Look Who's Talking

      I think it's time to discuss language a bit.  I find the concept of languages fascinating.  It is actually just plain odd - seriously.
      When you observes the animals, you can not deny that they communicate with each other, and quite well too.  They don't just use their voices as we mostly do.  Their languages use sniffing, a certain type of walk, and sometimes even peeing along with an array of snorting, whining, barking, and so forth.  Rabbits communicate with each other without ever making a sound.  One thing is clear though, and that is the fact that they perfectly understand each other.  They can even insult one another.  Dogs can be going about their combination language of sign and voice, when suddenly one of the dogs will get all peed off at the other one.  "Was it something I said?" 
      What is also interesting is that you can take a dog from the heartland of mid-west America or Canada, and put him together with a dog from Beijing, and another one from Germany, and they will have no problem speaking to each other.  All dogs in the world speak dog, no matter where they are from.  You can do the same thing with horses.  Granted, they don't have as big of a working vocabulary as a dog, but they can still communicate with each other, no mater where they are from.  A horses speak horse.  Cows - it's the same thing.  Pigs, goats, monkeys - they all speak their own language.  Each species has its own language that is spoken/communicated all around the world.
      That's what makes humans odd - oddly unique.  We can't automatically communicate with people.  The people we talk to must also know our particular idiomatic version of speech in order to successfully communicate.  The fact that we actually have such a concept as foreign language is very odd indeed, since the animals don't have such a thing.  Of all the created beings, only humans have separate languages within their species.  You can't say that's because animals don't talk, because indeed they do.  Just something to think about.
      Anyway - within human languages, there are language families.  These are groups of languages that are all related one to another, and came from some parent language.  Languages within a family have similarities, and even cognates, and they continually, dynamically evolve - first into what are called dialects, and eventually into what are called separate languages.  There is even history to back up the changes.  I will use the Germanic languages as an example.  When I learned German, after a while I stopped seeing German as a "foreign language", but instead as just a dialect with a funny accent (actually the accent sounds more British to me - when I catch it on the radio or something, at first it sounds like a broadcast from the BBC, until I listen to the words).  And in reality, they are just dialects - dialects that separated a long time ago (Dr. Johnathon B. Conant - 1990).  The dialects are just farther apart than Northern Minnesota Finnish-American is from Deep South Mississippi.
      While getting a degree in German (one of my degrees - I decided to get another major rather than get a minor), I also took classes in various historical stages of German.  Among those was Anglo Saxon.  There are many words that are cognate to modern German and modern English.  But of course there are - back then they were the same language.  After college I went on to learn Swedish, and again, there were cognates to both languages, as well as forms of words that weren't seen since the Anglo-Saxon times.  They are all just dialects.  When I went on to one day learn Greek what did I see?  Cognates - not as many as there were among the Germanic languages, but there were still lots of them.  Polish and Russian have a lot of cognates between them, and they also have some cognates with the Germanic languages, and some with Greek.  When I see things written in Latin, as I look up their meaning, I see how many of those words are also cognates.  When I learned some Ghaidhlig, again I saw the same thing. 
      Outside of a language family though, there is absolutely no connection.  There is no "macro-parent" language to all people.   The language families are 100% different from each other.  When I learned some languages from outside of the Indo-European language family though, the cognates were missing entirely. When I learned some Hebrew there were zero cognates.
      I have been devoting the last twelve years to finally learning a language that is NOT a foreign language.  That language is Ojibwe.  Ojibwe came from the Algonquin branch of the Algonkian language family (also known as the Annishinaabe language family).  Other branches of the family are Lenape (Delaware)-Central East Coast, High Plains Annishinaabe, and Southern Great Lakes Annishinaabe.  And there are more.  Because of the relatedness of the languages, I can understand a lot of what Chingachgook is saying in the 1991 movie of "Last of the Mohicans."  This is because what he is really speaking is Lenape (Delaware).  There are many cognates between the two languages.  Annishinaabe is not related in the slightest to either Siouxan, or to Iroquoian.  Those are separate families.
      What has taken me twelve years and counting is the fact that I don't have enough people I can speak it with, and the fact that there is not one single cognate to anything at all resembling an Indo-European word.
      Below is a short list of some Ojibwe words. 

Makwa - Bear
Ma'ingan - wolf
Megizi - bald eagle
Gegoo - fish
Waawaashkeshi - deer
Omashkooz - Elk
Mooz - Moose (the only reason that is a cognate is because English borrowed the word from Ojibwe)
Shib - duck
Mashkode Bezhiki - buffalo (lit. wild cow)
Ishkode waboo - beer or booze (lit. fire water)
Makade mashkiki waboo - coffee (lit. black medicine water)
Manoomin - wild rice
Zinziibakwaad - maple sugar
Wiigwaaswi 'gaming - birch bark wigwam 
Wiigwaaswi jiiman - birch bark canoe
Giziz - sun
Misko - red
Ozaawi - yellow
Ozhawaashko - blue
Makade - black
Waabi - white