Blackfoot IV

[stoutfellow]

Possessives. There is one more bit of noun morphology to be mentioned. If a noun refers to something that is possessed by something else, it takes a suffix indicating the person and number of the possessor. Interestingly, some nouns - iksisst "mother", i's "older brother", and ookoowa "home" are examples - must be marked as possessed; they generally describe a relationship of some kind. (A home must belong to someone; a house - niitóyisi need not.)
Verb Prefixes. The morphology of Blackfoot verbs is very complex. Many concepts that in English -  indeed, in most languages - are expressed by separate words are incorporated into the verb in Blackfoot. Negation, quantifiers, all sorts of adverbials, and what in English would be auxiliary verbs are expressed as prefixes. For example, "all" is expressed by the prefix ohkan(a)-. (It may refer to either the subject or the object; "We all bought them" and "We bought all of them" would be expressed by the same word/sentence. Presumably context would distinguish between them.) Auxiliary verbs such as "can", "try to", "like to", "finish", and "go to" (as in "go fishing") likewise appear as prefixes. Adverbials that are treated this way include "gently", "hard" (as in "work hard"), "frantically/recklessly/like a nuisance", and "well", as well as intensifiers like "very", "extremely", "extraordinarily". Such prepositions as "with" (= by means of), "with" (= together with), "instead of", and "toward" also are prefixes. Finally, there are a few more aspect markers, including "still" and the inchoative aspect (which refers to something that has just now happened). (It is interesting to note that "I don't remember" is constructed by combining the marker "still" with negation and the durative, all prefixed to the verb "know". Translation from English to Blackfoot is not exactly a straightforward matter!)
There's quite a bit more to verb morphology, but I'll leave that to another time.

Comments

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Continued thanks. Native Americans are thought to have wandered over from Siberia. Are the language roots traceable? Are there families of Native American languages that don't appear to have that genealogy? I suppose those living in S.A. made the journey some time ago.

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

There've been attempts to trace the connections, but we're talking about a time-depth of 20,000 years minimum; that's long enough for any traces of relationships to erode away. (By way of comparison, the Indo-European languages seem to have been more-or-less unified as recently as about 5,000 years ago.) The only exception concerns the most recent wave of immigrants, the Eskimos and Aleuts; there are a few Eskimos in the Russian Far East, and there's some evidence of a relationship to the so-called Paleo-Siberian languages - Yukaghir, Chukchi, and a few others.