A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

preferred to write the full form igo as adjoined, e.g. boochigo, rather than separated as in
booch igo. 8 The reason for this stems from the fact that a minimal word in Ojibwe is
bimoraic. In other words, the shortest content words in Ojibwe must be words consisting
of either two short vowels such as ashi ‘put him/her there’, or a word consisting of one
long vowel such as miizh ‘give it to him/her’ (see also Hayes 1995:217 for a similar
analysis for Eastern Ojibwa). 9 In the case of igo, its distribution (a full accounting of
which is beyond the scope of this thesis) appears to suggest that igo is its full form, and
its clitic form is the phonologically reduced go. While it may be tempting to analyze the
initial segment on igo as epenthetic i, this appears to be negated by the fact that go may
appear on words ending in a consonant without a connective vowel, such as in wiin-go
ogii-ayaan aw gwiiwizens ge-miijid ‘the boy always had something to eat’. This suggests
that the initial segment on igo is not epenthetic i and that igo, when it occurs, is indeed
the full form. Such a practice will also be extended to discourse markers which have full
forms and clitic forms.
There are times when traditional convention takes precedence over the practice of
using hypens to connect clitics to their host words. For example, in the case where the
particle mii combines with the contrastive particle idash to get miish ‘and then’, strict
8
William Jones, a Fox Indian and a native speaker of Fox, who transcribed many Ojibwe stories in the
early 1900s often adjoined what may be analyzed as clitics to their host words. Here are some random
examples from his transcriptions followed by the convention I use in parentheses: mīsa' (mii-sa), mīdạc
(mii-dash, although the convention has been to leave separated as mii dash), migu (mii-go), and one not
involving mii: cigwasa (zhigwa-sa). See Jones 1919 for further investigation. I have to admit though that
my hyphen usage may not be entirely consistent as aesthetics also play a role in my decision making about
hyphen usage. For example, if adherence to my convention for hypens would result in what I see as an
unattractive expression , such as in mii-sa-go namaj ‘I have no idea’, I usually minimalize the number of
hyphens which occur, preferring instead mii-sago namanj. Note that the traditional method would leave all
elements separated as mii sa go namanj. In short, the general orthographical conventions for written
Ojibwe are far from standard.
9
Function words, such as the Ojibwe demonstratives, may occur as mono-moraic however, but they are
truncations of bimoraic words, e.g. aw from a’aw ‘that (animate)’ and iw from i'iw ‘that (inanimate)’, and
many times may cliticize to their head nouns, e.g. i-mashkiki ‘that medicine’ from full form i'iw mashkiki.
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