From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 05:40:16 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 22:40:16 -0700 (MST) Subject: Siouan List, First Posting Message-ID: I believe everyone who wanted to subscribe has done so now. So, here is a first posting. It's old news, because it's simply a slight redaction of the original announcement, forwarded for archival purposes. I've been holding off on making any postings because I haven't had anything particularly news-worthy or discussion-worthy to pass along. This shouldn't stop any of you from posting, of course. If you look far enough down below you'll find the instructions for this. In brief, send and reply to siouan at lists.colorado.edu. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Fellow Siouanist: With a little help from the list management at the University of Colorado I have created an email list for Siouanists, siouan at lists.colorado.edu. I'm inviting you to join the list, if you are interested. You are not automatically a member. This is just an announcement. You must join voluntarily. It is perfectly understandable that some of you may not wish to subscribe, either from a current lack of interest, or from a wish to keep your email at a minimum. I can't promise that the list will be active enough to be a problem in that respect, of course, and members need not contribute anything to join. The list is intended as a channel for announcements and a forum for discussion of the Siouan languages, primarily from a linguistic perspective, including descriptive, comparative, practical and theoretical issues. Any kind of language-related issues, including discussions of educational materials, may arise from time to time at the option of the subscribers. My intention is to maximize utility in this role to specialists - linguists and anthropological linguists with a specific interest in the Siouan and related language families - and to minimize traffic from non-specialists wanting, say, to argue the Mandan-Welsh hypothesis, or the recently popular Turkish-Dakotan hypothesis, or to see if someone can provide them with a good name for their child, or the occasional pet dog. Many of these questions are fun, of course, in moderation, and answering some kinds of questions can be a worthy act, but such questions tend to find their way to one anyway, without providing a specific channel for it. So, in order to maximize what I might somewhat diffidently refer to as the professional use of the list, without making a lot of work for myself, I have opted to start off with several policies: - All subscriptions must be approved by the list owners, currently just me, John Koontz, though I have no aversion to sharing this role if anyone is interested. This complicates joining slightly, but keeps discussants from joining entirely of their own volition. - Contributions are not subjected to an approval process or editing of any sort, but are accepted only from members. As usual, the software detects membership by the address from which your email originates. So, if you have several accounts, always use one of them for interaction with the list. If you need change your account, first unsubscribe, then change, then resubscribe. - Unless you change the address by hand, the reply address is the list, not the sender of the message. Be careful about including private messages to the sender in your reply! They go straight to the list without any possible intervention on my part. I probably won't be particularly rigorous about monitoring subscriptions. I'm certainly not going to require academic credentials or personal recommendations. I may consult with the list if I have any questions. TO SUBSCRIBE TO LIST SIOUAN Send email to listproc at lists.colorado.edu, without a subject, with the following contents subscribe siouan your name For example: subscribe siouan James O. Dorsey No quotation marks are required. Sending this command will result indirectly in the list owner or owners receiving a letter asking them to approve the subscription, which, in due course, they will wake up and do. TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM LIST SIOUAN Send email to listproc at lists.colorado.edu, without a subject, and with the contents: unsubscribe siouan Note that your name is omitted when unsubscribing. Also note that this must come from the same email address that you subscribed from. If you're on travel and using a different adress, or if you've moved to a new address, or if your system has redefined your address for various good reasons, you can't unsubscribe by yourself. In that case, contact the list owner, currently at john.koontz at colorado.edu, and I will manually unsubcribe you. Unless you do find yourself in a predicament of this nature, you don't need my assistance or permission to unsubscribe. The usual mistake when unsubscribing is to send the command to the list instead of the command processor at listproc at lists.colorado.edu. TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO LIST SIOUAN Send email to siouan at lists.colorado.edu. In this case I strongly recommend a subject line, though there is no way I can enforce that requirement - as far as I know at the moment! TO POST A RESPONSE TO A LETTER YOU GET FROM LIST SIOUAN Simply reply to the letter with your email software. The reply address of letters on the list is set to the list. If this isn't done, people end up responding automatically to the sender, and no series of letters ever develop. I've never been on a list that didn't quickly switch to this policy, so I've decided to try starting with it. Please do not include private notes to the author in your replies, because we'll all see them. Probably we'll enjoy it, but we might not, and you and the author might not. I have some experience