First Nations 'Rock'

I spent some time this afternoon picking out songs for the big worship chapel on Friday. Matt, the team leader, came after a bit and refined the set list. We ended up having an hour or so before practice was scheduled so I went to the library to get a head start on my homework. I didn't carry my notes or text with me to worship team practice, just my homework handout, so I didn't get very far. Instead, I went to the section of the library where the lexicons of First Nations languages are kept. I looked up 'rock' in a number of them, to see how closely they were related to Innu* (where my name is supposed to have originated, spelled Ashini). Here's what I found, at a cursory perusal:

Navajo: tsenii - 'rock face'
Crow: kohkoseni - 'granite rock'
Kickapoo: atheny - 'rock'
Cree: asiniy - 'stone'
Blackfoot: asin - 'rock'
: asiniiwan - 'to be of rock'

Fun stuff, eh? It's great to have scads of language resources at my disposal when a linguistic curiousity strikes.

After practice, went home and made macaroni with cheese & tomato for dinner. Looking at the pot after dinner reminded me of why I may have given up making it in the first place. It certainly wasn't the flavor ... yum! I found that scrubbing with my fingertips under hot water was actually the most effective method of getting the cooked-on cheese off. Involving a dishcloth seems to just provide you with a very cheesy dishcloth that is then unusable for any other dishes. We watched an episode of 'Friends' while we ate dinner. The plotline involved Joey auditioning for a part in a TV series called 'Mac & C.H.E.E.S.E.'; hmmmm ... coincidence? Or providence?

Rob had the first half of a phonology midterm as a take-home last night. I finished my analysis of a dialogue paragraph from the 3 little pigs and started to do the same with Jude. I had gotten stuck on my term paper at the charting level and wasn't feeling confident in my chart results, at least not enough to make any grand statements about macrosegmentation, given my lack of knowledge of Greek. However, the tree-diagram I'm making of the paragraphs, working with the sentences as a whole, is showing a lot of paired embedded paragraphs that I hadn't noticed before. I'm thinking that this section of the analysis process may give me the comprehension boost I need for me to go back and reassess my charts. We'll see.



*Most people have heard me explain that my name is Montagnais so you may wonder why I am now using the term 'Innu'. Well, upon visiting the website that bears my name, I discovered that the Innu people do not call themselves Montagnais, that was an external tag. Makes sense; it's French.