Western Abenaki/Grammar Documentation

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

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
• 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:
  • snake<n><pl> ↔ snakes
  • window<n><pl> ↔ windows
• After -g and -k the inanimate plural becomes -il
• After -gw and -kw the inanimate plural becomes -ol and the w disappears.