Potawatomi

Introduction

Potawatomi is a Central Algonquian language and is spoken around the Great Lakes in Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as in Kansas in the United States, and in southern Ontario in Canada. There is currently an effort underway to revive the language.

The alphabet

Though no standard orthography has been agreed upon by the Potawatomi communities, the system most commonly used is the "Pedagogical System" developed by the Wisconsin Native American Languages Program. As the name suggests, this writing system was designed to be used in language teaching. The system is alphabetic (based on the Roman Alphabet), and is phonemic, with each letter or digraph representing a contrastive sound. The letters used are: a b ch d e é g h ' i j k m n o p s sh t w y z zh.

The Verb

The usual way to express who is doing what in Potawatomi is to inflect the verb by adding prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes come before the word (pre means "before", think preview, precursor, predated). Suffixes come at the end of a word. Instead of using whole words to show who the subject is, Potawatomi modifies the word with a letter or letters in front of the word (prefix), and a letter or letters at the end of the word (suffix).

Sample verb: maji to leave

	Present	Past	Future
Sg.1	nde-maji	ngi-maji	nwi-maji
Sg.2	gde-maji	ggi-maji	wwi-maji
Sg.3	maji	gi-maji	wi-maji
Pl.1 (exlusive)	nde-maji-men	ngi-maji-men	nwi-maji-men
Pl.1 (inclusive)	gde-maji-men	ggi-maji-men	gwi-maji-men
Pl.2	gde-maji-m	ggi-maji-m	gwi-maji-m
Pl.3	majik	gi-majik	wi-majik

Verblist

• zhenkazo