View source for Wiktionary:About Proto-Algonquian

<!--{{policy-TT}}-->
{{shortcut|WT:AALG|WT:AALG-PRO}}

Proto-Algonquian (PA) is the ancestor of all the Algonquian languages. Their relatedness and descent from a common source was recognised early on; a decade before [[w:William Jones (philologist)#Scholarly_contributions|William Jones' famous "philologer" speech on Proto-Indo-European]], native Mohegan speaker Jonathan Edwards reported to the Connecticut Society of Arts and Sciences on the Algonquian "language [family that] is spoken by all the Indians throughout New England. Every tribe, as that of Stockbridge, that of Farmington, that of New London, &c. has a different dialect [i.e. language], but the language [family] is [[radically]] the same."<ref name="Campbell AIL">Lyle Campbell, ''American Indian Languages''</ref> Proto-Algonquian is now one of the best-studied, most thoroughly-reconstructed proto-languages.<ref name="Goddard 1979">Ives Goddard, ''Comparative Algonquian'' (1979)</ref><ref name="Campbell HLAI">Lyle Campbell ''Historical Linguistics: An Introduction'' (2004)</ref>

Proto-Algonquian was spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago<ref name="Goddard 1978">Ives Goddard, ''Central Algonquian Languages'', in ''Trigger'' (1978), volume 15 of the ''Handbook of North American Indians''</ref> somewhere around the Great Lakes. It descends, like the languages [[Wiyot]] and [[Yurok]], from Proto-Algic.

==Vowels==
Proto-Algonquian had four basic vowels, which could be either long or short:
:long: *i·, *e·, *a·, *o·
:short: *i, *e, *a, *o

The same inventory of eight vowels was found in Proto-Algic, but Proto-Algonquian did not inherit its inventory directly from Proto-Algic. Rather, several sound changes left pre-Proto-Algonquian without short *''i'' and *''o'', and they only later redeveloped,<ref name="Proulx 2004">{{R:Proulx 2004 vowels}}</ref> apparently as the result of morphophonological shortening. They are thought to be of no great antiquity as independent phonemes within Proto-Algonquian; nonetheless, they are used in reconstructions.<ref name="Goddard 1979"/><ref name="Berman 1982">Howard Berman, ''Two Phonological Innovations in Ritwan'' (1982)</ref>

==Consonants==
Proto-Algonquian had a slightly smaller number of consonants than Proto-Algic.

{| class="wikitable"
|+Proto-Algonquian consonant phonemes
|-
! colspan=2|
! align="center"|[[w:Labial consonant|labial]]
! align="center"|[[w:Alveolar consonant|alveolar]]
! align="center"|[[w:Postalveolar consonant|postalveolar]]/<br>[[w:Palatal consonant|palatal]]
! align="center"|[[w:Velar consonant|velar]]
! align="center"|[[w:Glottal consonant|glottal]]
|-
! colspan=2|[[w:Stop consonant|stop / plosive]]
| align="center"|'''p'''
| align="center"|'''t'''
| align="center"|'''č''' /tʃ/ <sup>1</sup>
| align="center"|'''k'''
| align="center"|'''ʔ''' <sup>2</sup>
|-
! rowspan=2|[[w:Fricative consonant|fricative]]
! central
|
| align="center"|'''s'''
| align="center"|'''š''' /ʃ/
| align="center"|
| align="center"|'''h'''
|-
! possibly [[w:Lateral consonant|lateral]]
|
| align="center"|'''θ''' or '''ɬ''' <sup>3</sup>
|
|
|
|-
! rowspan=3|[[w:Sonorant consonant|sonorant]]
! [[w:Nasal stop|nasal]]
| align="center"|'''m'''
| align="center"|'''n'''
|
|
|
|-
! [[w:Lateral consonant|lateral]] or [[w:Rhotic consonant|rhotic]]
|
| align="center"|'''l''' or '''r''' <sup>4</sup>
|
|
|
|-
! [[w:Semivowel|semivowel]]
| align="center"|'''w'''
|
| align="center"|'''y''' /j/
|
|
|}

:<sup>1</sup> Whether ''č'' was an independent phoneme or merely an allophone of ''t'' before ''i'' is disputed.<ref name="Goddard 1994">Ives Goddard, ''A New Look for Algonquian'' (1994)</ref> The evidence for its phonemicity is very weak; ''t'' is only found before ''i'' in some reconstructions of the single questionable, possibly onomatopoeic word {{m|alg-pro|*ti·nti·wa}}, and ''č'' is only found elsewhere in the (also possibly onomatopoetic) word {{m|alg-pro|*čapo·nk-}} and in clusters.
:<sup>2</sup> The nature of this phoneme is not certain, but it probably was indeed /ʔ/.<ref name="Goddard 1979"/><ref name="Thomason 2006">Lucy Thomason, ''Proto-Algonkian Phonology and Morpho-Syntax'' (2006), in the ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 10, second edition''</ref>
:<sup>3</sup> The nature of this phoneme is not certain; it was most likely /θ/ or /ɬ/. Following Bloomfield, many authors have written ''θ'', but Picard argues and Blevins and Garrett agree that it was more likely /ɬ/, and Proulx reconstructs both it and its Proto-Algic [[antecedent]] as ''ɬ''. In daughter languages, it has several reflexes, including ''θ'', ''t'', ''l'' or ''n'', and ''s''.<ref>Marc Picard, in ''Principles and Methods in Historical Phonology: From Proto-Algonkian to Arapaho'' (1994), argues that an original /ɬ/ shifting to /θ/ in some daughter languages (and /θ/ shifting to /t/) and to /l/ in other daughter languages (and /l/ shifting to /n/) is more plausible than an original /θ/ shifting straight to /t/ in some daughter languages but via an unpreserved /ɬ/ to /l/ and then to /n/ in other languages. J. Blevins and A. Garrett, in ''The rise and fall of l sandhi in California Algic'' (2007), say they "find the argument for [ɬ] more convincing than does Goddard (1994); the fricative [ɬ] differs in both manner and voicing from the approximant [l], and a [ɬ] interpretation of PA *θ is consistent with the conclusion (from their behavior in mutation contexts) that PA *l and *θ ‘differed in some feature in addition to voicing’ (Goddard 1994:205)."</ref>
:<sup>4</sup> Bloomfield reconstructed this phoneme as ''l'', but Goddard argues it is more likely ''r''.

Reconstructing Proto-Algonquian's consonant clusters is difficult because their evolution in different child languages has been complex. In addition to the consonants above, two consonants of uncertain identity can be found in clusters before ''p'' and ''k''. Bloomfield and some scholars after him have arbitrarily used the symbols ''x'' and ''ç'' to represent them (the consonants are not /x/ and /ç/). Goddard believes that Bloomfield's ''x'' can be reconstructed as ''s'' and that Bloomfield's ''ç'' is the non-nasal alveolar sonorant (which is either ''l'' or ''r'', as described above).

==See also==
* [[Wiktionary:About Proto-Algic]]

==References==
<references/>

[[Category:Wiktionary language considerations|Proto-Algonquian]]
[[Category:Proto-Algonquian language]]