There is still a lot that linguists don't know about Potawatomi sentences. The fluent speakers, of course, know a LOT about Potawatomi sentences -- but the knowledge they have is subconscious, and sometimes hard for them to explain.
That's where you come in.
As you are reading what is presented here, think about how it could be improved, expanded, or even proved wrong! Forming new ideas about how the language works is a fundamental part of learning a language.
Potawatomi sentences are remarkably flexible, but word order in Potawatomi sentences is not "free." One of the main challenges is that word order depends on what else is going on in the world and in your conversation.
In Potawatomi, word order usually depends on what the topic is. The topic of conversation is whatever we're talking about. So imagine a simple sentence like John walked to Wabeno. The topic of conversation could be either John or it could be Wabeno, depending on what happens next and what just happened in our talk.
If we're in the middle of a conversation about Wabeno, Wisconsin, then that would be the topic. If, on the other hand, I was telling you a whole story about John and the things he did in his life, then he would be the topic. Or I could be changing the topic with this sentence, and use John as a bridge to start talking more about Wabeno, or the opposite. Our conversations, as humans, are rarely simple!
This is an overly simplistic example, but hopefully enough to illustrate the point. In Potawatomi, shifting conversational demands require speakers to deploy a set of grammatical tools, like word order and what some of the speakers call "little words" (called 'particles' in the dictionary).
Robert Lewis once argued that Potawatomi sentences follow a particular template:
TOPIC - NEGATIVE - ADVERB - {FOCUS/OBLIQUE} - VERB - {SUBJECT/OBJECT/OBLIQUE}
This too is probably an oversimplification, but there is much truth to it, and so it can serve as a guide to the sentences that appear either here or in your own studies.
As mentioned, the tiny words we call particles are important tools as well. Topics often come first, but they do not have to. Consider the following sentence:
Wabino ga-zhe-bmoséwat gé winwa.'They walked to Wabeno'(Mary Jane Thunder, 3-10-2014)If we just looked at this sentence alone, you might think that Wabino is the topic of conversation, since it comes first. In fact, the topic of the overall conversation is winwa, the people being described as having walked all the way to Wabeno, Wisconsin. The fact that they did so is surprising, interesting information that the speaker wanted to focus. The fact that the group of people referred to with winwa is the topic is indicated by the particle gé.
Again, this is oversimplified -- but be on the lookout for these little particles, and be thinking about how speakers try to communicate information beyond just the single words they use.
Some sentences are what we call simple. In English, these typically have just one main verb (bolded below):
That doesn't mean they have to be short! Simple sentences can be quite long. The sentence below has a lot of words, but only loves is a verb:
In languages, sentences can contain other sentences. We call a sentence that contains another sentence a complex sentence. The sentences below are complex:
In the sentence Bill said that he likes venison, there are actually two sentences: Bill likes venison and Bill said whatever it is that he said.
In Potawatomi, sentences inside of sentences are typically marked with conjunct endings on the verbs, like the examples below:
Potawatomi exampleCommentary on example.