Last updated: September 27, 2023
An actual relatively restrained post today (!!).
In this blog I’ve used some terminology and notational practices that are either rare or idiosyncratic, and usually fairly new (with one exception). But I haven’t discussed them all in one place, or always fully explained them. So I figured I’d just cover them all here, along with my justifications, and why I humbly think at least some of them would be beneficial for Algonquianists to adopt (or agree on, in the first case).
Terminology
“Algic”
I use the well-established label Algic to refer to the family encompassing Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok, and Proto-Algic for its protolanguage. This term has a long pedigree, first coined by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft in the 1830s to refer to Algonquian languages and peoples, then resurrected by Ives Goddard (Goddard 1967:91, n. 70; Teeter 1967:4, 5, n. 17) after a long period of relative disuse once the demonstration of the Algic family (Haas 1958) made it necessary to have different labels for Algonquian on the one hand and the broader family on the other.
However, a handful of linguists have instead used the labels “Algonquian-Ritwan” for the family and “Proto-Algonquian-Ritwan” for the protolanguage (in this respect following Edward Sapir’s lead: Berman 1982; Blevins 2002; etc.; though Blevins later switched to more neutral labels). Wiyot and Yurok were long collectively referred to as the “Ritwan” languages, and this alternative terminology is partly a result of that tradition and partly based on the suspicion or belief that Ritwan represents a genetic subgroup within Algic. But while I’m sympathetic to that idea, such a subgroup has not yet been proven (cf. Berman 1982:418; Garrett 2004:51; Blevins and Garrett 2007, esp. pp. 92-93; etc.). As such, “Algonquian-Ritwan” is a misleading label, and will be particularly unfortunate if Ritwan turns out not to be a subgroup. Especially since “Algic” is by now such a well-established term, there is simply no need to use any other, let alone a very loaded one.
“Wabanakian”
The Algonquian languages of northern New England—Western and Eastern Abenaki, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy, and Mi’kmaq—share a few innovations, and its speakers have been in close contact for a long time, although I think it’s unlikely they form a subgroup. (Abenaki and Maliseet-Passamaquoddy, without Mi’kmaq, might form one, “Abenakian.”) When referred to collectively, to date linguists have used the label “Northern New England (Algonquian)” for the linguistic grouping (e.g., Rhodes 2021:332), but I’ve begun using Wabanakian. “Wabanaki” is already widely used as an ethnic, cultural, and political term covering the people in question, so pressing “Wabanakian” into use as a linguistic one is no great leap, and it’s certainly less unwieldy than “Northern New England (Algonquian).” (If anyone has used the term this way before, I’m not aware of it. But there is precedence for referring to “Wabanaki languages.”) The only real drawback is that it could be confused with “Abenakian,” but, again, “Wabanaki(an)” has already been used for a long time to refer to the people in question, and this hasn’t seemed to cause any problems.
“Preverb”
Following David Pentland’s (2005:324-325) suggestion, I generally use the term “preverb” (in, as he points out, the etymological sense of “pre-word”) to refer to the Algonquian preverbal, prenominal, and preparticle half-prefix-half-particles. Most Algonquianists use “preverb” only for preverbal preverbs, and use “prenoun” and so on in other cases, but for the most part these seem to me to be essentially the same word class, regardless of what sort of word follows them. I’m open to being shown that I’m totally wrong here, though.
Notation and Spelling
Capitalizing “Initial,” “Medial,” etc.
In the traditional analysis, Algonquian verbs, and to a lesser extent nouns, are composed of three main parts, termed “initials,” “medials,” and “finals.” (In the traditional account there are also more nebulous little things stuck between these, or into which some of these are themselves decomposed: “premedials,” “postmedials,” “prefinals,” etc.; this part of the analysis is more controversial today, though it’s clearly at least partly correct diachronically, and may still be useful at times to descriptively use the terms.) For a while, I’ve been capitalizing these terms—“Initial,” “Medial,” “Final”—to avoid any potential confusion with the use of words like “initial” and “final” to refer to positions within a word. Thus: “an Initial is the initial morpheme in all primary stems,” and so on. Although no such confusion would result in the case of terms like “Premedial,” for consistency I capitalize these too. All such capitalization also parallels the common use of capitalization to indicate one is referring to certain grammatical categories like verb stem classes (“Animate Intransitive,” etc.).
