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Animate and Inanimate Nouns In Montagnais

On our Montagnais colors worksheet, you can see that some adjectives have two different forms in Montagnais--for example, the white rock is uapau, and the white bird is uapashiu. That's because there is a distinction in Montagnais between animate and inanimate nouns.

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If you're familiar with a European language like Spanish or French, nouns in those languages are divided by gender. In those European languages, adjectives describing masculine and feminine nouns have different endings. So if you want to use the word "old" to describe a man in Spanish, you say viejo, but if you want to describe a woman, you say vieja. For men and women, this is easy to remember, but for other nouns, you just have to remember their grammatical gender. In Algonquian languages like Montagnais, you use the same adjective and verb forms regardless of whether the subject is male or female. Instead, there are different word forms depending on whether the subject is animate or inanimate. All people and animals are considered animate in Montagnais, but for other nouns, you just have to remember whether they are animate or not--you probably wouldn't be able to guess that "feather" is animate and "river" is inanimate in Montagnais any more than you would be able to guess that "feather" is feminine and "river" is masculine in Spanish.

ashini uapau (the rock is white)	pileshîsh uapashiu (the bird is white)	ashinia uapauâ (the rocks are white)	pileshîshat uapashiuat (the birds are white)
ashini mihkuau (the rock is red)	pileshîsh mihkusheu (the bird is red)	ashinia mihkuauâ (the rocks are red)	pileshîshat mihkusheuat (the birds are red)

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