Table Of ContentThe Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique
•Y
Translated and Retranscribed by
John Hewson and Bernard Francis
Memoir 7
ALGONQUIAN AND IROQUOIAN LINGUISTICS
NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE
THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY
TRENT UNIVERSITY
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The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique
The Micmac Grammar of Father Pacifique
Translated and Retranscribed by
John Hewson and Bernard Francis
Memoir 7
ALGONQUIAN AND IROQUOIAN LINGUISTICS
ALGONQUIAN AND IROQUOLAN LINGUISTICS
John D. Nichols, Editor
H.C. Wolfart, Associate Editor (Supplements)
Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics
Fletcher Argue Building
28 Trueman Walk
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2
Copyright (C) 1990
Note: No royalties are paid either to the translators or the editors.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Pacifique, pere, 1863-1943.
The Micmac grammar of Father Pacifique
(Algonquian and Iroquoian linguistics. Memoir ; 7)
Translation of: Lemons grammaticales theoriques et
pratiques de la langue micmaque.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-921064-07-1
I. Micmac language - Grammar. I. Hewson, John, 1930-
II. Francis, Bernard, 1948- . III. Title. IV. Series.
PM1792.P313 1990 497’.3 C90-097217-3
Preface of the Editors
The Lecons grammaticales th6oriques et pratiques de la language
micmaque of Rev. Father Pacifique, ofmcap, published in 1939, is a vast
and important collection of information on the Micmac language. It represents
a tradition of Micmac grammatical studies by missionary priests that spans
200 years from the days of Father Maillard, who died in 1762, to Father
Pacifique, who, although he intended his grammar to be a guide to other
priests who wanted to learn the language, seems to have been the last
priest to speak the language fluently.
Father Pacifique's important study is now unfortunately out of
print. Those Micmacs who own a copy also find it difficult to use because
their second language is normally English. And because of the "abbreviated"
alphabet (as Fr. Pacifique calls it, p.l) that was used, it is next to
impossible to tell how words are to be pronounced. What was needed,
therefore, was a translation with a complete retranscription of the
Micmac words into an accurate orthography. Such an enterprise would give
Fr. Pacifique's work a wide audience, which would include not only the
Micmac people themselves, but also students, researchers and others
interested in the Micmac language.
The enterprise of translating Lecons grammaticales was first undertaken
by James Fidelholtz at about the time when he was preparing his doctoral
thesis entitled Micmac morphophonemics (1968). We were able to obtain a
copy of this manuscript, but it was obvious for several reasons that a
totally new translation and transcription was needed. The translator's
very solid knowledge of French was not adequate for handling some of the
idiomatic usage in the text, and almost every Micmac word needed either
adjustment or complete retranscription. Fidelholtz, for example, had
made certain minimal adjustments to the orthography used by Pacifique,
but had otherwise followed the original faithfully. The original normally
fails to mark vowel length, and also uses the spelling e not only for mid
front vowels, but also for schwa, and adds it to the spelling of the
syllabic sonorants, so that one cannot tell from the spelling el., for
example, whether one should pronounce [1], [el], or [e'l].
Fr. Pacifique's grammatical forms represent an older form of the
language, which has undergone considerable reshaping in the modern dialects.
It is clear that Fr. Pacifique also incorporated words from his predecessors,
items that are no longer known even to the older speakers of the present
day, but may be found in the grammar of Father Maillard, written in the
1740's. Occasionally, therefore, there are items of specialized vocabulary
in the text whose exact phonetic shape is not necessarily absolutely
certain. As far as the grammatical forms are concerned, we have taken
care to report the older usage as reported by Fr. Pacifique, even though
it is no longer in use. The whole question of the historical differences
of usage will be discussed in the grammar of the modern language that we
are now preparing.
We thought at first that the early section on sounds should be left
out, because of the inconsistency and incoherence in some of the detail.
ii
Since this section contains some valuable lexical commentary, however, we
decided to keep it, but the reader must be warned that at times the
examples used do not coherently match the text because items spelled in
the under-differentiated orthography used by Fr. Pacifique may no longer
be appropriate when they are spelled exactly: long vowels are given as
illustrations of short vowels, and so on.
The purpose of using the new orthography is of course to give the
reader who does not know the language exact information on the pronunciation
of each Micmac word. This was not an important goal for Fr. Pacifique, since
he recommends that the pronunciation should be obtained from a native
speaker. Now that the language has been lost on many reserves, so that
native speakers are not as available as they were, it has become crucially
important to use the new exact orthography, so that the written word can
be used to convey as much information as possible on the accepted pronun¬
ciations .
We may take almost any word from Fr. Pacifique's original text to
illustrate the kind of transcription that had to be done. When he writes
oigo£g (1939:220), for example, we write wi'kue'k. a spelling which adds
four items of detail. It indicates (1) that the initial element (spelled
o) is not a vowel, is non-syllabic; (2) that the vowel of the initial syllable
is long; (3) that the fourth element (also spelled o) is syllabic, but is
[u] not [o]; and (4) that the final vowel is long. When one appreciates
that Fr. Pacifique's o can be syllabic or non-syllabic, and can represent
the vowels o and oJ_ as well as u and u' . it is obvious that one cannot learn
pronunciations from such spellings.
Notes on the New Orthography
In the early 1970's the Nova Scotia Micmac Chiefs instructed Doug
Smith and Bernard Francis to develop a suitable orthography for the
Micmac language that would be useful for teaching the language. It is
this orthography, that uses a separate letter for each distinctive sound
that has been used in the retranscription.
Micmac has five long vowels, spelled aj_, e' . i' . o' . u' . five corres¬
ponding short vowels a, e, i., o, u, and a schwa represented thus: i.
Micmac also has eleven consonants, written as follows: p>, t, k, £,
kw, X, s, 1, m, n. Of these £, £w, are post velars, the latter with
labialization, and j_ is a simple affricate as in English church when unvoiced,
or English iudge when voiced.
The sonorants 1, m, n, may be either syllabic or non-syllabic; they
are always syllabic when they follow obstruents in the same word, so that
atlasmit s/he rests has five syllables [a-dl-a-zm-it], and kmtn hill is
[km-dn]. When the sonorants 1, m, n, are unpredictably syllabic they are
spelled V_, ml, n/_, being longer than their non-syllabic alternants.
