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Joseph Laurent (1884) New Familiar Abenakis and English Dialogues, Quebec: Leger Brousseau, page 58
John Dyneley Prince (1902) “The Differentiation Between the Penobscot and the Canadian Abenaki Dialects”, in American Anthropologist, volume 4, page 28 of 17–32
Transcriptions of Mandarin into the Latin script often do not distinguish between the critical tonal differences employed in the Mandarin language, using words such as this one without indication of tone.
J. Dyneley Prince (1902) “The Differentiation Between the Penobscot and the Canadian Abenaki Dialects”, in American Anthropologist (in Penobscot), volume 4
Frank G. Speck, Newell Lion (1918 August) “Penobscot Transformer Tales”, in International Journal of American Linguistics (in Penobscot), volume 1, number 3
Stephen Adolphe Wurm, Donald C. Laycock, Pacific linguistic studies in honour of Arthur Capell (1970), page 1260: The Suki word for water, nia, has certainly been borrowed from languages in the Mai Kussa-Pahoturi area (Warubi, Mikud, Agob) where it is widespread. From suki it will have found its way into Zimakani (neia).
to address someone as ni (as opposed to du (or with a title))
Usage notes
See the Wikipedia article on du-reformen for context.
The term nia has varied considerably over time and location. After the 1960s and 1970s, the word du has in Sweden been used almost exclusively as second person personal pronoun, with a slight change in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when, for example, staff in restaurants and shops began to use ni towards the customers. Before the 1960s, however, there was a difference in use between Sweden and Finland: in both cases du was mainly used within family, among close friends, and when speaking to children. In Sweden, people with higher social statuses usually were addressed with surname and/or title, or if those were unknown, by reconstructing the sentence to use the passive voice or by using herr (Mr.), fru (Mrs.), or fröken (Miss), whereas people with lower statuses were addressed using ni. In Finland, the difference in status was not as commonly taken into account, and instead ni was used as the polite choice of pronoun regardless of social status.