“Shawnee language”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

The Shawnee language is a Central Algonquian language spoken in parts of central and northeastern Oklahoma by the Shawnee people. It was originally spoken in Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. It is closely related to other Algonquian languages, such as Mesquakie-Sauk (Sac and Fox) and Kickapoo.

Status

Shawnee is severely threatened, with speakers shifting to English. The approximately 200 remaining speakers are older adults. The decline in usage of Shawnee is largely the result of reform schools for Native American children that forced an education in English, causing some Native Americans to cease teaching their languages to children.

Of the 2,000 members of the Absentee Shawnee Tribe around Shawnee town, more than 100 are speakers; of the 1,500 members of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe in Ottawa County, there are only a few elderly speakers; of the 8,000 members of the Loyal Shawnee in the Cherokee region of Oklahoma around Whiteoak there are fewer than 12 speakers. All of these low figures, in addition to the fact that most speakers are older adults, make Shawnee an endangered language. Additionally, development outside of the home is limited; apart from a dictionary and portions of the Bible from 1842 to 1929, it appears that there is little literature or technology support for Shawnee.

Language revitalization

Conversational Shawnee booklets and CDs, and a Learn Shawnee Language website are available.^[3]^[4]

Sounds

Vowels

Consonants

Some speakers of Shawnee pronounce /ʃ/ more like an alveolar [s]. This pronunciation is especially common among Loyal Band Shawnee speakers near Vinita, Oklahoma.

Phonology

Phonological rules

A word may not begin with a vowel. Instead, an on-glide [h] is added. For example:

There are two variants of the article "-oci", meaning from. It can attach to nouns to form prepositional phrases, or it can also be a preverb. When it attaches to a noun, it is "-ooci," and when attached to a preverb it is "-hoci."

Morphology

Morphophonological rules

Rule 1

As we know from the phonological rule stated above, a word may not begin with a vowel in Shawnee. From the morphophonological rule above, we can assume that [h]~[t].

"-eecini(i)" meaning Indian agent appears as "hina heecini" or that Indian agent, and as "ho-[t]eecinii-ma-waa-li, meaning he was their Indian agent. The [t] of "ho-[t]-" fills the open slot that would otherwise have to be filled with [h].

Rule 2

Rule 3

When a long vowel and a short vowel come together at a morpheme boundary, the short vowel is deleted.

Grammar and syntax

Shawnee shares many grammatical features with other Algonquian languages. There are two third persons, proximate and obviative, and two noun classes (or genders), animate and inanimate. It is primarily agglutinating typologically, and is polysynthetic, resulting in a great deal of information being encoded on the verb. The most common word order is Verb-Subject.

Instrumental and transitivizing affixes

The instrumental affix is not obligatory, but if it is present, it determines the type of transitivizing affix that can follow it, (see numbering scheme below) or by the last stem in the theme.

Possessive paradigm: animate nouns

Possessive paradigm: inanimate nouns

Modality

The independent and imperative orders are used in independent clauses. The imperative order involves an understood second person affecting first or third persons.

Demonstrative pronouns

Refer to the examples below. 'Yaama' meaning 'this' in examples 1 and 2 refers to someone in front of the speaker. The repetition of 'yaama' in example 1 emphasizes the location of the referent in the immediate presence of the speaker.

Refer to the examples below. 'Hina' functions as a third-person singular pronoun.

Refer to the examples below. 'Hini' fulfills the same functions as above for inanimate nouns. Locational and third-person singular pronominal uses are found in the following examples.

Word order

Grammatical categories

Parts of speech in the Algonquian languages, Shawnee included, show a basic division between inflecting forms (nouns, verbs and pronouns), and non-inflecting invariant forms (also known as particles). Directional particles ("piyeci" meaning "towards") incorporate into the verb itself. Although particles are invariant in form, they have different distributions and meanings that correspond to adverbs ("[hi]noki" meaning "now", "waapaki" meaning "today", "lakokwe" meaning "so, certainly", "mata" meaning "not") postpositions ("heta'koθaki wayeeci" meaning "towards the east") and interjections ("ce" meaning "so!").

