Difference between revisions of "Western Abenaki/Grammar Documentation"

Revision as of 16:11, 16 February 2023

Parts of Speech

Western Abenaki has heavily inflected verbs, which have affixes marking subject person and number as well as object person and number, nouns inflected with formatives in a similar manner, adjectives which have agreement with nouns, adverbs, and pronouns.

Spell Relax

ȣ and ô

w

"w" and "u" are used fairly interchangeably across the corpus. It is unclear (but unlikely) that there is a pronunciation difference. Additionally, "w" is often dropped orthographically and phonetically when followed by "ô."

Morphology

Noun Pluralization

Regular plurals are formed depending on whether the noun is animate or inanimate.

• Regular animate plurals are formed with -ak:
  • kanal - teakettle
  • kanal<n><aa><pl> ↔ kanalak
• After -d and -t the animate plural becomes -ik
• After -gw and -kw the animate plural becomes -ok and the w disappears.
  • amiskw - beaver
  • amiskw<n><aa><pl> ↔ amiskok
  • azeskwamagw - mud fish
  • azeskwamagw<n><aa><pl> ↔ azeskwamagok
• After -ȣ and -a the animate plural becomes -k
  • abitȣ - farmer
  • abitȣ<n><aa><pl> ↔ abitȣk
  • alȣtegwihla - wood duck
  • alȣtegwihla<n><aa><pl> ↔ alȣtegwihlak
• Regular inanimate plurals are formed with -al:
• After -g and -k the inanimate plural becomes -il
• After -gw and -kw the inanimate plural becomes -ol and the w disappears.
• Certain words ending in -m and -n form their plural with -ok and -ol (animate and inanimate respectively)

Pronouns

Pronouns are usually affixed to verbs, but sometimes are found as their own words.