User:Jomeara421/GLakes

Odawa (and Eastern Ojibwa) are characterized by a pervasive pattern of vowel Syncope, by which short vowels are either reduced to schwa /ə/ or completely deleted when they appear in certain metrically defined Weak syllables, discussed below. Syncope sharply distinguishes Odawa and Eastern Ojibwa from other dialects of Ojibwe, although related patterns of syncope primarily affecting word-initial syllables have also been recorded for Ojibwe communities along the north shore of Lake Superior, between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie.

Syncope has had far reaching effects in Odawa, resulting in significant changes in the pronunciation and representation of words, prefixes, and suffixes, and increasing the distinctiveness of Odawa relative to other dialects of Ojibwe. Syncope has also resulted in the introduction of new forms for person prefixes on nouns and verbs, and the deletion of vowels between consonants has resulted in new secondary consonant sequences, which in some cases results in further adjustments in the pronunciation of consonants sequences.

The Potawatomi language also has rules that affect short vowels, reducing them to schwa /ə/ and also deleting them under conditions similar to Odawa. The Potawatomi phenomena were recorded as early as the 1830s, whereas Odawa material from the same period do not show any signs of vowel reduction or deletion.<Goddard, Ives, 1978, p. 584 The rise of extensive Syncope in Odawa may be a substratum effect related to the migration of Potawatomi speakers to Odawa-speaking communities in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century.

The patterns of syncope are not new in Ottawa, and are attested in the Ottawa material that Leonard Bloomfield recorded in the late 1930s from Andrew Medler, an Ottawa speaker originally from Michigan who spent most of his life at Walpole Island. Although reduction and syncope effects in Walpole Island Ottawa were noted in Bloomfield (1958), and treated by him as vowel reduction, the situation was not identical in all Ottawa materials collected in approximately the same period. Material collected by Leonard Bloomfield in 1941 from Odawa speaker Angeline Williams, then residing at Sugar Island, Michigan, east of Sault Ste. Marie show no sign of Syncope. Williams was born at Manistique, Michigan in 1872 As well, material collected by C. F. Voegelin from Odawa speaker Gregor McGregor of Birch Island, Ontario (immediately north of Manitoulin Island) shows only a very limited amount of Syncope. McGregor was born in 1869.

Syncope is also sociolinguistically complex in terms of the way it is realized by different speakers of Odawa, as several distinct patterns have been noted. Rhodes (1976) notes that for older speakers, in particular at Manitoulin Island, deletion of short vowels is “…a kind of casual speech phenomenona, and the vowels can be easily resupplied (with only some ambiguity of quality).” By comparison, for younger speakers and for older speakers elsewhere, such as the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, deletion of short vowels is categorical.


 * Nichols, John D. and Leonard Bloomfield, eds. 1991. The dog’s children. Anishinaabe texts told by Angeline Williams. Winnipeg: Publications of the Algonquian Text Society, University of Manitoba. ISBN 0-88755-148-3


 * McGregor, Gregor with C. F. Voegelin. 1988. “Birch Island Texts.” Edited by Leonard Bloomfield and John D. Nichols. John Nichols, ed., ''An Ojibwe text anthology, pp. 107-194. London: The Centre for Teaching and Research of Canadian Native Languages, University of Western Ontario. ISBN 0-7714-1046-8