Talk:Menominee language

To do to improve

1. Classification: its relationship to other Algonquian languages; similarities to other languages and unique features
2. Short example of grammar
3. Vocabulary discussion
4. Orthography
5. Sample text

Please cross off these items as they are incorporated into the article. Thanks. CJLippert 19:07, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Menominee language. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130901010045/http://www.menominee.edu/ to http://www.menominee.edu/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 11:39, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Claims About Syllabification and Stress are Suspect

The claim under Syllable Structure and Stress that “syllables do not end in vowels” is extremely fishy.

While there are many languages that don’t allow closed syllables, there is none known that completely dissallows all open syllables, with one debated exception, which is Arrernte. Some linguists claim that Arrernte not only disallows open syllables, but that is disallows onsets too, thus turning known linguistic universals on their head. These claims are controversial, however, and other linguists argue that Arrernte can be analyzed according to standard models. If Menominee truly allows only closed syllables surely it would have been noticed by linguists by now and have taken its place alongside Arrernte as a second exemption to the rules.

Beyond that, words taken from this very article like weːkewam ‘house’, waːwan ‘egg’, metɛːmoh ‘woman’, nenaq ‘we’, kemeːwan ‘it is raining’ seem to contain open syllables, unless they actually are supposed to be syllabified as weːk.ew.am, waːw.an, met.ɛːm.oh, nen.aq, and kem.eːw.an respectively. Is this actually how it is claimed that they are divided? If so, it shows the same sort of avoidance of onsets as that claimed for Arrernte, if not a complete avoidance like that claimed for Arrerente. Further, if the ua in the words kenuaq ‘you (pl.)’ and wenuaq ‘they’ truly is a diphthong, then should those words not be syllabified as ke.nuaq and we.nuaq, otherwise what real difference is there between their u component and the Menominee w?

Furthermore it’s claimed that stress occurs on every long vowel or diphthong that is in the next-to-last (“penultimate”) syllable of a word, so then what if a word contains no long vowel nor diphthong? Which syllable receives the stress then? I asked Google A.I. this morning on which syllable the Menominee word Sāpīwǣhekaneh received its stress, and was told that it was on the penultimate, but which syllable contains no long vowel nor diphthong, so apparently Menominee words are always stressed on the penultimate syllable regardless of length, and so we have to wonder why mention of long vowels and diphthongs is relevant at all. ~2026-52297-91 (talk) 21:08, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Google Gemini doesn't know anything. Asking it questions is like shaking a Magic 8 Ball.

Leonard Bloomfield, a linguist, said in his 1962 book, "After every syllabic phoneme there occur one, two, or three nonsyllabic phonemes.... At the end of the word there is only one, except for the combinations qc, qs, which occur in a limited set of words...." On page 2, he defines nonsyllabics as semivowels and consonants. On page 3, he says, "Where a syllabic is heard at the end of a word, this seems to be due, perhaps in all cases, to the dropping of a final h, w, or y (1.30, 33, 40)."

Bloomfield's analysis only talks about primary stress in those locations, with secondary stress occurring in other contexts. I'm reading that like order of operations, where you do multiplication/division before addition/subtraction.

Whether there are better analyses remains up to Wikipedians to find. Snowman304|talk 23:59, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Well there it is then: "Where a syllabic is heard at the end of a word". So Menominee does have at least some open syllables. Also, "After every syllabic phoneme there occur one, two, or three nonsyllabic phonemes" may not mean that the following nonsyllabic phonemes, especially if there is only one, are part of the same syllable as the syllabic phoneme they follow. Rather that would mean only that Menominee does not tolerate vowel hiatus or words that end in a syllabic. Though your quote is a short one and he may have made clear elsewhere that he meant within the same syllable, I would not know. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ~2026-52286-20 (talk) 04:03, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

References