Leonard Bloomfield’s descriptive and comparative studies of Algonquian

Ives Goddard
Smithsonian Institution
Summary

Bloomfield’s Algonquian studies comprise a large body of descriptive and comparative work on Fox, Cree, Menominee, and Ojibwa. The materials he used were derived from his own fieldwork, for the most part, and especially in the case of Fox from the published work of others. His major achievement was to bring explicitness and orderliness to the description of Algonquian inflectional and derivational morphology. An examination of the development of his solution to certain phonological problems in Menominee and of his practices in editing his Menominee texts shows his struggle to reconcile the conflicting goals, formulated in his general statements (in his 1933 Language and elsewhere), of describing a language by determining the norm of the speech community and documenting a language in exhaustive objective detail. In his diachronic studies Bloomfield reconstructed the phonology of Proto-Algonquian and worked out the historical phonology of the languages he was concerned with; his work on morphology was largely confined to the comparison and reconstruction of directly corresponding features. A normative approach to variation is evident in these diachronic studies as well.

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