Talk:zhaaganaashiimowin

Moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification

zhaaganaashimowin

Highly suspect. SemperBlotto 08:24, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

• Found here, but not as the "forward version of". It does, in fact, seem to be the Ojibwe word for English [1]. —Dvortygirl 09:02, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
  • I’m pretty certain it’s correct, and it means 'English language' (the "forward version of" as a definition was not serious). The question is whether it should be capitalized. Written Ojibwe hasn’t been subject to the same academic oversight that we have for English, and I think capitalization is often ignored or applied carelessly. I have moved this entry to Zhaaganaashimowin because I believe it’s supposed to be capitalized, but I hesitate to label it a proper noun. —Stephen 10:30, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

In the Ojibwe language, there are no such rules regarding capitalisation. However, it is very common practise to find proper names of people and places capitalised in middle of a sentence and all words beginnining a sentence to be capitalised. Otherwise, Ojibwe words are not capitalised. "Zhaaganaashiimowin" beginning a sentence would be capitalised, but "zhaaganaashiimowin" in the middle of a sentence would not. See John D. Nichols and Earl Nyholm, A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995. CJLippert 18:20, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

"Ojibwe" experiences a similar situation. The English word "Ojibwe" is always capitalised since it always refer to the group of people. The ojibwemowin word "ojibwe" as a verb is never capitalised unless at the beginning a word while the noun is always captalised as "Ojibwe" because it is always a proper noun. CJLippert 18:26, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn’t this apply to anishinaabe as well then? I have only seen zhaaganaash/zhaaganaashiwag with little 'z'. Another bit of confusion I encounter is the matter of hyphenation ... sometimes I see hyphens used in some words, but other times not. For instance, in the names of the months or days of the week. —Stephen 09:24, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Again, if these were English words, they would be written "Anishinaabe(g)" and "Zhaaganaashi(wag)"/"Zhaaganash(ag)". In Ojibwe, the default is no capitalisation, but it is common practise to capitalise the first word of each sentence and proper name of peoples and places. This means that the group of people the Anishinaabe calls "zhaaganaash" are the English (or the English-descent) while "Zhaaganaash" is a given name, possibly the Ojibwe translation for a guy named Scott. For place names, "oshki-oodena" might be describing any new town but "Oshki-oodena" describes Brainerd, Minnesota, or Bayfield, Wisconsin.

Like capitalisation, the rules for hyphenation do not exist. The general rule of thumb, though, is not to use hyphens unless you are separating the pre-verbs from the rest of the word elements. Consequently, if you break a long word in the middle the word and a hyphen is not there, a double-hyphen "=" is used... so you end up with a German-like use of puncutation in Ojibwe, if you're using Fiero Romanisation. Otherwise, in syllabics, the only punctuation mark is the "᙮" (full stop), though it is common for folks these days to use periods, commas, hyphens, question marks and all other punctuation marks. Depending on the syllabic-using community, if the individual uses non-Ojibwe punctuation marks, some use guillemet (« ») while other use the same quotation marks as in English (“ ”).

This then brings up the next slippery slope. For the diminutive, "zhaaganaashens" is the smaller version of "zhaaganaash" while "zhaaganaashiins" is the smaller version of "zhaaganaashi", but though "zhaaganaash" and "zhaaganaashi" are used identically, "zhaaganaashens" and "zhaaganaashiins" are not. I have seen "Zhaaganaashens" to be a person's name "Little Englishman" in treaty documents, but an English boy or an Englishman of a short stature is called "zhaaganaashiins." Another example is zhiishiib and pull up the "edit" tab and examine the hidden remarks regarding /zhiishiib/ vs. /zhiishiiby/. CJLippert 13:22, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

The page has been moved to "zhaaganaashiimowin" (with lc. "z" and with "ii"). Please check out the test pages for zhiishii, zhiishiib and zhiishiigwe. If they seem fine, we could apply the similar format to "zhaaganaashiimowin" as well. Otherwise, feedback at either the zhiishii or Wiktionary talk:About Algonquian languages would be very helpful. Miigwech. CJLippert 19:05, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

amusing note

When it says "Moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification", above... it means Wiktionary:Requests for verification itself was literally moved here. - -sche (discuss) 03:50, 24 March 2012 (UTC)