Potawatomi Language Blog

(They Will Learn To Teach)
Language Teacher Training

The Hannahville Indian Community has recently learned that we are the recipient of another three-year federal language grant award from the ACF Administration for Native Americans (ANA). Out of more than 350 applicants this year, only 10 or 11 language projects were funded. We are fortunate that this new grant follows on the heels of our three-year ANA Digital Connections language grant. Now we can move ahead with the new grant to fill a gap in school and community language programs by providing much needed training for Potawatomi language instructors.

The purpose of the new grant is to establish Project Ewikkendaswat Ekenomagewat, a language teacher training initiative. This multi-level language teacher training project will provide current and prospective Potawatomi instructors with essential language teaching skills and hands-on classroom experiences to help create productive and engaging language learning environments in our K-12 tribal school. Companion language content sessions in grammar comprehension and language immersion sessions is intended to help increase conversational fluency and promote authentic classroom lessons. While the primary objective is to provide essential teacher training for language instructors, the project’s overall purpose is to assure successful transmission of the Potawatomi language to students in our tribal school and ultimately throughout the entire community.

Objectives for the three-year Project Ewikkendaswat Ekenomagewat include:

• Years 1, 2 and 3 - A multi-level teacher training project will be launched with learning content areas focused upon (a) understanding essential educational psychology and effective classroom strategies, (b) grammar comprehension, (c) language immersion learning and experience during the nine-month school year, and (d) three weeks of language immersion training sessions during each summer throughout the grant period.
• Years 2 and 3 - Inter-generational events will be organized with culture-based language immersion activities to increase active participation of community members of all ages in productive language learning experiences, and to provide teacher training participants a practical hands-on forum in which to practice, showcase and celebrate emergent language teaching skills.

Community Members who would like to Learn the Language as well as to Learn How to Teach the Language are encouraged to participate in this three-year teacher training project. Trained Potawatomi Language Instructors are urgently needed for teaching in our Tribal School in the coming years. Now is the perfect time for you to plan for a new career! Certificates of Successful Completion will be awarded at the end of the three-year period. Individuals who work within the community may be able to use education hours to attend the full-day class sessions twice a month during the school year.

Contact us today to register for the Language Teacher Training Project! Call 723-2270 for more information or stop into the Potawatomi Heritage Center. Registrations will be accepted during the months of November and December 2009.

Playing “Go Fish” is a fun way to practice numbers with your friends and family. Here is how…

You need a deck of cards and the following vocabulary…

ngot - this is an ace, it’s worth 1 point
nish - 2
nswe - 3
nyew - 4
nyanen - 5
ngotwatso - 6
noek - 7
shwatso - 8
shak - 9
mdatso - 10
jack - say jack (or gigabe) - it’s worth 10 points
queen - say queen ( or kwe) - it’s worth 10 points
king - say king (or nene) - it’s worth 10 points

play like normal but instead of saying “do you have a 2″ for example, you would say…

Nish ne gde-ton? - do you have a 2?

they can say “ehe” for yes or “ttho” for no. Also, say…

Gwedemotthgen! - Go fish!

Gwedemotthge - he/she is fishing
By adding the “n” to the end, we turned the verb into a command.

Deal out 7 or 8 cards. Spread the remaining cards in the center of the table. Lay down pairs whenever you get them. Go around the table asking for cards from one person. If someone tells you “Gwedemotthgen!” you must draw a card. The game ends when someone has no cards left. Everyone adds up the cards that they laid down and subtracts the points of the cards left in their hand.

Other vocab -

nin ashtek - my turn
gin ashtek - your turn
win ashtek - his/her turn

ttho - no
ttho wi - no (stronger)
ttho wi shena! - no (really strong)

If you want to be a smarty pants and you know someone has a particular card you can say…

mishen i nish! - Give me the 2!

Have fun!

On January 25th, 2010, we will again be offering Potawatomi courses for adult students. Community and Tribal members are strongly encouraged to join us. There is no fee, but the classes can be intensive, so be prepared to work and study!

Potawatomi Basics Part 1
This is an 18 week course that covers the basics of Potawatomi grammar. This is our beginner course that covers one topic per week on subjects such as nouns, pronouns, verbs and other grammitically structured themes. The course features stories and discussions and uses writing assignments and quizzes to assess students.

Potawatomi Basics Part 2
This course is the second part of our Potawatomi Basics courses. We strongly recommend that you attend the first course before taking this one. This course covers one topic per week on subjects such as verb conjugation, possession, and the infamous “conjunct”.

