpretation of it, then, is that it represents ininiiwiwag “they are men” with some sort of haplology or haplography (probably Gatschet’s responsibility, not Bottineau’s)—though this would still be an instance of a word with non-penultimate stress marking that was “correct” and didn’t align with a long vowel.

31. ↑ Evidence for this is again found in testimony for the Bottineau v. O’Grady lawsuit. Under cross-examination, Marie Baldwin had the following exchange with the defense attorney (TOR Bottineau v. O’Grady, at 56):
    

    Q. Do you speak the language of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas?
    A. I do not speak it much now [1906], but I did speak it.
    Q. When?
    A. Up to the time of my mother’s death, in 1900. I could speak enough of that language and a little French. [Given her known fluency in French, perhaps this could really be a reference to Michif, but that’s pure speculation on my part.] The Indians understood a good deal of French. They lived near the Canadian border line, and I could get along with them and make them understand me and I could understand them.
    [. . . .]
    Q. How do you know what was said to your father at these interviews that you have spoken about?
    A. I could understand enough of it then. I have not spoken it since 1900. I have not had anybody to speak to, but I could still understand enough in 1902 to know what they were talking about. I can speak some Indian now.

    Marie’s testimony reveals a few things. It is obvious that her mother, Marie Renville Bottineau, was the primary source of her exposure to Ojibwe: Baldwin spoke some Ojibwe until her mother’s death, and did not have “anybody to speak to” after that time. Meanwhile, as may be recalled, she described her father Jean as speaking almost exclusively French at home; had he regularly spoken Ojibwe as well or instead, she would of course have had someone to speak Ojibwe with, given that they were living in the same city and frequently working together on the same project. (Though note that this very testimony is in the context of whether she could understand some statements which were being made to Jean in Ojibwe. And during the same testimony, under direct examination, she said of some of the Ojibwe speakers in question that “[m]y father was about the only one they knew that they could talk to in their own language” [id. at 52].)

    Further confirmation is found in a newspaper article written about Marie in 1910 (“Indian Woman Works for Uncle Sam”), though it must be approached with a bit of caution as it seems likely the writer is not directly quoting Baldwin, assigning to her statements that are identical in tone and outlook and stereotypical language with regard to Indians as his own (“[My totem] is the equivalent of a paleface’s coat of arms” and things of this sort), and also commits a couple blatant factual errors (confusing Pierre Bottineau with Pierre’s father Charles, for instance). With these caveats, the article still makes it clear that Marie Renville Bottineau, Jean’s wife, spoke Ojibwe fluently and presumably natively and was the primary source of Marie Baldwin’s acquisition of the language; that Jean did not speak Ojibwe with his daughter; and that Baldwin spoke fluent French. The author notes that Marie “chats as readily in French as in her childhood tongue” (meaning Ojibwe), but that “she confessed with reluctance, through an utter lack of Indian companionship her knowledge of the latter is departing”—and recall that by this point she had been living near or with her father for nearly two decades and serving as a clerk for him for much of her life, but her mother had passed away ten years prior. Baldwin is also quoted as saying: “Now when I go near my own people, I discover whole sentences of which I know not the meaning, and that is a disgrace” (ibid.). She further describes aspects of her childhood that make it clear she had a fairly traditional Ojibwe or Métis Ojibwe upbringing, which must have been primarily her mother’s influence: she was carried in a cradleboard while an infant, “slept in tents until I was fourteen years old,” etc. (ibid.).

    This information on Marie Renville Bottineau is quite important to one other question that’s been posed repeatedly in this post, and which I will return to in a moment.

32. ↑ Incidentally, that Jean Bottineau continued to consider Red Lake an important location is suggested by the prominence placed on names relating to Red Lake in the vocabulary. It appears on pg. 31 as part of a short list of placenames or ethnonyms with significance to the Pembina and Turtle Mountain Ojibwes along with Ojibwes in general (alongside Lakes Superior and Michigan, the Pembina River, the Red River of the North, Devils Lake in North Dakota, “British Territory” [i.e., British Canada], the U.S., and the “Bois Fort tribe”). On page 57 are also listed just two band names, in the middle of words relating to band governance: “Indian tribe of Pembina”—and “tribe of Red Lake Band.” Pierre also helped found, moved to, and lived in the town of Red Lake Falls, about midway between Red Lake and the Red River and just west of the Red Lake Band’s territory at the time, for the last two decades of his life. He and Jean, among other family members, worked to encourage Métis settlers to move to the town and nearby areas.
33. ↑ The ultimate ending has been less grim, and even in the face of great hardship and oppression the people of Turtle Mountain have proven as adaptable and resilient as any.

    In regards to the Ten-Cent Treaty, the Turtle Mountain Tribe did eventually pursue a claim against the government through the U.S. Indian Claims Commission and was finally awarded compensatory funds of $52 million plus interest in 1978, though by the time this was disbursed in 1984 it amounted to “a few thousand dollars” per tribal member (Richotte 2009:242-269, 2017:153). A splinter group of some of Little Shell’s followers and people dropped from the Turtle Mountain rolls, who moved to Montana and (together with other migrating or displaced Métis and other “landless Indians”) became the “Little Shell Tribe,” also scored a recent victory in December of 2019 in finally securing federal recognition as an Indian tribe.

34. ↑ The qualification of “at the time” is important. Several of these terms I have not found in any modern resource, but have found in one or more older works. For example, the word Bottineau gave for “afternoon,” <kabíkû nawákue> (gabikoo-naawakwe) is not in any modern dictionary or text collection which I checked; the only place I found it was in Baraga’s 1853 dictionary of Michigan and Wisconsin Ojibwe: <kabikónawakwe> “it is noon passed” (pg. 560). Nonetheless, this is enough to confirm that the term was real and was once in use, even if it’s either no longer used, or not used (or is at least archaic or extremely rare) in any of the regions I have materials for.