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Chiwere (also called Iowa-Otoe-Missouria or Báxoje-Jíwere-Ñút'achi) is a Siouan language originally spoken by the Missouria, Otoe, and
Iowa Iowa () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wiscon ...
peoples, who originated in the
Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lakes ...
region but later moved throughout the Midwest and plains. The language is closely related to
Ho-Chunk The Ho-Chunk, also known as Hoocągra or Winnebago (referred to as ''Hotúŋe'' in the neighboring indigenous Iowa-Otoe language), are a Siouan-speaking Native American people whose historic territory includes parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iow ...
, also known as Winnebago. Non-Native Christian
missionaries A missionary is a member of a religious group which is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Mi ...
first documented Chiwere in the 1830s, but since then not much material has been published about the language. Chiwere suffered a steady decline after extended European-American contact in the 1850s, and by 1940 the language had almost totally ceased to be spoken. "Tciwere itce" (in the Otoe dialect) and "Tcekiwere itce" (in the Iowa dialect) translate to "To speak the home dialect." The name "Chiwere" is said to originate from a person meeting a stranger in the dark. If a stranger in the dark challenged a person to identify their self, that person might respond "I am Tci-we-re" (Otoe) or "I am Tce-ki-we-re" (Iowa), which translates to "I am belonging to the people of this land" or "I am belonging to those dwelling here."


Names

The Iowa tribe refers to their language as Báxoje ich'é or Bah Kho Je (pronounced ). The Otoe-Missouria dialect is called Jíwere ich'é (pronounced ). The spelling ''Chiwere'', used mostly by linguists, derives from the fact that the language has an aspiration distinction rather than a
voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...
distinction (see the phonology section below), so that the unaspirated stops are variably voiced or unvoiced . Although is a valid pronunciation of the first sound of ''Jiwere ~ Chiwere'', it may mislead English speakers into pronouncing it . Similarly, a common
folk etymology Folk etymology (also known as popular etymology, analogical reformation, reanalysis, morphological reanalysis or etymological reinterpretation) is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more famili ...
of ''Báxoje'' is "dusty noses," based on the misunderstanding of the first syllable ''bá'' as ''pá'', or "nose."GoodTracks, Jimm (1992) ''Baxoje-Jiwere-Nyut'aji - Ma'unke: Iowa-Otoe-Missouria Language to English.'' Boulder, CO: Center for the Study of the Languages of the Plains and Southwest. ''(also)'' GoodTracks, Jimm (16 August 2008), personal communication
Ioway Otoe-Missouria Language Website
/ref> However, the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma says that ''Bah-Kho-Je'' means "grey snow," due to their winter lodges being covered with snow that is stained grey by fire smoke.


Status

The last two fluent speakers died in the winter of 1996, and only a handful of semi-fluent speakers remain, all of whom are elderly, making Chiwere critically
endangered An endangered species is a species that is very likely to become extinct in the near future, either worldwide or in a particular political jurisdiction. Endangered species may be at risk due to factors such as habitat loss, poaching and in ...
. As of 2006, an estimated four members of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians still speak the language, while 30 members of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma speak their language. The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma has sponsored language workshops in the past and hopes to host more in the future. They have provided tribal elders with recording devices to collect Chiwere words and songs. A 2012 NSF grant was used to provide digital access to existing audio recordings of fluent speakers. The Third Annual Otoe-Missouria Language and Culture Day is planned for September 2012. The Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians is establishing a language program in conjunction with the University of Oklahoma Native American Studies Department.


Phonology

The phoneme inventory of Chiwere consists of approximately 33 consonants, and five vowel qualities (three of which occur as nasalized).


Consonants

The phoneme has a number of variants and allophones. It can appear as a dental tap or flap (especially word-medially), as an alveolar fricative (as in Spanish), as an (inter)dental fricative , as a lateral , as a nasal , or as a voiced dental plosive . The velar nasal phoneme does not occur word-initially, being confined to "medial position after a nasal vowel."Whitman, 1947, p. 235