Recently I discovered that Conor Quinn adopted the same practice a few years ago, and for the same reasons (Quinn 2009:18, n. 1).
Proto-Eastern Algonquian Transcription
I’ve already explained my somewhat distinct transcription of Proto-Eastern Algonquian clusters (here and here); I won’t make any claim that this is a superior practice to what others are doing, and of course it may be a mistake for me to introduce yet another, idiosyncratic system in addition to the several other ones in use. The one exception is that I do think that writing PEA (and phonemicizations of some daughter Eastern languages) with <kw> is superior to the current standard practice of <kw>, since this was pretty clearly a unit phoneme, unlike its ambiguous status in Proto-Algonquian.
Eastern Algonquian Vowels
I’ve already discussed this in later edits to my post on PA and Proto-Algic vowels, but will repeat here that I think many existing transcriptions and analyses of Southern New England Algonquian vowels—and of the PEA vowel system—are flawed. Basically, whatever the merits of most of the other arguments in that post, one point I am confident in is that the best way of viewing the PEA system is that it was organized into two subsystems: a set of four “full” peripheral vowels *ī [i(ː)], *ō [o(ː) ~ u(ː)], *ē [ɛ(ː)], *ā [ɑ(ː)], and a set of two “reduced” central vowels *ə [ə̆], *a [ă]. This system was subsequently restructured to varying degrees in all of the Eastern languages which continued to be spoken uninterruptedly into the late 20th century, but was retained, with just some phonetic shifts, in the Southern New England (SNEA) branch, as well as probably—though the poor records make it harder to tell—in Virginia Algonquian and Nanticoke-Choptank.
The full vowels have traditionally been termed “long” and the reduced vowels “short,” and I have no objection to such terminology—I have used “full” and “reduced” for a few reasons, including that there are twice as many full vowels as reduced ones (cf. also Goddard’s [1990:233] brief, offhanded use of this terminology), but the exact terms are not crucial (except that choosing “tense” vs. “lax” or something like it [cf. LeSourd 1988:675, n. 10] would be wrong). The important points are that the two sets of vowels differed in duration, and that they occupied separate subsystems.
However, there is an increasingly common practice of not indicating length distinctions for individual vowels in Eastern languages whenever they are deemed not to be in a contrastive relationship with an equivalent vowel of differing length. For example, Oxford (2015) transcribes PEA as having the vowels */i, u, ə, ɛ, a, aː/, with length indicated only for the “pair” /a/:/aː/ because thanks to the neutralization of length of the PA high vowels in PEA (*i + *i· → *ī, *o + *o· → *ō) and the putative shift of PA *e to PEA *ə, “*/i, u, ɛ/ . . . no longer participate in the length contrast” (2015:333, n. 14); Costa (2007) phonemicizes SNEA languages with no indications of length except for writing full /ɑ/ as <ā>; and Goddard, though he once indicated length distinctions on all SNEA vowels, uses a transcription basically the same as Costa’s for the so-called “Loup” languages, only marking length for full /ɑ/ as <ā> (Goddard 2016). Rudes (1997), meanwhile, does write PEA and Quiripi-Naugatuck as though they contained long and short vowels but then oddly claims that while “[t]he evidence indicates that, at the phonemic level, there was a contrast of length for mid and low vowels, but not for high vowels, which were always long (i· and u·) as in other Eastern Algonquian languages,” at “the phonetic level, it seems that there were only short vowels, with i· appearing as [i], u· as [u], a· as [ɔ], a as [a], ʌ̨· as [ʌ̨], and ə as [ə]” (1997:51, cont. of n. 4).
These transcriptions or analyses, however, are based on two misapprehensions. The first is that two of the PEA (and SNEA) vowels were identical other than their duration, and therefore contrasted for length. However, as discussed at length in the vowels post, the available evidence is that this is wrong: *ā was focused around a peripheral value of *[ɑ] or *[ɑː] (and in SNEA, seemingly optionally rounded, at least sometimes) while *a was central *[ă] or *[a], or thereabouts. Thus there were no pairs of vowels in PEA or SNEA (or, probably, Virginia Algonquian or Nanticoke-Choptank) which contrasted for length. But the second misapprehension—or I should say, point which has been given proper consideration—is that if two given vowels don’t have a contrastive durational distinction, then they lack a significant one.
