On Ojibway elements in CJ

[Dave Robertson]

"Anthony Grant" <Anthony.Grant3 at btinternet.com> wrote:

Dear Dave:

Just a quick note on the above topic.

I don't think there's much point distinguish Ojibwa elements from Cree ones except when only one of these languages has the form.  Lwpishemo is certianly Cree/Ojib via Canadian French (and has passed into Cowlitz with the French article intact).  Tutush 'breast; milk' and musmus 'bovine' are both Algonquian elements in CJ.  I've always put them down as Cree rather than Ojibwa, but perhaps the matter is moot.  There are a few more.  Thomson River CJ used sunia as the word for money; this is Cree so:niyak 'gold pieces, coins', originally from Spanish jornal and the archaic Spanish coin names jola and sol (the latter is of course 'sun'; Frank Siebert pointed out this connection).  This is the same word as Mobilian shunak 'money', which has passed into Caddo as sunah.  Wawa and makmak are Nootka, as finer minds than mine have often pointed out.  (Let's not get into the possible origin of /wapato/, which looks like a Wascoised Kalapuya word to me, though it would be good if it were Cree wapatowa 'white mushroom'.)

There's also /mitas/ which is 'leggings' and which is a 3sg indefinite form of an inalienably possessed Cree/Ojibwa noun /ta:s/ 'leggings'.

Cree and Ojibwa share a lot of words, which is why etymologising is difficult, BUT they are not closely related within Algonquian.  Cree's closest relatives are probably Menominee and Cheyenne, whereas Ojibwa's closest relative (apart from Potawatomi, which is a subdialect really) is Miami-Illinois, with Fox-Sauk-Kickapoo and Shawnee forming a related subgroup.  Cree and Ojibwa have borrowed extensively from one another both before and after white contact (Severn Ojibwa being the culmination of this borrowing), so that some of the similarities are inherited but many others are diffused.

But you probably knew all this already!

Keep up the good work!

Anthony

--
"Asking a linguist how many languages she knows is like asking a doctor how many diseases he has!" -- anonymous



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