Like many North American languages, Ojibwe is polysynthetic, meaning it exhibits a great deal of synthesis and a very high morpheme-to-word ratio (e.g., the single word for "they are Chinese" is aniibiishaabookewininiiwiwag, which contains six morphemes: leaf-liquid-make-man-be-PLURAL, or approximately "they are leaf-drink [i.e., tea] makers").
Like most Algonquian languages, Ojibwe distinguishes two different kinds of third person, a proximate and an obviative.
In other words, Ojibwe uses the obviative to avoid the confusion that could be created by English sentences such as "John and Bill were good friends, ever since the day he first saw him" (who saw whom?).
Objects with great spiritual importance for the Ojibwe, such as rocks, are very often animate rather than inanimate, for example.
There are seven Ojibwe inflectional categories expressing person/gender combinations for each of the two numbers (singular and plural).
Characteristics of the resulting 14 persons are built into Ojibwe nouns and pronouns, thus dictating which verb forms would be used in speech.
However, among Saulteaux communities, the first person prefix nim- and nin- are instead reduced to ni-, nind- to nid- and nindo- to nido-.
These are the main classes: Verbs mark tenses with prefixes (a'-, aorist past, gii'-, simple past, ga(d)- and da-, future, and wii'-, desiderative future), but also can take a myriad of affixes known as "preverbs", which convey a great amount of additional information about an action.
"), the delayed imperative, used to indicate that the action should be completely eventually, but not immediately (nibaakan!, "Sleep (in a little bit)!
All verbs can also be marked for four "modes:" indicative (neutral), dubitative (the speaker is unsure about the validity of what they are saying, for example: bakade, "he is hungry," but bakadedog, "he must be hungry; he could be hungry"), preterit (which emphasizes that the action occurred in the past, and is also used to refer to attempted or intended but uncompleted actions, for example: imaa ninamadab, "I'm sitting there," but imaa ninamadabiban, "I was sitting there; I meant to sit there"), or preterit-dubitative (which expresses doubt about a past action: imaa namadabigoban, "she must have sat there; she could have sat there").
Note that unlike VAI verbs, VII do not have imperatives: Passives in intransitives can be expressed by using the INVERSE marker igw, which may undergo a minor structural modification.
Some examples of verb final containing the INVERSE marker igw are: Ojibwe, as with other Algonquian languages, also exhibits a direct–inverse system, in which transitive verbs are marked for whether or not the direction of the action follows a "topicality hierarchy" of the language.
[16] Ojibwe has no case distinctions among agent, patient and experiencer theta roles, so in a transitive verb with two participants, the only way to distinguish subject from object is through direct/inverse/goal suffixes.
"As can be seen, the only difference between these two verbs is the direct–inverse opposition, rather than case markers (or word order, when distinct nominals are used).
"To illustrate this, a generic VTA and VTI paradigm table, arranged by person hierarchy, is shown below.
The table depicts only the paradigm for Independent Order, Positive Voice, Neutral Mode.
ALQ : AlgonquinCIW : Southwestern OjibweOJB : Northwestern OjibweOJC : Central Ojibwe OJG : Eastern OjibweOJS : Severn OjibweOJW : SaulteauxOTW : Odaawaa BLK : Border Lake OjibwePAR : Parry Island Eastern OjibwePIC : Pic River Central OjibweWAL : Walpole Island Eastern OjibwePOT : Potawatomi language Ojibwe language is rich in its use of preverbs, which is a prefix that comes before verbs, nouns, and particles, to provide an additional layer of meaning.
Other suffixes are: pejorative (e.g., jiimaan, "canoe", jiimaanish, "worthless canoe"), diminutive (e.g., zhooniyaa, "money", zhooniyaans, "coin"), contemptive (e.g., odaabaan, "car", odaabaanenh, "just some old car"), preterit (which marks a deceased or no-longer existent person or object, e.g. nookomis, "my grandmother", nookomisiban, "my late grandmother"), and preterit-dubitative (which marks a deceased or no-longer existent person or object which was never known by the speaker, e.g. a'aw mindimooyenh, "that old woman", a'aw mindimooyenyigoban, "that late old woman I never knew").
Though each class of verbs may have their own participle-forming patterns, for simplicity, only the VAI neutral mode, positive participles are shown in the example, again, using nibaa ("sleep").
Contemptives are formed in a similar fashion as diminutives and are used to express negative or depreciative attitude the speaker may have of the noun.
When contemptive suffix is added for terms of endearment, any other d, t, z and s in the word are changed to j, ch, zh and sh respectively.
For other persons or number, again using the possessive theme -m as an example, the word is conjugated as following: 1 In the Algonquin, the plural suffix remains as -an/-ag, rather than becoming -in/-ig.
7 Historically Pejoratives, marked with the -sh suffix, generally indicates a stronger negative feelings a speaker may have than that of the contemptive.
In Northwestern Ojibwe dialect when the pejorative suffix ish is added, any other d, t, z and s in the word are changed to j, ch, zh and sh respectively.
Other particles may be interjections like these: The short initial vowel may be omitted typically in excited speech.
However, in some words beginning in dan-, dazh-, das-, dash- or daa- instead take on the prefix en- to form endan-, endazh-, endas-, endash- or endaa-.
Words typically conveying repetitive actions have their very first syllable experience reduplication.
Vowel syncope process Eastern Ojibwe and Odaawaa experiences happen after the word has gone through reduplication.
As Ojibwe is highly synthetic, word order and sentence structure is relatively free, since a great deal of information is already encoded onto the verb.
Ojibwe tends to prefer a VS order (verb–subject) when subjects are specified with separate nominals or pronouns (e.g., bakade a'aw asabikeshiinh, be.hungry that.there.ANIMATE net.make.PEJORATIVE.CONTEMPTIVE, "that spider is hungry").