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Ojibwe has a series of three short oral vowels and four long ones. The two series are characterized by both length and quality differences. The short vowels are /ɪ o ə/ (roughly the vowels in American English bit, bot, and but, respectively) and the long vowels are /iː oː aː eː/ (roughly as in American English beet, boat, ball, and bay respectively).
Today, the majority of the first-language speakers of this dialect of the Ojibwe language are elderly, whose numbers are quickly diminishing, while the number of second-language speakers among the younger generation are growing. However, none of the second-language speakers have yet to transition to the fluency of a first-language speaker.
The vowel that was in the final Strong syllable in the singular form makizin and hence exempt from syncope is now in a Weak syllable because of the following suffix, and is eligible for deletion. The Ojibwe word 'my shoes' (non-syncopating dialects) has both the personal prefix and the plural suffix: nimakizinan.
The general grammatical characteristics of Ojibwe are shared across its dialects. The Ojibwe language is polysynthetic, exhibiting characteristics of synthesis and a high morpheme-to-word ratio. Ojibwe is a head-marking language in which inflectional morphology on nouns and particularly verbs carries significant amounts of grammatical information.
The system embodies two principles: (1) alphabetic letters from the English alphabet are used to write Ojibwe but with Ojibwe sound values; (2) the system is phonemic in nature in that each letter or letter combination indicates its basic sound value and does not reflect all the phonetic detail that occurs. Accurate pronunciation thus cannot be ...
Notable changes include the merger of *θ and *r in most descendant languages, the merger of short *i and *e in Cree and Ojibwe, the far-reaching and unexpected sound shifts of Plains Algonquian languages, and the simplification of original clusters in the Algonquian languages.
Ottawa is known to its speakers as Nishnaabemwin 'speaking the native language' (from Anishinaabe 'native person' + verb suffix -mo 'speak a language' + suffix -win 'nominalizer', with regular deletion of short vowels); the same term is applied to the Eastern Ojibwe dialect. [4]
The language is often referred to in English as Oji-Cree, with the term Severn Ojibwa (or Ojibwe) primarily used by linguists and anthropologists. [3] Severn Ojibwa speakers have also been identified as Northern Ojibwa , [ 4 ] and the same term has been applied to their dialect.