The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique PDF
Preview The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique
The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique •Y Translated and Retranscribed by John Hewson and Bernard Francis Memoir 7 ALGONQUIAN AND IROQUOIAN LINGUISTICS NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/micmacgrammaroffOOOOpaci The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique Translated and Retranscribed by John Hewson and Bernard Francis Memoir 7 ALGONQUIAN AND IROQUOIAN LINGUISTICS ALGONQUIAN AND IROQUOLAN LINGUISTICS John D. Nichols, Editor H.C. Wolfart, Associate Editor (Supplements) Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics Fletcher Argue Building 28 Trueman Walk Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2 Copyright (C) 1990 Note: No royalties are paid either to the translators or the editors. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Pacifique, pere, 1863-1943. The Micmac grammar of Father Pacifique (Algonquian and Iroquoian linguistics. Memoir ; 7) Translation of: Lemons grammaticales theoriques et pratiques de la langue micmaque. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-921064-07-1 I. Micmac language - Grammar. I. Hewson, John, 1930- II. Francis, Bernard, 1948- . III. Title. IV. Series. PM1792.P313 1990 497’.3 C90-097217-3 Preface of the Editors The Lecons grammaticales th6oriques et pratiques de la language micmaque of Rev. Father Pacifique, ofmcap, published in 1939, is a vast and important collection of information on the Micmac language. It represents a tradition of Micmac grammatical studies by missionary priests that spans 200 years from the days of Father Maillard, who died in 1762, to Father Pacifique, who, although he intended his grammar to be a guide to other priests who wanted to learn the language, seems to have been the last priest to speak the language fluently. Father Pacifique's important study is now unfortunately out of print. Those Micmacs who own a copy also find it difficult to use because their second language is normally English. And because of the "abbreviated" alphabet (as Fr. Pacifique calls it, p.l) that was used, it is next to impossible to tell how words are to be pronounced. What was needed, therefore, was a translation with a complete retranscription of the Micmac words into an accurate orthography. Such an enterprise would give Fr. Pacifique's work a wide audience, which would include not only the Micmac people themselves, but also students, researchers and others interested in the Micmac language. The enterprise of translating Lecons grammaticales was first undertaken by James Fidelholtz at about the time when he was preparing his doctoral thesis entitled Micmac morphophonemics (1968). We were able to obtain a copy of this manuscript, but it was obvious for several reasons that a totally new translation and transcription was needed. The translator's very solid knowledge of French was not adequate for handling some of the idiomatic usage in the text, and almost every Micmac word needed either adjustment or complete retranscription. Fidelholtz, for example, had made certain minimal adjustments to the orthography used by Pacifique, but had otherwise followed the original faithfully. The original normally fails to mark vowel length, and also uses the spelling e not only for mid front vowels, but also for schwa, and adds it to the spelling of the syllabic sonorants, so that one cannot tell from the spelling el., for example, whether one should pronounce [1], [el], or [e'l]. Fr. Pacifique's grammatical forms represent an older form of the language, which has undergone considerable reshaping in the modern dialects. It is clear that Fr. Pacifique also incorporated words from his predecessors, items that are no longer known even to the older speakers of the present day, but may be found in the grammar of Father Maillard, written in the 1740's. Occasionally, therefore, there are items of specialized vocabulary in the text whose exact phonetic shape is not necessarily absolutely certain. As far as the grammatical forms are concerned, we have taken care to report the older usage as reported by Fr. Pacifique, even though it is no longer in use. The whole question of the historical differences of usage will be discussed in the grammar of the modern language that we are now preparing. We thought at first that the early section on sounds should be left out, because of the inconsistency and incoherence in some of the detail. ii Since this section contains some valuable lexical commentary, however, we decided to keep it, but the reader must be warned that at times the examples used do not coherently match the text because items spelled in the under-differentiated orthography used by Fr. Pacifique may no longer be appropriate when they are spelled exactly: long vowels are given as illustrations of short vowels, and so on. The purpose of using the new orthography is of course to give the reader who does not know the language exact information on the pronunciation of each Micmac word. This was not an important goal for Fr. Pacifique, since he recommends that the pronunciation should be obtained from a native speaker. Now that the language has been lost on many reserves, so that native speakers are not as available as they were, it has become crucially important to use the new exact orthography, so that the written word can be used to convey as much information as possible on the accepted pronun¬ ciations . We may take almost any word from Fr. Pacifique's original text to illustrate the kind of transcription that had to be done. When he writes oigo£g (1939:220), for example, we write wi'kue'k. a spelling which adds four items of detail. It indicates (1) that the initial element (spelled o) is not a vowel, is non-syllabic; (2) that the vowel of the initial syllable is long; (3) that the fourth element (also spelled o) is syllabic, but is [u] not [o]; and (4) that the final vowel is long. When one appreciates that Fr. Pacifique's o can be syllabic or non-syllabic, and can represent the vowels o and oJ_ as well as u and u' . it is obvious that one cannot learn pronunciations from such spellings. Notes on the New Orthography In the early 1970's the Nova Scotia Micmac Chiefs instructed Doug Smith and Bernard Francis to develop a suitable orthography for the Micmac language that would be useful for teaching the language. It is this orthography, that uses a separate letter for each distinctive sound that has been used in the retranscription. Micmac has five long vowels, spelled aj_, e' . i' . o' . u' . five corres¬ ponding short vowels a, e, i., o, u, and a schwa represented thus: i. Micmac also has eleven consonants, written as follows: p>, t, k, £, kw, X, s, 1, m, n. Of these £, £w, are post velars, the latter with labialization, and j_ is a simple affricate as in English church when unvoiced, or English iudge when voiced. The sonorants 1, m, n, may be either syllabic or non-syllabic; they are always syllabic when they follow obstruents in the same word, so that atlasmit s/he rests has five syllables [a-dl-a-zm-it], and kmtn hill is [km-dn]. When the sonorants 1, m, n, are unpredictably syllabic they are spelled V_, ml, n/_, being longer than their non-syllabic alternants.
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