Case

Examples (1) and (2) below show the grammatical interaction of obviation and inverse. The narrative begins in (1) in which grandfather is the grammatical subject [+AGENT] in discourse-focus [+PROXIMATE]. In (2), grandfather remains in discourse-focus [+PROXIMATE], but he is now the grammatical object [+OBJECT]. To align grammatical relations properly in (2), the inverse marker /-ekw-/ is used in the verb stem to signal that the governor is affecting grandfather. (The prefix /ho-/ on 'ho-stakooli' refers to grandfather).

Since the person building the house (the governor) is disjoint from the person who the house is being built for (the grandfather), this disjunction is marked by placing one participant in the obviative. Since grandfather is the focus in this narrative, the governor is assigned the obviative marking. Grammatically, 'kapenal-ee' (-ee- < -ile- < -ileni- 'person') is the subject who is not in discourse-focus (marked by /-li/ 3sOBVIATIVE), showing that grammatical relations and obviation are independent categories.

Similar interactions of inverse and obviation are found below. In Shawnee, third person animate beings participate in obviation, including grammatically animate nouns that are semantically inanimate.

Locative affix /-eki/

The Shawnee /-eki/ meaning "in" can be used with either gender. This locative affix cliticizes onto the preceding noun, and thus it appears to be a case ending.

Person, number, and gender

Gender

The basic distinction for gender in Shawnee is between animate actors and inanimate objects.

Grammatical gender in Shawnee is more accurately signaled by the phonology, not the semantics.

Nouns ending in /-a/ are animate, while nouns ending in /-i/ are inanimate.^[8] It should be noted that this phonological criterion is not absolute. Modification by a demonstrative ("hina" being animate and "hini" being inanimate, meaning that) and pluralization are conclusive tests.

In the singular, Shawnee animate nouns end in /-a/, and the obviative singular morpheme is /-li/.

This causes animate obviative singular and inanimate plural to look alike on the surface.

Number

Person

The choice of person affix may depend on the relative position of agent and object on the animacy hierarchy. According to Dixon ^[10] the animacy hierarchy extends from first person pronoun, second person pronoun, third person pronoun, proper nouns, human common nouns, animate common nouns, and inanimate common nouns.

The affixes in the verb will reflect whether an animate agent is acting on someone or something lower in the animacy scale, or whether he is being acted upon by someone or something lower in the animacy scale.

Orthography

During the 19th century a short-lived Roman-based alphabet was designed for Shawnee by the missionary Jotham Meeker. It was never widely used.^[11] Later, native Shawnee speaker Thomas 'Wildcat' Alford devised a highly phonemic and accurate orthography for his 1929 Shawnee translation of the four gospels of the New Testament, but it, too, never attained wide usage.

Vocabulary

Notes

1. ^{{Cite episode| publisher = PBS| title = Shawnee: A Matter of Funding| work = Language, Native Now, We Shall Remain, American Experience| accessdate = 2013-04-26| date = 2009-04-13| url = https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/native_now/language_shawnee}}
2. ^{{Cite web| title = Shawnee Language Classes| work = Eastern Shawnee of Oklahoma| accessdate = 2013-04-26| url = http://www.estoo-nsn.gov/events/shawnee-language-classes/}}
3. ^{{Cite web| title = Say it in Shawnee!| accessdate = 2013-04-26| url = http://shawneelanguage.homestead.com/}}
4. ^{{Cite web| title = Learn Shawnee - Learn Shawnee Language| accessdate = 2013-04-26| url = http://learnshawnee.com/}}
5. ^Andrew, Kenneth Ralph. Shawnee Grammar. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses; 1994
6. ^{{cite book | last = Mithun | first = Marianne | title = The Languages of Native North America | publisher = Cambridge University Press | location = Cambridge | year = 2001 | page = 16 | isbn = 978-0-521-29875-9 }}
7. ^Bloomfield 1946:449-50; punctuation as in the original
8. ^Chrisley 1992:9
9. ^Andrew, Kenneth Ralph. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses; 1994.
10. ^Dixon 1979:85-6
11. ^{{cite book | last = Mithun | first = Marianne | title = The Languages of Native North America | publisher = Cambridge University Press | location = Cambridge | year = 2001 | page = 36 | isbn = 978-0-521-29875-9 }}