Part 3: 2 years-3 years In the previous post from this series, I provided an overview of Seenseewia’s and my learning up to her second birthday. There was a lot going on in that time span, and it all happened fairly quickly. This post will cover ages 2 to 3. The changes we experienced during…
Tag: Myaamiaataweenki
wiiyaakiteeheelo weehki-kihkatwe ‘Happy (Gregorian) New Year!’
In the next few days, we’ll be celebrating the Gregorian New Year! While this is the most commonly celebrated calendar new year around the world, it is also not the only one. For Myaamiaki, our year is based on the lunar calendar which reflects the cycles of the moon. This puts our lunar new year…
hohowa pyaaci ‘Santa is coming’
For most of us, the holidays are a time to relax in the good company of family and friends! Many children are also eagerly awaiting a visit from Santa Claus which means it’s a perfect time to introduce the phrase hohowa pyaaci! ‘Santa is coming!’ Since Santa says “hohoho!” so much we figured that was…
The Four Verb Types of Myaamiaataweenki
In today’s post we’re talking about the different types of verbs in Myaamiaataweenki. This may seem a little odd because in English we only have one type and we just call them ‘verbs’. Myaamia, however, has four different types. The reason for that is because the language uses verbs in more scenarios and in more…
iši neepwaamici nintaana ‘what my daughter has taught me’ Part 2
Part 2: 11 months – 2 years In my last post, I wrote about the first year of teaching and learning about Myaamiaataweenki with nintaana ‘my daughter’ Seenseewia. In this post, I want to cover what happened from the end of that post (when she was about 11 months old) to just before her second…
Why are Myaamia words so long?
When I’m teaching in the community I often get the question, “why are Myaamia words so long?” So, what is it that makes them so different from English? Why are they longer? Let’s dig into Myaamiaataweenki and find out. When we think about English words and how they turn into sentences it normally goes like…
Animacy In Action
For this second blog post on animacy we will talk more about how it works when actually using the language. It’s important to recognize that animacy is very complicated to describe and understand as a concept. As a matter of fact, linguists have struggled for a long time to explain it so don’t feel bad…
An Introduction to Myaamia Nouns and Animacy
This post introduces a unique feature of Myaamia nouns known in linguistics as animacy. This system is used to separate nouns into two categories: animate and inanimate. Every noun we have falls into one or the other and that gets represented by the last letter of the word. For animate nouns the word ends in…
weehki kaloosioni: waapicahkihkwa ‘New Word: shaker cans’
Normally, this time of year we would have had our Annual Winter Gathering filled with lots of socializing, fun, games and one of our big events of the year, stomp dance. Stomp dance is a common intertribal dance that has been around for a very long time and is still a big part of the…
Aacimotaatiiyankwi 