If you would like to participate in either course, please sign up with a user account on our online course system and then send an email to Eric Janofski, ejanofski@potawatomilanguage.org, to let me know of your interest.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Language Instructor Skills Training

 
Twelve participants have registered for the new ANA Potawatomi Language Instructor Skills Training at the Heritage Center. The group met for Orientation on January 8th. There is still time, however, for community members to register for this three-year instructor training. If you would like to Learn the Language as well as to Learn How to Teach the Language, please stop in to register. Trained Potawatomi Language Instructors are urgently needed for teaching in our Tribal School and to facilitate adult language learning groups in the coming years. Now is the perfect time for you to plan for a new career! This training is funded through a grant from the Administration for Native Americans. Call 723-2270 for information.

Our site now features an online Potawatomi Dictionary with over 7000 Potawatomi words and phrases. To access the dictionary, click on the “Dictionary” button in the main navigation area near the top of our site.

Recently we were given two spreadsheets of words by fluent speaker  Jim Thunder Sr. of Forest County and linguist Laura Buszard-Welcher. We were able to collate these words into one database that will be used to store these and more words to come.

Our dictionary also features conjugated verbs. You can access these words by selected “Conjugated Verbs” at the top of the dictionary. This section is a step forward in our attempt to demystify conjugated verbs. This section is still a work in progress and there may be errors, but we are sure you will find value from having these lists as you try to write and speak sentences.

There is still a lot of work left to do with the dictionary. We hope to go through the words and remove duplicates, upload audio clips, and add other features as well.

Hopefully these new features will serve as a powerful tool for learning the language.

Migwetth.

Nah Tah Wahsh Hannahville Indian School begins another year of school and the Language, Culture and History Departments is gearing up for another productive year.

The Potawatomi Basics Part 1 course began on Sept. 8th and we have a good mixture of adult students from across the nation.

We hope to be adding new resources to the website soon as well as filling out the resources that currently exist with much more content. This year is already starting off in a postive and productive direction.

Migwetth to all who are endeavering to learn their language.

Bama pi

Up until recently we were using the Potawatomi word “wishpemishgos” for sweetgrass. We were corrected by fluent speaker Jim Thunder. He let us know that the corect word is “wishgbemishgos”.

We will be making the change wherever the word appears on our website.

Migwetth,
Eric

It took some hairpulling days, but we have our online course system updated and hopefully this will remove some of the bugs that students have been experiencing.

The Potawatomi Basics class is winding down and will be over soon. It will be starting again in the fall, so if anyone is interested in joining, please send me an email and I will put you on the roster.

Migwetth,
eric
ejanofski@potawatomilanguage.org

This is an older post that was deleted accidentally. I was able to recover it, so I posted it here.

Possessing things in Potawatomi can be very simple. We simply add a prefix and sometimes a suffix to a noun very much like conjugating verbs. The good thing is, The prefixes are the same as the ones used for verbs. The following examples are the simplest way to do possession in Potawatomi.

Short Form

wigwam — house

nwigwam — my house

gwigwam — your house

Notice how the “n” made it “my” house and the “g” made it “your” house. This is like short form conjugation of verbs.

Long Form

mkesen — shoe

nde-mkesen — my shoe

gde-mkesen — your shoe

Above we used the long form prefixes, just like we do when conjugating verbs.

There are suffixes that can be added and other variations of these prefixes and suffixes that can be used to indicate who possesses something, but here is possession in its simplest form. It’s nice to see how consistent the language is. Once you grasp how to inflect words in this language, that knowledge will take you a long way.

This is an older post that was accedentally deleted. I recovered it and reposted it here.

I just came across a few things in my notes from a conversation I had with fluent speaker Jim Thunder. Hopefully this information is helpful. Jim says that there is a preference to use the short form conjugation with the verb Maji and the long form conjugation with the verb Zhye. Let’s take a look at these verbs, but first I’d like to explain what short and long form conjugation is.

Conjugation

Verbs conjugate. That means that they change their spelling depending on who is doing what. This happens in English:

I have

you have

she has

You can see here that the verb “have” conjugates. It changes from “have” to “has”. This is a natural part of speach that you don’t even notice, but if someone said it wrong, you most certainly would notice…

she have a dog.

That doesn’t sound right does it.

Let’s conjugate a Potawatomi word…

nmaji — I’m leaving

gmaji — you are leaving

wmaji — he/she is leaving

We add the N, G, and W out front to indicate who is doing the leaving.

Short Form

When you only add an N, G or W, it is called short form.

The short form is preferred with the verb Maji.

Long Form

Long form conjugation is very similar to the short form. Instead of just the N, G or W out front, we have Nde, Gde or Wde out front. The “de” is simply indicating that the action is happening right now (present tense).

With the verb Zhye, the long form is preferred…

nde-zhya — I’m going

gde-zhya — you are going

wde-zhye — he/she is going

So, to wrap it up, you can conjugate verbs with the short form (n, g and w prefixes) or long form (nde, gde and wde prefixes). They both mean the same thing even though they look a bit different.

With maji, use the short form

With zhye, use the long form.

For more information about verb conjugation, check out our video lectures at http://www.potawatomilanguage.org/videos.