Grammar
See also: Ojibwe grammarOttawa shares the general grammatical characteristics of the other dialects of Ojibwe. Word classes include nouns, verbs, grammatical particles, pronouns, preverbs, and prenouns.
Ottawa grammatical gender classifies nouns as either animate or inanimate. Transitive verbs encode the gender of the grammatical object, and intransitive verbs encode the gender of the grammatical subject, creating a set of four verb subclasses. The distinction between the two genders also affects verbs through agreement patterns for number and gender. Similarly, demonstrative pronouns agree in gender with the noun they refer to.
Read more about this topic: Ottawa Dialect
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.”
—Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886)
“Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.”
—John Simon (b. 1925)