Blackfoot I

[stoutfellow]

As I mentioned, I'm currently reading Blackfoot Grammar, by Donald Frantz. I'm not trying to learn Blackfoot, but just to get some idea of the structure of the language. In order to keep things straight in my head - and also in the belief that some of this is interesting - I'm going to post some of the things I find as I read.

Blackfoot is a language of the Algonquian family, spoken on reserves and reservations in Alberta and Montana.

• Gender. Indo-European languages classify nouns as masculine, feminine, and (in some cases) neuter. This classification is somewhat arbitrary; in Spanish, for example, "automóvil" is masculine and "casa" feminine, but no Spanish-speaker actually believes cars to be male or houses female. Blackfoot distinguishes instead between animate and inanimate nouns, but again this is somewhat arbitrary; words for people and animals are animate, but so are such words as "pokóon" ("ball") and "íssk" ("pail"). This does not imply that Blackfoot-speakers regard balls or pails as somehow alive.
  
• Reference. Blackfoot distinguishes between particular and non-referring nouns. If you ask someone to give you an egg, there is no specific egg you want; Blackfoot therefore adds a suffix to indicate this fact. Compare, in English, "I'm looking for a friend." This is ambiguous; there may be one specific person you're looking for, who happens to be your friend, or you may wish to meet someone - anyone - who will be a friend. In Blackfoot, the word meaning "friend" would be marked so as to distinguish these two possibilities. (Non-referring nouns are not marked for number; "Give me an egg" and "Give me some eggs" are not distinguished.)
  
• Major and minor third person. If a Blackfoot sentence contains two or more animate nouns, one (and only one) must be marked as "major third person"; the others are "minor third person". (There is an exception; if two nouns are conjoined, they may both be major.) The major noun is thereby indicated to be more important in the sentence, in some sense. (Compare English "John told Fred" and "John told Fred"; what we might convey by stress, Blackfoot marks explicitly.) One special case: if a noun is marked as having an animate possessor - e.g., "John's son" - it is automatically minor.
  
• Pronouns and agreement. Intransitive verbs in Blackfoot are marked as to the person of their subject, but the system is a bit more complicated than that in English. Major and minor third person nouns are indicated by different suffixes; second person singular and plural are always distinguished (as in various English dialects, "you" vs. "y'all"/"yins" etc.) Inclusive (including "you") and exclusive (not including "you") "we" are also distinguished.
  
• Predication. Expressions that would be predicate adjectives in English are normally verbs in Blackfoot; there is no word literally meaning "tall", but rather a verb meaning "to be tall". Nouns are readily converted into verbs, if they are used predicatively; the sentence "My son will be chief" involves the noun meaning "chief", but with a suffix which converts it into a verb, "to be chief".
  
• Weather. In English and French, descriptions of weather generally use a dummy subject - "It is raining" or "Il pleut" - even though there is no "it" (or "il") literally involved. Spanish simply uses the verb "llover", in a reflexive form with no explicit subject: "Se llueve". Blackfoot behaves rather like Spanish in this respect; "Áísootaawa" translates as "It is raining". No subject appears explicitly. (The word/sentence does include the suffix "-wa", for a singular third person major subject, just as "Se llueve" appears in third person singular form.)

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Thank you.

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

How interesting. I'm particularly intrigued by the noun classifications of animate vs. inanimate.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

It's actually a fairly common classification scheme, especially in the languages of North America. (Some linguists believe the Indo-European M/F/N system originated as animate/inanimate - MF vs. N - and the M/F split developed later.)

[hornedhopper.livejournal.com]

Intriguing also the route from actually animate vs. inanimate to, what, representative? I can see animists imbuing trees, rain, etc. as having "live" properties, but it's a stretch to get to the *male* table!

I don't remember any of this being discussed 30 years ago in linguistics class.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

I find the idea of inclusive "we" and exclusive "we" extremely useful.

[ndrosen.livejournal.com]

I believe that Dravidian languages also make that distinction. (I'm neither a linguist nor a Dravidian.)

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

You're right, they do. (I think that, somewhere around here, I've got a reference which mentions a number of other families which make that distinction, but I can't find it.)

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

I'd be inclined to agree. (Loglan, my favorite constructed language, is one of the few to incorporate that distinction.) It's pretty common in the languages of the Americas, apparently, and (I believe) also in the Pacific languages.