Phoneme combinations

In languages there are certain clusters of phonemes that show up in particular environments within a word. According to William Whitman's research of Chiwere, there are approximately 23 known consonant clusters which are word medial and approximately 14 of these show up word initially or word medially. In this research it has been found that the stop + stop consonant cluster ''čd'', as in ''áčda'' ('then'),Whitman, 1947, p. 236 shows up in the word medial position but not as a word initial phoneme cluster. The stop + spirant clusters ''ʔθ'', ''ʔs'', and ''ʔh'' all show up word initially and word medially, whereas the stop + semivowel clusters ''dw'' and ''gw'' only show up word medially. The stop + liquid clusters ''bl'' and ''gl'' show up word initially and word medially. Spirant + stop clusters generally appear in both word initial and word medial position, these clusters include ''θg'', ''sǰ'', ''sg'', ''hd'', and ''hg'', however the spirant + stop clusters ''sd'' and ''xd'' only appear word medially. These are all the spirant + stop clusters accounted for in the research of William Whitman, however, the spirant + stop cluster ''hk'' has been found to exist word medially, as in ''chéthka'' ('domestic cow'). According to Whitman's research there are two spirant + nasal consonant clusters that have been found, which are ''hm'', as in ''sáhmã'' ('seven') and ''hn'', as in ''láhnũwe'' ('calumet'), however Whitman does account that ''hñ'' is a combination which appears as a future tense suffix. After reviewing further data, the cluster ''hñ'' has been found in the word medial position, as in ''péhñi'' ('whiskey') and thus appears to be another possible spirant + nasal consonant combination. The stop + semivowel consonant clusters ''θw'', ''xw'', and ''hw'' all appear to be restricted to the word medial environment, whereas the stop + semivowel consonant cluster ''sw'' appears to be the only stop + semivowel known to show up both word initially, as in ''swá̃la'' ('to be soft') and ''baswá'' ('to cut piece off'). The stop + liquid phoneme clusters ''θl'', ''sl'', and ''xl'' have all been found in the word initial and word medial environments.


=Cluster metamorphosis and phenomenon

= An interesting analysis of the Chiwere language has shown that the spirant + stop consonant cluster ''hg'' is the more commonly used pronunciation of the spirant + stop cluster ''θg'' and that the ''hg'' cluster may be replacing the ''θg'' altogether. In William Whitman's research, the spirant + stop combination ''xd'', with the one given example used in this journal being ''iblí̃xdo'' ('blackbird'), is mentioned as being an error for the spirant + stop combination ''hd''. But the spirant + stop combination ''xd'' has also been found in the words ''chéxdó'' ('buffalo bull'), ''náxda'' ('sour'), and ''náxdage'' ('kick'). With this data we can see that the consonant cluster ''xd'' is a possible combination and can show up in word medial position.


Vowels

Chiwere has five oral vowel phonemes, , and three
nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced with ...
phonemes, . Vowel length is distinctive as well.


Grammar

Chiwere grammar is Agglutinative language, agglutinative; its verbal complex is central to the structure of the language.Whitman 1947, p. 241. Verbs are formed by addition various
affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...
es to a verb stem, each of which corresponds to a
part of speech In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...
, such as a
preposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
,
pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
,
case Case or CASE may refer to: Containers * Case (goods), a package of related merchandise * Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component * Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books * Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to ca ...
marker and so forth. Concepts such as possession, reflexivity and
grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...
, as well subject-object relation and case (including nine
instrumental An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to inst ...
prefixes) are also expressed via affixing. In this way, large, complete sentences can be formed out of a single complex word. Aside from its complex verbal morphology, Chiwere differs from English in a number of significant ways. There are separate male and female registers, and interrogatives are formed with the question particle ''je'', though this is omitted in informal speech. Finally, Chiwere word order is subject-object-verb, in contrast to English SVO order.


Verbal complex

The verbal complex is formed of preverbal and postverbal affixes, with preverbal affixes communicating positional, instrumental and pronominal elements. These are added to a verb stem, which can be mono-, duo- or polysyllabic, and either agent ( transitive) or patient ( intransitive). Most verb stems are passive. Altogether, the Chiwere verb complex is arranged as follows:
a- pronoun A- or a- may refer to: ;A-hyphen * A- (plane), a U.S. military aircraft prefix * Privative a, a prefix expressing negation * Copulative a, a prefix expressing unification ;A-minus * A−, a blood type in the ABO blood group system * A− (grade) ...
a- directional A- or a- may refer to: ;A-hyphen * A- (plane), a U.S. military aircraft prefix * Privative a, a prefix expressing negation * Copulative a, a prefix expressing unification ;A-minus * A−, a blood type in the ABO blood group system The ABO ...
ositional wa/ri- pronouns a-/ra- pronouns eflexive ossession
i- directional An iodide ion is the ion I−. Compounds with iodine in formal oxidation state −1 are called iodides. In everyday life, iodide is most commonly encountered as a component of iodized salt, which many governments mandate. Worldwide, iodine defic ...
nstrumentalSTEM ronoun suffix ausative


Positional prefixes

Positional prefixes occupy the first position in the verbal complex. These prefixes refer to the location or direction of the verb's action:GoodTracks 2002 *a- on, upon, over *i- at, to, by *u- in, within, into


Pronominal prefixes

Chiwere distinguishes three
persons A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
– first, second and inclusive, which functions as an inclusive first person plural. Each person has an agent (subject) and patient (object) form. The agent forms mark the subjects of active verbs, whereas the patient forms mark the objects of active verbs and the subjects of passive verbs, making Chiwere, like many other Siouan languages, active-stative. Third person forms as they exist in English are not directly marked. Following are the subject and object forms of the pronominal prefixes: *First Person: ha- hi- *Second Person: ra- ri- *Inclusive: hi- wa-wa- (note that the inclusive object form is spelled "wa-wa" because it can be separated by the positional prefixes) The plural forms of these pronominal forms are expressed via a combination of the above listed prefixes with suffixes. Thus: *First Person: hi-…wi, wa-wa…wi *Second Person: ra-…wi, ri-…wi *Inclusive (pl.): …wi, wa- *Inclusive: …ñe, wa-…wi


