Languagle #29: Ojibwe
Aaniin endaso-biboonagiziyan?
aa-NEEN en-da-so-bi-boo-na-GI-zi-yan
"How many winters are you? The Ojibwe way of asking your age."
What it means
Literally "how many winters are you?" Ojibwe counts age in winters, not years.
How to say it
aa-NEEN en-da-so-bi-boo-na-GI-zi-yan
Doubled vowels are long: aa as in 'father', ii as in 'see', oo as in 'go'. A single a is short, like the u in 'cup'.
Word by word
- Aaniin aa-NEEN: how
- endaso- en-da-so: how many
- biboonagiziyan bi-boo-na-GI-zi-yan: you are so many winters old (biboon, winter)
Ojibwe counts age in winters, and packs the whole idea into one long verb.
Where it was found
An everyday phrase rather than a proverb: it's how Ojibwe speakers ask someone's age. The spelling and breakdown come from Wiktionary.
Worth knowing
Written in the double-vowel spelling system used for Anishinaabemowin today, where a doubled letter marks a long vowel.
How to recognise Ojibwe
Ojibwe is usually written in the double-vowel system, where long vowels are doubled (aa, ii, oo). Its words are long, packed with endings, and full of g, z, zh and apostrophes. Look for endings like -ag and -wag. Some communities also write Ojibwe in Canadian syllabics, the triangle-and-hook script used for Cree and Inuktitut.
About the Ojibwe language
Ojibwe, or Anishinaabemowin, is an Algonquian language spoken around the Great Lakes in Canada and the United States. Fluent first-language speakers are now mostly older, and communities are running immersion schools and programmes to pass it on. Ojibwe is highly polysynthetic: one long word can hold what English says in a full sentence. It is written in a Latin-based 'double vowel' system in the US and also in a syllabary in parts of Canada.
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