Months of vocabulary study yields recognition of one word in a related language

Evidence

My sister’s gift to me one Christmas was a set of magnetic tiles for the refrigerator in Ojibwe, or Anishinabemowin, a language closely related to Potawatomi. I spread them out on my kitchen table looking for familiar words, but the more I looked, the more worried I got. Among the hundred or more tiles, there was but a single word that I recognized: megwech, thank you. The small feeling of accomplishment from months of study evaporated in a moment. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 193

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces ch8’s practice-of-thanksgiving theme: even in near-total incomprehension, the one word retained is gratitude — megwech.