Wa- prefix

This prefix, perhaps best translated as "something," occurs before every other verbal element except for the pronominal ''hi''-, and approximates the English third person plural object of a transitive verb. Additionally, the prefix can be used as a
dummy pronoun A dummy pronoun is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora. Dummy pronouns are used in many Germanic languages, inclu ...
to make transitive verbs intransitive; these verbal forms are often used as nouns, and this prefix is thus the general method of forming nouns from verb stems. There are several intransitive verbs that take the ''wa''- prefix idiomatically, wherein the prefix has no literal meaning.Whitman 1947, p. 244.


Reflexive prefix

Verbs are made reflexive by the "ki-" prefix;
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...
of this prefix ("kiki-") expresses reciprocity. Thus: *Uhákigisa (I helped myself) *Ukikisa ke (They helped each other) A number of verbs that are non-reflexive in English take the reflexive prefix in Chiwere.


Directional prefixes

These three prefixes serve to indicate an indirect object and as such are grouped together, even though they do not occupy the same position within the verbal complex: *wa- indicates that the action moves away from a third point not occupied by the speaker *gi- indicates that the action moves towards a third point and communicates the English prepositions of to, for or concerning *gla- indicates that the action reverts towards the subject and is used to form possessive constructions


Instrumental prefixes

There are nine separate prefixes that indicate instrumentality, all of which change passive verbs into active. *wa- by pushing with the hand *gi- by pushing or striking with a held object *ru-/ri- by hand *na- by means of the feet or a machine *ra- by means of the mouth or teeth *bo- by means of blow or blast *ba- by cutting *da- because of heating or freezing


Causative suffix

The
causative In linguistics, a causative ( abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either ...
, wherein the subject causes or makes something else to do or be something, is expressed via the suffix -''hi''.


Tense

" Tense" in Chiwere can be divided into present/past and future. Present and past tenses are unmarked in the language, and are distinguished by actual statements of time using words like "yesterday" or "today." The future tense is indicated with the particle ''hnye'', which follows the verb.Wistrand-Robinson, et al 1977, p. 97.


Personal pronouns

Chiwere is a pro-drop language; once the subject of the sentence has been established, it can be omitted. *First Person: mi'e (sing.), hi'e (inc.) *Second Person: ri'e *Third Person: alé


Negation

Statements are negated with the particle ''skunyi'', which follows the verb.


Commands

Commands are formed using the simple verb stem plus a gender-specific particle – le for male speakers and lé for female speakers.


Classes

The Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma's Otoe Language Program teaches weekly classes in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Oklahoma City (), officially the City of Oklahoma City, and often shortened to OKC, is the capital and largest city of the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, it ranks 20th among United States cities in population, and ...
, and Red Rock, Oklahoma."Otoe Language Program."
''The Otoe-Missouria Tribe.'' Retrieved 11 Feb 2012.


See also

*
Truman Washington Dailey Truman Washington Dailey, (October 19, 1898 – December 16, 1996) also known as Mashi Manyi ("Soaring High") and Sunge Hka ("White Horse"), was the last native speaker of the Otoe-Missouria dialect of Chiwere (Baxoje-Jiwere-Nyut'achi), a ...
(Otoe-Missoura, 1898–1996), the last fully fluent native speaker


Notes


References

*GoodTracks, Jimm G. (2010). ''Iowa, Otoe-Missouria Language Dictionary: English / Báxoje-Jiwére-Ñútˀačhi ~ Maʔúŋke''. (Revised Edition). Center for the Study of the Languages of the Plains and Southwest. *GoodTracks, Jimm G. (2007). ''Iowa, Otoe-Missouria Language Dictionary: English / Báxoje-Jiwére-Ñútˀačhi ~ Maʔúŋke''. (Revised Edition). Center for the Study of the Languages of the Plains and Southwest. *GoodTracks, Jimm G. (2002). Ioway-Otoe Verb Composition: Elements of the Verb and Conjugations. (Revised Edition). Ioway Cultural Institute. *Whitman, William. (1947). "Descriptive Grammar of Ioway-Oto." ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', 13 (4): 233-248. *Wistrand-Robinson, Lila, et al. (1977). ''Jiwele-Baxoje Wan'shige Ukenye Ich'e Otoe-Iowa Indian Language – Book I''. Jiwele Baxoje Language Project.


External links


Ioway-Otoe-Missouria Language WebsiteIoway-Otoe Verb Composition
Native-Languages.org

translated from English by Earl Plumley.
Otoe-Missouria Language Department
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chiwere Language Iowa tribe Otoe Endangered Siouan-Catawban languages Indigenous languages of Oklahoma Native American language revitalization Endangered languages of the United States Western Siouan languages