The Ojibwe Language

https://ciel.utsc.utoronto.ca/ojibwe-textbook/lesson/1?dialect=southwestern

Written Ojibwe

In about 1830 James Evans, a Wesleyan missionary, devised a way to write the Ojibwe language of Rice Lake with the Latin alphabet. His goal was to produce a dictionary of Ojibwe to help him to learn the language better, and to help him teach English to the Ojibwe people.

In about 1840, while working at Norway House in Hudson’s Bay, Evans invented a syllabic script for the Ojibwe language, based partly on Pitman shorthand, which had been published in 1837. It is thought that his idea to create a syllabic script was based on the Cherokee script.

Evans’ syllabary for Ojibwe consisted of just nine symbols, each of which could be written in four different orientations to indicate different vowels. This was sufficient to write Ojibwe. Evans translated parts of the Bible and other religious works into Ojibwe, and later Cree, and printed them using type carved from wood, or made from melted-down linings of tea chests.

Evans later adapted it to write Cree. The script proved popular with Ojibwe and Cree speakers, and within about 10 years, many of them had learnt to read and write it, learning mainly from family or friends. As paper was scarce at the time, they wrote on birch bark with soot from burnt sticks, or carved messages in wood, and nicknamed James Evans ‘The man who made birch bark talk’.

The Ojibwe script continued to be widely used until the 1950s and 1960s, when the integration policies of Department of Indian and Northern Affairs led to a decline in use to the script among Ojibwe children taught to write in the Roman alphabet.

Main source: Murdoch, John Stewart, Syllabics: A Successful Educational Innovation (University of Manitoba, 1981).

Notable features of the Ojibwe syllabary

Type of writing system: Syllabary
Writing direction: left to right in horizontal lines
Used to write: Ojibwe (Anishinaabemowin / ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᒧᐎᓐ)
Each sign can be written facing four different directions which indicate the vowel attached to it
The finals are used to write stand-alone consonants
There are considerable variations in the way the symbols are written

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VAI verbs – Grammar Structure

Ojibwe is a language of verbs. Most of the information in a sentence is carried by verbs, and verbs also tend to carry out functions that are covered by other parts of speech in other languages. For example, Nimbakade – I am hungry. This is a verb. Ojibwe doesn’t really have adjectives. To express that someone or something is in a given state or has a certain property, you almost always use a verb.

Traditional analysis of the grammar of Ojibwe (and related languages) suggests that there are four major categories of verbs in the language. Each category has its own set of prefixes and suffixes. It adds up to a lot to memorize, but don’t worry, we will take you through it step by step, one lesson at a time.

To understand the four categories, it helps to know that Ojibwe nouns come in two kinds, or “genders.” These genders are not male and female as you might be familiar with in certain European languages, but rather animate and inanimate. Animate generally refers to living things and people, while inanimate refers to non-living objects. However, there are many exceptions. For example, in many dialects, the word for rock is animate. Some speakers of the language attribute spiritual significance to this, and some don’t. In this course, we won’t get too much into the philosophy, but we will teach this simply as a property of the language. It is similar to how in Spanish “table” is feminine but “book” is masculine. As you learn Ojibwe nouns, you will have to memorize whether they are animate or inanimate. As you’ll see, this distinction also affects what verbs you can use with different nouns. We’ll talk much more about this in time.

PRONOUNS:

These pronouns are fairly equivalent to their English translations, but they actually aren’t used that much in Ojibwe in ordinary conversation. This is because verbs take prefixes to indicate 1^st 2^nd and 3^rd person, so you don’t need to add a pronoun on top of that. Here are the verb forms with prefixes:

*bare pronoun*	*verb prefix*	full verb	*translation*
*niin*	nim-	nimbakade	I am hungry.
*giin*	gi-	gibakade	You are hungry.
*wiin*	—–	bakade	S/he is hungry.

VERBS EXAMPLES:

Here are two more examples. The dictionary forms for these verbs are maajaa and nibaa. Note that these are also the third-person singular forms (this only applies to VAI verbs – the other verb classes have their own dictionary forms, again the most minimal forms with no prefixes or suffixes).

*bare pronoun*	*full verb*	*translation*
niin	nimaajaa	I leave
*giin*	gimaajaa	you leave
*wiin*	maajaa	s/he leaves
*niin*	ninibaa	I sleep
giin	ginibaa	you sleep
*wiin*	nibaa	s/he sleeps
*niin*	ningiishkaabaagwe	I am thirsty
giin	gigiishkaabaagwe	you are thirsty
*wiin*	giishkaabaagwe	s/he is thirsty

PREVERBS:

Finally, the preverbs in this lesson. A preverb is a kind of prefix that comes before the main verb, modifying its meaning. Here we use wii-, which is a kind of future tense marker. OPD labels it as pv tns, a preverb of tense. You use this when indicating that someone will probably do something, that they want to do something or are volunteering to do it, like when you say “I’ll get it” when the house phone rings. It is less definite than the other future tense marker ga, which indicates more certainty that something will happen – as in giga-waabamin. The hyphen at the end of wii- reminds you that it comes before the verb, and it is common to use that hyphen in writing but not always. The preverb comes before the main verb, but after the prefix indicating person. So we have:

Grammatical rule: For VAI verbs ending in -o or -i, that final short vowel is deleted for the first-person niin and second-person singular giin forms, but it remains for third person wiin. We will illustrate this for two VAI verbs whose citation forms are the third person singular: wiisini and giigido. The first-person prefix for verbs starting in g is nin-. So we have:

PARTICLES:

Particles are little words that fulfill specific grammatical functions. Again, the OPD distinguishes many different kinds, and we will tell you the part of speech as listed in the OPD, but we will not delve deeply into the meaning of those categories. For now, we will discuss na and enya’, both of which are classified as pc disc, or discourse particles.

Na is an important word that marks yes/no questions. To turn a statement into a question, you simply add na as the second word of the sentence. It may also be ina, if following a hard pronounced consonant. So we have: