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72-501: The word Abegweit is derived from the Mi'kmaq word Abahquit , meaning "lying parallel with the land", or Epegweit , "lying in the water". It is often loosely translated as meaning "cradled on the waves." 46°11′N 63°43′W  /  46.183°N 63.717°W  / 46.183; -63.717 This Prince Edward Island location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This New Brunswick location article

144-407: A decimal numeral system . Every multiple-digit number is formed by using one of the first nine numerals as a prefix or a preceding word, as seen in the number for ten, neꞌwtisgaq , a combination of the prefix neꞌwt - (derived from newt ) and the root isgaꞌq , meaning ten (the pattern can be seen in tapuisgaꞌq for 20, nesisgaꞌq for 30, etc.) While 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 all use

216-595: A degree of endangerment level of vulnerable under the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger scale. A level of vulnerable means the language may not be used consistently and instead the dominant language English is opted for. This also means it is still somewhat commonly spoken by younger generations or children of Mi'kmaq people. A lack of fluent Mi'kmaq speakers is due to the cultural genocide performed by

288-618: A classifying system of animate versus inanimate words . The animacy system in general is common, but the specifics of Miꞌkmaq's system differ even from closely related Algic languages. For instance, in Wampanoag, the word for 'Sun', cone , is inanimate, but the word for 'Earth', ahkee , is animate, a fact used by some scholars to claim that the Wampanoag people were aware of the Earth's rotation around an unmoving Sun; however, in Miꞌkmaq, both

360-402: A desired scansion . Due to the presence of grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, and in some cases or dialects vocative and locative) applied to nouns, pronouns and adjectives, Albanian permits a large variety of word order combinations. In the spoken language, an alternative word order to the most common S-V-O helps the speaker to emphasise a word and hence make

432-476: A general word order can be identified, but this is much harder in others. When the word order is free, different choices of word order can be used to help identify the theme and the rheme . Word order in Hungarian sentences can change according to the speaker's communicative intentions. Hungarian word order is not free in the sense that it must reflect the information structure of the sentence, distinguishing

504-499: A grammatically comprehensible sentence, but nonetheless archaic. There are some verbs, however, that are entirely acceptable in this format: This is acceptable to a modern English speaker and is not considered archaic. This is due to the verb "to be", which acts as both auxiliary and main verb. Similarly, other auxiliary and modal verbs allow for VSO word order ("Must he perish?"). Non-auxiliary and non-modal verbs require insertion of an auxiliary to conform to modern usage ("Did he buy

576-504: A means to emphasize a constituent in an independent clause by moving it to the beginning of the sentence. This is a defining characteristic of German as a V2 (verb-second) language, where, in independent clauses, the finite verb always comes second and is preceded by one and only one constituent. In closed questions, V1 (verb-first) word order is used. And lastly, dependent clauses use verb-final word order. However, German cannot be called an SVO language since no actual constraints are imposed on

648-664: A member of the Eskasoni First Nation , recorded a cover version of the Beatles song " Blackbird " in the language to raise awareness and help in its revitalization efforts. Miꞌkmaq is one of the Algic languages , a family that once spanned from a small portion of California across Central Canada , the Midwestern United States , and the northeastern coast of North America. Within this family, Miꞌkmaq

720-487: A nuanced change to the meaning. For example: In these examples, " (mua) " can be omitted when not in first position, causing a perceivable change in emphasis; the latter being of different intensity. " Më " is always followed by the verb. Thus, a sentence consisting of a subject, a verb and two objects (a direct and an indirect one), can be expressed in six ways without " mua ", and in twenty-four ways with " mua ", adding up to thirty possible combinations. O'odham

792-474: A preferred or basic word order, with other word orders considered " marked ". Constituent word order is defined in terms of a finite verb (V) in combination with two arguments, namely the subject (S), and object (O). Subject and object are here understood to be nouns , since pronouns often tend to display different word order properties. Thus, a transitive sentence has six logically possible basic word orders: These are all possible word orders for

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864-410: A schwa preceding the cluster; for instance, gtaꞌn is pronounced /ək.taːn/ while mgumi is pronounced /əm.ku.mi/ . On the other hand, word-final clusters, such as in asige tg ('instigate') are pronounced over a single syllable: compare the pronunciation of asigetg , /a.si.ketk/ , with mestꞌg ('taste'), /mes.tək/ . Miꞌkmaq uses free word order, based on emphasis rather than

936-677: A sentence is usually the topic, which may under certain conditions be marked by the particle " to " (तो / تو), similar in some respects to Japanese topic marker は (wa). Some rules governing the position of words in a sentence are as follows: Some of all the possible word order permutations of the sentence " The girl received a gift from the boy on her birthday ." are shown below. In Portuguese, clitic pronouns and commas allow many different orders: Braces ( { } ) are used above to indicate omitted subject pronouns, which may be implicit in Portuguese. Because of conjugation ,

1008-598: A shift in a language's syntax, this is called syntactic change . An example of this is found in Old English, which at one point had flexible word order, before losing it over the course of its evolution. In Old English, both of the following sentences would be considered grammatically correct: This flexibility continues into early Middle English, where it seems to drop out of usage. Shakespeare's plays use OV word order frequently, as can be seen from this example: A modern speaker of English would possibly recognise this as

1080-402: A single word containing a prefix, the tens between 60 and 90 use the numeral as a preceding word to a separate word meaning ten, teꞌsisgaꞌq : for instance, 60 is written as asꞌgom teꞌsisgaꞌq . Numbers between the tens are stated by multiple-word phrases, beginning with the ten-based root number, such as neꞌwtisgaq , followed by jel (meaning 'and' or 'also') and ending with one of

1152-410: A statistical bias for SO order (or OS order in ergative systems; however, ergative systems do not always extend to the highest levels of animacy, sometimes giving way to an accusative system (see split ergativity ). Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders, such as Polish , Hungarian , Spanish , Latin , Albanian , and O'odham . In some languages,

1224-400: A tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject. The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: The vast majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V, however, has been shown to be

1296-433: A traditionally fixed order of subjects, objects and verbs. For instance, the sentence "I saw a moose standing right there on the hill" could be stated " sapmiꞌk ala nemaqtꞌk na tett tia'm kaqamit " (I saw him/there/on the hill/right-there/ a moose /he was standing) or " sapmiꞌk ala tia'm nemaqtꞌk na tett kaqamit " (I saw him/there/ a moose /on the hill/right-there/he was standing); the latter sentence puts emphasis on

1368-420: A very small number of adjectives that go after the heads, such as extraordinaire , which kept its position when borrowed from French.) Russian places numerals after nouns to express approximation (шесть домов= six houses , домов шесть= circa six houses ). Some languages do not have a fixed word order and often use a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments. However,

1440-403: A very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders. In many languages, standard word order can be subverted in order to form questions or as a means of emphasis. In languages such as O'odham and Hungarian, which are discussed below, almost all possible permutations of a sentence are grammatical, but not all of them are used. In languages such as English and German, word order

1512-584: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Mi%27kmaq language The Mi'kmaq language ( / ˈ m ɪ ɡ m ɑː / MIG -mah ), or Miꞌkmawiꞌsimk , is an Eastern Algonquian language spoken by nearly 11,000 Mi'kmaq in Canada and the United States ; the total ethnic Mi'kmaq population is roughly 20,000. The native name of the language is Lnuismk , Miꞌkmawiꞌsimk or Miꞌkmwei (in some dialects). The word Miꞌkmaq

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1584-503: Is a language that is spoken in southern Arizona and Northern Sonora, Mexico. It has free word order, with only the auxiliary bound to one spot . Here is an example in literal translation: Those examples are all grammatically valid variations on the sentence "The cowboy is branding the calves," but some are rarely found in natural speech, as is discussed in Grammaticality. Languages change over time. When language change involves

1656-605: Is a plural word meaning 'my friends' (singular miꞌkm ); the adjectival form is Miꞌkmaw . The phonemic inventory of Mi'kmaq is shown below. The sounds of Mi'kmaq can be divided into two groups: obstruents ( /p, t, k, kʷ, t͡ʃ, s, x, xʷ/ ) and sonorants ( /m, n, w, l, j/ and all vowels). The obstruents have a wide variety of pronunciations. When they are located word-initially or next to another obstruent, they are voiceless [p, t, k, kʷ, t͡ʃ, s, x, xʷ] . However, when they are located between sonorants, they are voiced , and appear as [b, d, ɡ, ɡʷ, d͡ʒ, z, ɣ, ɣʷ] . When

1728-423: Is also given in the table below; this orthography is more complex than the table suggests, particularly as far as vowel quantity and quality is concerned, employing various letters such as ⟨ a ⟩, ⟨ à ⟩, ⟨ɛ⟩ , ⟨ɛ́⟩ , ⟨ɯ⟩ , ⟨ɯ́⟩ , ⟨ɹ̇⟩ , ⟨ɹ́⟩ , ⟨ơ⟩ , ⟨ u ⟩, etc. Miꞌkmaq uses

1800-409: Is an echo question ; it would be uttered only after receiving an unsatisfactory or confusing answer to a question. One could replace the word wen [whom] (which indicates that this sentence is a question) with an identifier such as Mark : 'Kate liebt Mark ?' [Kate loves Mark ?]. In that case, since no change in word order occurs, it is only by means of stress and tone that we are able to identify

1872-482: Is common. For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture) . On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has

1944-479: Is essentially a verb-final (SOV) language, with relatively free word order since in most cases postpositions explicitly mark the relationships of noun phrases to the other sentence constituents. Word order in Hindustani does not usually encode grammatical functions. Constituents can be scrambled to express different information structural configurations, or for stylistic reasons. The first syntactic constituent in

2016-406: Is found that previously given information ( topic ) tends to precede new information ( comment ). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have

2088-423: Is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking , agreement , or another marker . Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian . Observing discourse patterns, it

2160-483: Is largely free and dependent on context. Mi'kmaq verbs are also marked for tense. Nouns in Mi'kmaq are either animate or inanimate . This is a common feature among Algonquian languages . The verbs change depending on the noun's animacy. For example: Nemitu – 'I see (inanimate noun)' Nemi'k – 'I see (animate noun)' Miꞌkmaq is written using a number of Latin alphabets based on ones devised by missionaries in

2232-530: Is part of the Eastern Algonquian subgroup spoken largely along the Atlantic coast. It is closely related to several extant languages, such as Malecite-Passamaquoddy , Massachusett and Munsee as well as extinct languages like Abenaki and Unami . Beyond having a similar language background and sharing close geographic proximity, the Miꞌkmaq notably held an alliance with four other tribes within

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2304-652: Is somewhat disputed in the community, as the languages where it occurs have one of the dominant word orders but every word order type is grammatically correct. The table below displays the word order surveyed by Dryer . The 2005 study surveyed 1228 languages, and the updated 2013 study investigated 1377 languages. Percentage was not reported in his studies. Hammarström (2016) calculated the constituent orders of 5252 languages in two ways. His first method, counting languages directly, yielded results similar to Dryer's studies, indicating both SOV and SVO have almost equal distribution. However, when stratified by language families ,

2376-575: Is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is both the most frequent and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses. Cases like this can be addressed by encoding transitive and intransitive clauses separately, with

2448-712: Is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language . Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest. The primary word orders that are of interest are Some languages use relatively fixed word order, often relying on the order of constituents to convey grammatical information. Other languages—often those that convey grammatical information through inflection —allow more flexible word order, which can be used to encode pragmatic information, such as topicalisation or focus. However, even languages with flexible word order have

2520-458: Is used as a means of turning declarative into interrogative sentences: A: 'Wen liebt Kate?' / 'Kate liebt wen ?' [Whom does Kate love? / Kate loves whom ?] (OVS/SVO) B: 'Sie liebt Mark' / 'Mark ist der, den sie liebt' [She loves Mark / It is Mark whom she loves.] (SVO/OSV) C: 'Liebt Kate Mark?' [Does Kate love Mark?] (VSO) In ( A ), the first sentence shows the word order used for wh-questions in English and German. The second sentence

2592-440: Is written as taꞌpu pituimtlnaqn . The exceptions to that pattern are the numbers 100 and 1,000, which are simply the roots gasgꞌptnnaqan and pituimtlnaqn , respectively. Similarly to digits between the tens, the connecting word jel is used between hundreds and tens, or thousands and hundreds: for example, the number 3,452 is written as siꞌst pituimtlnaqn jel neꞌw gasgꞌptnnaqan jel naꞌnisgaq jel taꞌpu . On top of

2664-421: The grammatical person is recovered. In Classical Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations. Latin lacks articles. The subject, verb, and object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often (especially in subordinate clauses) the verb comes last. Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining

2736-462: The sentence structure is highly flexible and reflects the pragmatics of the utterance. However, also in languages of this kind there is usually a pragmatically neutral constituent order that is most commonly encountered in each language. Topic-prominent languages organize sentences to emphasize their topic–comment structure. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin and Turkish, SOV

2808-645: The 19th century. Previously, the language was written in Miꞌkmaq hieroglyphic writing , a script of partially native origin. The Francis-Smith orthography used here was developed in 1974 and was adopted as the official orthography of the Míkmaq Nation in 1980. It is the most widely used orthography and is that used by Nova Scotian Mikmaq and by the Míkmaq Grand Council. It is quite similar to the "Lexicon" orthography, differing from it only in its use of

2880-564: The Canadian government through the introduction of the Canadian Indian residential school system . These schools under the notation of assimilation, forced Indigenous children to reject their cultural identity and language. These schools resulted in a significant number of children physically and mentally abused and without the means to speak their mother tongue. Wagmatcook, Cape Breton, is undergoing significant efforts to revitalize

2952-600: The Eastern Algonquian language group known as the Wabanaki Confederacy : in short, a history of long-term language contact has existed between Miꞌkmaq and its close linguistic relatives. Miꞌkmaq has many similarities with its fellow Eastern Algonquian languages, including multiple word cognates: for instance, compare the Miꞌkmaq word for 'woman', eꞌpit , to the Maliseet ehpit [æpit] , or

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3024-553: The English words caribou and toboggan are borrowings from Miꞌkmaq. The name caribou was probably derived from the Miꞌkmaq word xalibu or Qalipu meaning 'the one who paws'. Marc Lescarbot in his publication in French in 1610 used the term caribou . Silas Tertius Rand translated the Miꞌkmaq word Kaleboo as 'caribou' in his Miꞌkmaq-English dictionary (Rand 1888:98). The aforementioned use of hieroglyphic writing in pre-colonial Miꞌkmaq society shows that Miꞌkmaq

3096-779: The Miꞌkmaq language, due to the Acadians and Miꞌkmaq living together prior to the Expulsion of the Acadians and the British colonization of Acadia ; in French-speaking areas, traces of Miꞌkmaq can also be found largely in geographical names within regions historically that were occupied by the Miꞌkmaq people, including Quebec and several towns in Nova Scotia such as Antigonish and Shubenacadie . Moreover, several Miꞌkmaq words have made their way into colonizing languages:

3168-431: The action (verb) itself, as seen in sentences 1, 6 and 7, or it can be on parts other than the action (verb), as seen in sentences 2, 3, 4 and 5. If the emphasis is not on the verb, and the verb has a co-verb (in the above example 'meg'), then the co-verb is separated from the verb, and always follows the verb. Also the enclitic -t marks the direct object: 'torta' (cake) + '-t' -> 'tortát'. Hindi - Urdu ( Hindustani )

3240-655: The backseat of the car speaking Miꞌkmaq and they're excited", said the Miꞌkmaq language instructor at Lnu Siꞌpuk Kinaꞌmuokuom Miꞌkmaq school in Indian Brook . Miꞌkmaq language courses are mandatory from grades Primary to 12 at the school, which only opened six years ago. Evening classes are starting as of Oct. 2013. Also as of 2013, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia 's Miꞌkmaq Burial Grounds Research and Restoration Association has about forty students in its Miꞌkmaq language revitalization classes, and Miꞌkmaq greetings are becoming more common in public places. In 2021, Emma Stevens,

3312-491: The basic structure, numbers in Miꞌkmaq must agree with the animacy of whatever they are counting: for instance, when speaking of two people, taꞌpusijik is used, as opposed to the number used for two days, taꞌpugnaꞌq . The suffix -ijik to denote the counting of animate subjects and the suffix -gnaꞌq to denote the counting of inanimate subjects are common, but animacy-marking suffixes are somewhat fluid and vary by number and dialect. The Mi'kmaq language possesses

3384-577: The book?"). Shakespeare's usage of word order is not indicative of English at the time, which had dropped OV order at least a century before. This variation between archaic and modern can also be shown in the change between VSO to SVO in Coptic , the language of the Christian Church in Egypt. There are some languages which have different preferred word orders in different dialects. One such case

3456-512: The degree of marking alone does not indicate whether a language uses a fixed or free word order: some languages may use a fixed order even when they provide a high degree of marking, while others (such as some varieties of Datooga ) may combine a free order with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments. Typologically, there is a trend that high-animacy actors are more likely to be topical than low-animacy undergoers; this trend can come through even in languages with free word order, giving

3528-423: The development of an Algonquian–Basque pidgin with a strong Miꞌkmaq imprint, which was recorded to be still in use in the early 18th century. A 2012 book, by the Miꞌkmaq linguist Bernie Francis and anthropologist Trudy Sable, The Language of this Land, Miꞌkmaꞌki, "examines the relationship between Miꞌkmaq language and landscape." Word order In linguistics , word order (also known as linear order )

3600-510: The distribution showed that the majority of the families had SOV structure, meaning that a small number of families contain SVO structure. Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents . This works because speech

3672-482: The echo question in ( A ) simply by restating: Mark! . This is the same for both languages. In yes–no questions such as ( C ), English and German use subject-verb inversion . But, whereas English relies on do-support to form questions from verbs other than auxiliaries, German has no such restriction and uses inversion to form questions, even from lexical verbs. Despite this, English, as opposed to German, has very strict word order. In German, word order can be used as

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3744-406: The emphatic part that carries new information (rheme) from the rest of the sentence that carries little or no new information (theme). The position of focus in a Hungarian sentence is immediately before the verb, that is, nothing can separate the emphatic part of the sentence from the verb. For "Kate ate a piece of cake ", the possibilities are: The only freedom in Hungarian word order is that

3816-401: The language. The community created a variety of children's books suited for a range of ages to develop Mi'kmaq language skills as children mature. The use of Mi'kmaq immersion schools in this area also increased the proficiency in the language for children and an improved attachment to their Indigenous identity. The immersion schools allowed children to learn their mother tongue, which increases

3888-403: The moose by placing tia'm ('moose') earlier in the utterance. Miꞌkmaq, as a polysynthetic language , has verbs which usually contain the sentence's subject and object: for instance, the aforementioned sapmiꞌk translates to 'I saw him'. While it is thus difficult to classify Miꞌkmaq under traditional word order categories such as SVO or SOV, a more fixed aspect in the language comes in

3960-425: The morphology of its verbs. Certain areas of internal morphology of verbs in Miꞌkmaq have regular placement: for instance, when the aspect of a verb is included, it appears as the first prefix, while the negative marker always appears directly after the verb root. An example for both of these instances can be seen in the Miꞌkmaq verb kisipawnatqaꞌtiꞌw ( kisi-paw-natq-aꞌti-w ), translated as 'they cannot get out':

4032-438: The nine numerals: for instance, the number 28 is constructed as tapuisgaꞌq jel ugumuljin , or literally 'twenty and eight'. For numbers beyond 99, Miꞌkmaq uses a pattern similar to that of 60 to 99, with numeral words preceding separate roots that identify higher numbers (such as gasgꞌptnnaqan , meaning 'hundred', or pituimtlnaqn meaning 'thousand'); for instance, 300 is written as siꞌst gasgꞌptnnaqan , while 2,000

4104-824: The noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before and/or after the head noun . Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions ( in London ), postpositions ( London in ), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides) either separately ( For whom? or Whom for? ) or at the same time ( from her away ; Dutch example: met hem mee meaning together with him ). There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions . VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions . For SVO languages, either order

4176-534: The number of fluent speakers while still obtaining the dominant language. Community member educators also participated in a program to obtain a Certificate in Aboriginal Literacy Education that increased their fluency in the language. Cape Breton University 's Unamaꞌki College specializes "in Miꞌkmaq history, culture and education". As of 2013, "it has some 250 aboriginal students". "Parents come to me and say they hear their children in

4248-425: The order of parts outside the focus position and the verb may be freely changed without any change to the communicative focus of the sentence, as seen in sentences 2 and 3 as well as in sentences 6 and 7 above. These pairs of sentences have the same information structure, expressing the same communicative intention of the speaker, because the part immediately preceding the verb is left unchanged. The emphasis can be on

4320-478: The order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question: Latin prose often follows the word order "Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Adverb, Verb", but this is more of a guideline than a rule. Adjectives in most cases go before the noun they modify, but some categories, such as those that determine or specify (e.g. Via Appia "Appian Way"), usually follow the noun. In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve

4392-420: The placement of the subject and object(s), even though a preference for a certain word-order over others can be observed (such as putting the subject after the finite verb in independent clauses unless it already precedes the verb ). The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause . Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within

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4464-968: The plosives and affricate are located word-finally, they may be aspirated and appear as [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, kʷʰ, tʃʰ] . An example of each kind of pronunciation is given below. Miꞌkmaq distinguishes between long and short vowels and consonants, the latter indicated in Listuguj by doubling the consonant. Beyond expanding in length, long consonants add a schwa when they precede other consonants. For instance, compare /en.mitk/ , written in Listuguj as e n mitg ('flow away') with /en.nə.mit/ , written in Listuguj as e nn mit ('stick into'); or, /tox.tʃu.pi.la.wek/ , written in Listuguj as toqjuꞌpila w eg ('hoist'), with /ke.si.kaw.wek/ , written in Listuguj as gesiga ww eg ('loud'). Listuguj orthography occasionally begins words with consonant clusters, as in gt aꞌn ('ocean') and mg umi ('ice'). However, such clusters are pronounced over separate syllables, with

4536-456: The prefix kisi marks the verb as being in the completive aspect, whereas the negative marker, w , appears directly after the verb root aꞌti ('the two move'). However, these solidly placed elements of verbs are paired with markers that can appear throughout the word, depending again on emphasis; animacy in particular can appear fluidly throughout verbs. In short, while a few specific aspects of Miꞌkmaq can be predicted, its syntax in general

4608-415: The rather uncommon VOS word order. However, they are ergative–absolutive languages , and the more specific word order is intransitive VS, transitive VOA, where the S and O arguments both trigger the same type of agreement on the verb. Indeed, many languages that some thought had a VOS word order turn out to be ergative like Mayan. Every language falls under one of the six word order types; the unfixed type

4680-477: The sentence as a question. In ( B ), the first sentence is declarative and provides an answer to the first question in ( A ). The second sentence emphasizes that Kate does indeed love Mark , and not whomever else we might have assumed her to love. However, a sentence this verbose is unlikely to occur in everyday speech (or even in written language), be it in English or in German. Instead, one would most likely answer

4752-490: The straight apostrophe ⟨ꞌ⟩ or acute accent ⟨´⟩ instead of the colon ⟨:⟩ to mark vowel length. When the Francis-Smith orthography was first developed, the straight apostrophe (often called a "tick") was the designated symbol for vowel length, but since software applications incorrectly autocorrected the tick to a curly apostrophe, a secondary means of indicating vowel length

4824-607: The subject, object, and verb in the order of most common to rarest (the examples use "she" as the subject, "loves" as the verb, and "him" as the object): Sometimes patterns are more complex: some Germanic languages have SOV in subordinate clauses, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO. Many synthetic languages such as Latin , Greek , Persian , Romanian , Assyrian , Assamese , Russian , Turkish , Korean , Japanese , Finnish , Arabic and Basque have no strict word order; rather,

4896-434: The symbol "S" being restricted to the argument of an intransitive clause, and "A" for the actor/agent of a transitive clause. ("O" for object may be replaced with "P" for "patient" as well.) Thus, Russian is fixed AVO but flexible SV/VS. In such an approach, the description of word order extends more easily to languages that do not meet the criteria in the preceding section. For example, Mayan languages have been described with

4968-731: The varying related words for the color 'white': wapeꞌt in Miꞌkmaq, wapi [wapi] in Maliseet, waapii [wapi] in Munsee, wôbi [wɔ̃bɪ] in Abenaki and wòpe [wɔpe] in Unami. Even outside of the Eastern Algonquian subgroup, there exist similar cognates within the larger Algic family, such as the Cree wāpiskāw [wɔ:bɪska:w] and the Miami-Illinois waapi [wa:pi] . Like many Native American languages, Miꞌkmaq uses

5040-401: The word for 'Sun', naꞌguꞌset , and the word for 'Earth', ugsꞌtqamu , are animate, and parallel cultural knowledge regarding astronomy cannot be gleaned through the language. Much like grammatical gender , the core concept of animacy is shared across similar languages while the exact connotations animacy has within Miꞌkmaq are unique. Many Acadian French and Chiac words are rooted in

5112-621: Was formally accepted, the acute accent. The barred-i ⟨ɨ⟩ for schwa is sometimes replaced by the more common circumflex-i ⟨î⟩ . In Listuguj orthography, an apostrophe marks long vowels as well as schwa, and the letter ⟨g⟩ is used instead of the letter ⟨k⟩ . The 19th-century Pacifique orthography omits ⟨w⟩ and ⟨y⟩ , using ⟨o⟩ and ⟨i⟩ for these. It also ignores vowel length. The 19th-century orthography of Silas Tertius Rand , using characters from Isaac Pitman 's Phonotypic Alphabet ,

5184-510: Was one of the few Native American languages to have a writing system before European contact. Linguist Peter Bakker identified two Basque loanwords in Miꞌkmaq, presumably because of extensive trade contact between Basque sailors and Native Americans in the 16th century. The overall friendly exchanges starting in mid-16th century between the Miꞌkmaqs and the Basque whalers provided the basis for

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