Re: Animacy in Sohlob

From:    Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
> But this means that I have to decide what is animate!  Just
> humans (*if* the speakers are human, which I haven't decided)
> and animals is too bland and too scientific for my taste.
> Other candidate categories for animacy are:
>
> -- Spirits and gods (naturally).
> -- Heavenly bodies (these are gods to the speakers!)
> -- Fire.
> -- Water.
> -- Weather phenomena.
> -- Metals (the only more odd category that has suggested itself to me.)
>
> Can anyone suggest more possibly animate categories, preferably with
> explanation why they would be considered animate?
Meskwaki (like other Algonquian languages) has grammatical gender
distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns. For the most part,
gender is predictable:  human beings, animals, and spirits fall into
the animate category, while objects and abstractions fall into the
inanimate category, with the latter serving as the elsewhere-category.
However:

-- most nouns denoting body parts are inanimate, but some are
   animate: 'feather', 'blood clot', 'horn, braid', 'kidney'
   are all animate.  There is a tendency for body-parts higher
   up on the body to be animate.
-- any ritual objects, or anything remotely connected to ritual
   discourse, is likely to become grammatically animate: 'drum',
   'tobacco', 'pipe', 'red ochre', 'sacred story', 'kettle with
   lid', 'sacred bundle' are all unexpectedly animate.
-- nouns for plants are mostly inanimate (e.g. ahte:himini
   'strawberry'), but some are animate (e.g. wi:tawi:ha 'raspberry')
-- some manufactured items are animate (mehte:ha 'bow'), others
   are inanimate (ma:tesi 'knife')
-- skins of large animals are inanimate, while skins of small
   animals are animate. [sic]
-- the words for 'doll' (ni:ca:pa) and 'corpse, ghost' (ci:paya)
   are both animate.

So, there is much room for manipulation of the class of animates.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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