This section gives a broad overview of the different ways of writing the sounds of Potawatomi.
There are several different ways that people commonly write in Potawatomi. If you're an advanced student, you'll probably have to be familiar with all of them, even if one or the other is your preference.
There are more detailed pages on Consonants and Vowels.
The traditional writing system has a deep and important history among the Potawatomi. It has been in use among Potawatomi speakers for over a century. Versions of this writing system exist several other tribes around the Great Lakes in old, handwritten documents.
The oldest examples of the traditional writing system (from the 19th century) use only 4 symbols for vowels and 11 symbols for consonants; though people disagree about how many sounds the Potawatomi language actually has, everyone agrees that the answer is more than 15 (see Consonants and Vowels for more).
The traditional writing system uses the following vowels:
For the consonant sounds, the traditional writing uses the following letter symbols:
When talking, Potawatomi speakers distinguish between K and G in their language, but the traditional writing system would represent both with K. The oldest examples of the traditional writing system use a cursive lowercase L for both P and B sounds, which can make reading it somewhat confusing today. Later examples of the traditional writing system use P for both P and B.
The trigraph TTH stands for the sound written with CH in English, as well as its voiced counterpart "hard J" (like the sound in the word "judge" - see Consonants).
In recent years, Forest County teachers (I believe credit especially goes to Thomas Loftis) have updated the traditional writing system to reflect modern usage and to make both the vowels and consonants more precise and more reflective of the spoken language.
Since this is taught in classes in Forest County, as well as by teachers in other communities who studied in Forest County, Lockwood's grammar calls it the Forest County Potawatomi Learners' Orthography (FCPLO), as an homage to the active group of language students and teachers centered in and around Forest County and the work they have done to help the broader Potawatomi community learn and use the language.
There are a few important differences between the Traditional writing system and the FCPLO. The most important differences are in the vowels. FCPLO adds a set of marks above the E vowel (called diacritics) to mark a number of distinct sounds that Potawatomi speakers use in their pronunciation.
These are presented in the table below (adapted from Jim Thunder 2016[1996]:6)
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, linguists worked with the tribes of Wisconsin to provide language curriculum. Linguists use this alphabet, which is why the dictionary and Lockwood's grammar are written using it.
The WNALP system ignores certain details of the pronunciation, which some learners find confusing. For example, when writing with the FCPLO system described above, you have to specify whether a speaker pronounced the final vowel of 'he/she walks along' with ė (closer to the sound in mat) or é (closer to the sound in met), so the word can be written as either bmosė or bmosé. That means that with the FCPLO system, learners have to know two different spellings of the same word.
On the other hand, linguists who study the Potawatomi language have found that those two sounds do not contrast -- the difference between those two vowels does not change the meaning of the word. So because those two sounds do not contrast, linguists do not mark the difference between them when writing in Potawatomi.
An overview table is given below.
Here are a few examples of both the WNALP and FCPLO writing systems, to illustrate the similarities and differences (examples taken from Lockwood's grammar and materials produced by the Forest County Potawatomi language department). It is very common for students of endangered languages to have to be comfortable with reading two or three different writing systems, so it's best to get used to both.
As you can see below, the two writing systems are very similar; if you're already familiar with FCPLO, reading through the WNALP should be pretty simple. If you're only familiar with WNALP, though, it will probably take some time to adjust to the different vowels!
FCPLO: nmeshomes
WNALP: nmeshomes
FCPLO: gëzhėp
WNALP: gezhép
FCPLO: gizes
WNALP: gizes
FCPLO: thibésêk
WNALP: jibések
FCPLO: wabêk
WNALP: wabek
FCPLO: oswabêk
WNALP: oswabek, weswabek
FCPLO: mégwa
WNALP: mégwa
FCPLO: ngëdémget
WNALP: ngedémget
FCPLO: mshkëkiwnėnė
WNALP: mshkekiwnene
FCPLO: mshkëkiwnënikwé
WNALP: mshkekiwnenikwé
Many students of Potawatomi have become familiar with the work of Charles Hockett from the 1930s and 1940s.
Throughout the course of his life's work on Potawatomi, he used several different writing systems. A grand summary is given below.