But, Rudes’s claim to the contrary notwithstanding, there is plenty of evidence that the vowels in question did meaningfully differ in duration, with the full vowels phonetically longer than the reduced ones. Beyond their reflexes in some daughters, the most obvious evidence is that vowel syncope processes are common throughout much of Eastern Algonquian, and these consistently target the reflexes of *ə and *a, but not any of the full vowels.
These recent transcriptions/analyses quoted above also fail to capture that there were two vowel subsystems in PEA/SNEA. The organization into full vs. reduced subsystems is discussed more fully in the vowels post, so I won’t belabor it too much, except to note that numerous sound changes and phonological processes in various Eastern languages can only be fully appreciated—or, at least, are most easily and elegantly described—by reference to such a system and to the phonetic differences in length which were associated with it. Take Massachusett as an example: (1) as in other SNEA languages, two full vowels (including *ā) underwent a chain shift which did not affect *a (*ā → /ʌ̃/ †[ʌ̃(ː) ~ ɔ̃(ː)], *ē → ā /ɑ/ †[(ä(ː) ~) ɑ(ː) ~ ɒ(ː)], and *a remained as /ă/); (2) both reduced vowels were frequently syncopated in various contexts, but the full vowels were not; and (3) intervocalic semivowels were normally lost except when following a reduced vowel. So, to reiterate, to write Massachusett as though only full /ɑ/ had a significant durational quality because it was the only vowel with contrastive length is (a) wrong in that, properly speaking, it had no contrastive length either, but (b) it’s also wrong because historical changes and synchronic processes in Massachusett phonology are dependent on distinctions among the two sets of vowels—two sets which should therefore be distinguished notationally as well.
My current solution, which may or may not be defensible, is simply to transcribe all Eastern languages as though they phonemically had long and short vowels (when there is any distinction to be made). Full /ɑ/ in Massachusett is thus written “/ɑː/” or ā and reduced /ă/ is written “/a/” or a, just as, say, Mi’kmaq long /aː/ and short /a/ (in a system mainly consisting of paired long and short vowels) are written as such. Other strategies are certainly possible.
Umlauting *w
There was a PA morphophoneme which was pronounced *w, but which induced “umlaut” (a shift of *a· to *e·) on a preceding vowel. Nilsen (2017) introduced the practice of writing this as |ẅ|, which has since been adopted by Oxford (forthcoming) as well, and which beside being, of course, appropriate on its own (w + umlaut), is in my opinion superior to the prior choices of |wm| or |w’| in other respects too. I have therefore adopted it as well.
Relative Roots
As noted in later versions of my post on Proto-Algonquian verbs, in glosses of verbs which license relative root complements, I follow Goddard by enclosing the general indication of the general type of complement it takes in {curly braces}:
- *ta·- “live {somewhere} (AI)” [as if containing relative root *taθ- LOCATION ≈ “in such a place, there”]
- *eθ- ~ *Ø- “say {so} to (TA)” [as if containing the relative root *eθ- MANNER/GOAL ≈ “in such a way, thus, that, thither”]
- *onten- “take sth. from {somewhere} (TI(1))” [with relative root *ont- SOURCE/REASON ≈ “from such a source, whence, for such reason”]
- *aθpi·htesi- “be {so long}, of {such extent}, be {so} old (AI)” [with relative root *aθpi·ht- DEGREE/LEVEL ≈ “to such an extent, degree, level”]
- *tahθopiθ- “tie together {so many} of (TA)” [with relative root *tahθw- QUANTITY ≈ “so many, such a number”]
And so on. The braces are intended to indicate that they “mark a characterization of the type of . . . complement for which the root bears a valence” (Goddard 2001:171, n. 10), that is, that they enclose a “place-holder” or “variable” which is specified in context by the complement itself, rather than being the actual contextual translation (Goddard 2021:44; Goddard and Thomason 2014:8). This is a useful convention in most cases, and it results in shorter glosses; to shorten glosses further for space reasons, sometimes the variable may be abbreviated (“{somewhere}” as “{smwh}” or “{sw}” for example).
I will also occasionally use “+R” in abbreviations for verbs which license RRCs (e.g., “AI+R” for Animate Intransitive verbs which license RRCs, etc.), or, when mapping the argument structure of a verb, to refer to the RRC it takes as a complement.
