relative roots

[Conor McDonough Quinn]

Dia dhaoibh, a chairde!

> I think that there are quite reasonable, commonly used English words which can work well for glosses of Alg. relative roots. We linguists may have to give up some of our Alg. terminology, at least for indigenous audiences, but that may not be such a bad idea--including when writing for the linguistic community.
Seconded, amen to that, and so on.  Algonquianist terminology does not
seem to help as much as it hinders, and linguists, if anybody, should
always be able to see that they are just labels for concepts/analyses that
can always be expressed with much more accessible terminology.  To expect
everybody in a community to learn this terminology to use their dictionary
is like expecting everybody to go out and buy a Mac as well if they all
own PCs (or vice versa): reasonable for the people who work in tech
support (i.e. lexicographer-linguists), but not for the average user.

(By the way, I recognize of course that this particular metaphor is about
 to become a thing of the past (Intel-based Macs and all), but I hope it's
still timely enough to get the point across.)

This is a really important issue, this unintentional exclusion of people
because they can't make easy use of the terminology.  Some might say,
well, there's no getting around learning the categories, they have to do
that (i.e. essentially what David was talking about)---but nothing in that
says we have to use Algonquianistese to do that.

I have seen student after student get lost just in the terminology of
inclusive vs. exclusive first person plural---even as its composite "we +
you" vs. "we + (just) me" morphology in the Algonquian Independent and
possessive paradigms in itself is one of the clearest explanations of the
distinction that I've ever seen.  I.e.  contrast Indonesian kita vs. kami,
where there is no such surface hint as to which is "you-ful".  In this
case, as in many, there are ways of helping the language speak for itself,
as it were.

For that reason, for example, I use "NA" and "NI" as *the* metalinguistic
terms for the categories we Algonquianists (fully knowing the drawbacks)
call "animate" and "inanimate".  This avoids the entire unhelpful
discussion of "(why) do they think bottles are alive/powerful?"---whose
major problem is that it completely distracts many from the task of
learning what's what, no matter what the story behind it is---and has the
following two advantages:

(a) fits with the "na" and "ni" they'll see in dictionaries like Rich's

(b) conveniently in Penobscot, "na" is the animate 'that' and "ni" is the
inanimate 'that', such that they can learn and practice gender by the
maximally simple 'that is a ...' pattern, i.e.

	X na.		'that is an X' (animate)
	X ni.		'that is an X' (animate)

I.e. this comparable to just learning "le chat" as a unit and
understanding its elements, as opposed to learning an isolated word "chat"
+ the abstract fact that is a masculine noun, then recalling that "le" is
the masculine definite article...etc. etc.

So: point to it, learn its gender implicitly.  It dovetails nicely on so
many levels. And it turns out that Howard Webkamigad and his crew have
been doing much the same thing, talking about maaba-words and manda-words.
In this case, I think all the arguments are in favor of this
language-specific category-naming approach (not necessarily globally, but
at least for this particular contrast).  Particularly because naming the
categories after the basic demonstratives manifesting them also obviates
one problem my students have also had: forgetting which demonstrative is
of which gender.

Hope that helps!  Till later, keep well.

Sla/n,
bhur gcara