Menominee/Cree vowel correspondence

[Guillaume Jacques]

Dear Sarah,

First of all, comparing Cree and Menominee directly might be difficult
because Cree merges short *e and *i, while Menominee has undergone a very
complex vseries of owel shifts that depends on many factors, including
number of vowels in the word, presence of a glottal cluster in the first
syllable of the word etc. Rather than Bloomfield's sketchy account, I would
suggest reading Hockett's detailed article (I can provide a copy if your
institution does not allow access to this journal):

Hockett, C. F. 1981. The Phonological History of Menominee. Anthropological
Linguistics 23. 51-87.

However, even this article is not explicit enough in all details, and
requires a careful reading. The correspondences between Menominee and PA
(and even more, between M and Cree) cannot be stated in a simple table like
the one you show. For PA vowels, the easiest solution is to use Fox, which
preserves them almost without change from PA (except word-initial *e-).
Since Ives Goddard's dictionary has just been published, Fox data are now
much more accessible than before.

At the present moment I am working with my colleage Thomas Pellard on a
program applying the sound laws from PA to Menominee (and the other way
round), but it is needs a lot of debugging.

Have a look at Hewson's dictionary for an updated list of PA finals:

http://www.mun.ca/linguistics/people/faculty/protoalgonkian.php

If you have a more detailed list of the finals you are interested in (with
the verb conjugation AI/II/TA/TI, if possible, to avoid any
misunderstandings), maybe we can have a look.

Guillaume



2014-09-04 0:10 GMT+02:00 Sarah Lundquist <sjlundquist at wisc.edu>:

> Hi all,
>
>
> My advisor Monica Macaulay and I are attempting to ascertain
> correspondence for a set of vowels in Cree and Menominee.  In his "sketch,”
> Bloomfield (1946) states that:
>
> PA *i & *ii split into Menominee i, ii and e, ee
> PA *o & *oo split into Menominee u, uu and o, oo
> PA *e split into M e and ae (what he writes with epsilon ɛ)
> PA *ee became M long ae (a͞e, or ɛɛ)
>
> PA *i and *e merged to i in Cree
>
>
>
> I am working on a paper which relies upon a comparison of Cree and
> Menominee AI finals.  Monica and I believe that following the information
> above, the Cree/Menominee cognates for the finals should be as follows:
>
>  C       M
> -ee     -a͞e
> -o       -o
> -aw     -aw
> -isi      -isi/-ese/-aese (varies in Menominee)
> -isii     -isii/-esii/ -aesii (ditto)
> -in       -in/-en (ditto)
> -i         -i/-e (ditto)
> -ii        -ii/-ee (ditto)
>
>
>
> However, my knowledge of PA and phonological patterns across Algonquian
> languages is very limited, and Monica has suggested that I check with
> someone with more knowledge of the history of the languages than she has.
> In general, the meanings of these finals do seem to correspond, but one of
> the things that I’m looking at with them is the ways in which they *don’t*
> correspond; so we can’t really use the meanings as a way to decide the
> matter.  Would anyone be willing to lend us a hand in verifying that these
> morphemes are cognate?  Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
> Sarah [image:
> https://ssl.gstatic.com/ui/v1/icons/mail/images/cleardot.gif]
>
>
> --
> *Sarah Lundquist* │Project Assistant, UW-Madison Dept. of Linguistics
> Linguistics Student Organization Co-President
> TLAM Student Organization Outreach Coordinator
> sjlundquist at wisc.edu
>
>


-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques
http://himalco.hypotheses.org/
http://panchr.hypotheses.org/


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