Sources Used [click to expand]
(“AIL” = Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics)
(“AL” = Anthropological Linguistics)
(“IJAL” = International Journal of American Linguistics)
(“SCOIL” = “Survey of California and Other Indian Languages”)
(“TIL-SM” = Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs)
- Berman, Howard (1982). “Two Phonological Innovations in Ritwan.” IJAL 48(4): 412-420. DOI: 10.1086/465750.
- Blevins, Juliette (2002). “Notes on Sources of Yurok Glottalized Consonants.” In Proceedings of the Meeting of the Hokan-Penutian Workshop, June 17-18, 2000, University of California at Berkeley, ed. Laura Buszard-Welcher, pp. 1-18. SCOIL Report 11. Berkeley: SCOIL, University of California, Berkeley.
- Blevins, Juliette, and Andrew Garrett (2007). “The Rise and Fall of l Sandhi in California Algic.” IJAL 73(1): 72-93. DOI: 10.1086/518335.
- Blevins, Juliette (2005). “Yurok Verb Classes.” IJAL 71(3): 327-349. DOI: 10.1086/497875.
- Costa, David J. (2007). “The Dialectology of Southern New England Algonquian.” In Papers of the Thirty-Eighth Algonquian Conference, ed. H.C. Wolfart, pp. 81-127. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba.
- DeBlois, A[lbert] D., ed. (1967). Contributions to Anthropology: Linguistics I (Algonquian). National Museum of Canada Bulletin 214. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer.
- Garrett, Andrew (2004). “Proto-Algonquian *š and ‘Ritwan’: A Rejoinder.” AIL 29(4): 50-51.
- Goddard, Ives (1967). “The Algonquian Independent Indicative.” In DeBlois (1967), pp. 66-106.
- Goddard, Ives (1990). “Unhistorical Features in Massachusett Orthography.” In Historical Linguistics and Philology, ed. Jacek Fisiak, pp. 227-244. TIL-SM 46. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110847260.227.
- Goddard, Ives (2001). “Contraction in Fox (Meskwaki).” In Actes du Trente-Deuxième Congrès des Algonquinistes, ed. John D. Nichols, pp. 164-230. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba.
- Goddard, Ives (2016). “The ‘Loup’ Languages of Western Massachusetts: The Dialectal Diversity of Southern New England Algonquian.” In Papers of the Forty-Fourth Algonquian Conference, eds. Monica Macaulay, Margaret Noodin, and J. Randolph Valentine, pp. 104-138. Albany: State University of New York Press.
- Goddard, Ives (2021). A Grammar of Southern Unami Delaware (Lenape). Petoskey, MI: Mundart Press.
- Goddard, Ives, and Lucy Thomason (2014). A Meskwaki-English and English-Meskwaki Dictionary, Based on Early Twentieth-Century Writings by Native Speakers. Petoskey, MI: Mundart Press.
- Haas, Mary R. (1958). “Algonkian-Ritwan: The End of a Controversy.” IJAL 24(3): 159-173. DOI: 10.1086/464453.
- LeSourd, Philip S. (1988). Accent and Syllable Structure in Passamaquoddy. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- Nilsen, Campbell (2017). The Historical Development of the Menominee Independent Indicative. Unpublished senior thesis.
- Oxford, Will (2015). “Patterns of Contrast in Phonological Change: Evidence from Algonquian Vowel Systems.” Language 91(2): 308-357. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2015.0028.
- Oxford, Will (forthcoming). The Algonquian Inverse. Oxford University Press.
- Pentland, David H. (2005). “Preverbs and Particles in Algonquian.” In Papers of the Thirty-Sixth Algonquian Conference, ed. H.C. Wolfart, pp. 323-338. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba.
- Quinn, Conor M. ([2009]). “Medials in the Northeast.” Ms., based on paper presented at the 40th Algonquian Conference, October 24-26, 2008.
- Rhodes, Richard A. (2021). “The Case for Core Central Algonquian.” In Webs of Relationships and Words from Long Ago: A Festschrift Presented to Ives Goddard on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday, eds. Lucy Thomason, David J. Costa, and Amy Dahlstrom, pp. 305-345. Petoskey, MI: Mundart Press.
- Rudes, Blair A. (1997). “Resurrecting Wampano (Quiripi) from the Dead: Phonological Preliminaries.” AL 39(1): 1-59.
- Teeter, Karl V. (1967). “Genetic Classification in Algonquian.” In DeBlois (1967), pp. 1-6.
Mii Dash Geget 