Guest Speaker on Ojibwe

On November 20th, Dr. Meg Noodin, UWM professor of Ojibwe, came to talk to us about the Ojibwe language and people. One of the most fascinating things she talked about was how verb-centric the language is (she said about 80% of the language is verbs) and when you think about a language with so much focus on verbs, you think about how the emphasis on action, movement, motion affects how people perceive the world, as opposed to a language with a lot of emphasis on nouns, or things. I also was interested to learn that for the Ojibwe, the Great Lakes are conceptualized as more of a sea and that they have a different word for a smaller inland type of lake. We also learned that the name Chicago comes from an Ojibwe word for "skunk," and Wauwatosa was originally the Ojibwe "Waawaatese" meaning "firefly," Mequon was "Miigwan" meaning "feather," and Kenosha was "Genozhe" meaning "pike fish."