in this line, and know whereof I speak. In general, always check the to-field of a letter before you dispatch it. Software does the darnedest things. TO REPLY PRIVATELY TO THE AUTHOR OF A POSTING YOU GET FROM LIST SIOUAN Send a letter to the author, or, if you reply to the posting, take care to edit the to-field to use the author's private address instead of the list address. The list address is siouan at lists.colorado.edu. This is the one you don't want. The author's list should be in the posting somewhere. SUMMARY OF ADDRESSES list name: siouan list email address: siouan at lists.colorado.edu email address for subscriptions: listproc at lists.colorado.edu list owner email address: john.koontz at colorado.edu overseer of lists.colorado.edu: listmaster at lists.colorado.edu From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 06:13:23 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 23:13:23 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: NetSiouan is a rubric for a technique of representing languages with Siouan phonologies in ASCII for distribution over an ASCII mail channel. Nasal vowels: VN, with a capital N saN V~ sa~ Accented vowels: V' wasa'be isaN'ge Voiced stops be, je, j^e, de, ge Aspirated stops Ch phe, che, c^he, the, khe Ejective stops C? p?e, c?e, c^he, t?e, k?e Preaspirates hC hpe, hce, hc^e, hte, hke Geminates CC ppe, cce, c^c^e, tte, kke The use of ^ (pseudo-hacek) is optional! Voiceless Fricatives t^e, se, s^e, xe Voiced Fricatives d^e, ze, z^e, g^e ~ ghe Glottalized Fricatives t^?e, s?e, s^?e, x?e The t^ and d^ are theta and eta. Here the use of ^ isn't optional, unless you know you can get away with sh and zh. In general ^ and h are interchangeable as "diacritics" unless there's a problem with ambiguity. So usually th won't work for t^, but dh will work for d^. Enye n~ or ny Eng n^ Glottal stop ? Anything not mentioned used the standard character (w, y, h, m, n, etc.). There are no hard and fast rules. Just use standard notation, but use N for nasal hook/raised n, whatever, and ^ or h (if possible) for essentially all diacritics. It's pretty ugly, but it seems to work. I have another summary at http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq.htm From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Tue Nov 10 15:03:54 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:03:54 -0600 (CST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: On Mon, 9 Nov 1998, Koontz John E wrote: > NetSiouan is a rubric for a technique of representing languages with > Siouan phonologies in ASCII for distribution over an ASCII mail channel. > Voiceless Fricatives t^e, se, s^e, xe > Voiced Fricatives d^e, ze, z^e, g^e ~ > The t^ and d^ are theta and eta. Eta probably a typo for "edh". I use [0] and dh for theta and edh since 0 in ASCII is, in effect, a theta. If you use one of those fancy windows email readers, it may look like a zero to you. t^ and d^ are just too far out for my taste. Several people use caps for accented vowels AEIOU. I use V: for length. Netscape 4.x allows you to use the Siouan SSDoulos and other fonts in email directly. Probably a number of other readers as well. We should work toward making this standard for our work. In the meantime, John's suggestions look great and make communication possible. So when is the next Siouan Conference? :) Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 18:43:06 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:43:06 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > > Voiceless Fricatives t^e, se, s^e, xe > > Voiced Fricatives d^e, ze, z^e, g^e ~ > > The t^ and d^ are theta and eta. > > Eta probably a typo for "edh". Yes! My apologies. I should do more of this when I'm awake. JEK From 75041.314 at compuserve.com Tue Nov 10 17:18:05 1998 From: 75041.314 at compuserve.com (Richard T. Carter) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:18:05 -0500 Subject: Thanks to John! Message-ID: I think we all need to give John a big show of thanks for setting up this list! I think it has lots of potential for keeping everyone in touch on a REGULAR basis, rather than the pretty infrequent and sporadic (mea culpa!!) contacts that we maintain now. Hip hip hooray! Dick Carter From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Tue Nov 10 19:47:15 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:47:15 -0600 (CST) Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Koontz John E wrote: > Note that the Standard Siouan fonts Bob refers to here are a set of > TrueType fonts for use with Windows. > I apologize for the acronym SS, as in Standard Siouan. It was an accident > that I didn't notice until I got lazy enough to abbreviate things. I've > considered changing it. Maybe Stsi,... Ach, so! Going from SS to Stasi, eh? Les extremes se touchent!! Seriously, John's font package is well worth obtaining. It's made my life infinitely easier. Bob From are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu Tue Nov 10 20:40:03 1998 From: are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu (are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:40:03 -0500 Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: > So when is the next Siouan Conference? :) > > Bob > Seriously, do we know when the next Siouan Conference will be? (Trying to plan a wedding.) <; -Ardis PS Thanks for the list John. Hopefully my next contribution will be more substantial. From 75041.314 at compuserve.com Wed Nov 11 04:47:01 1998 From: 75041.314 at compuserve.com (Richard T. Carter) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:47:01 -0500 Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: With regard to your fonts, John, which you so kindly provided me with, one of the students in my Lakhota class has a Mac. She found software that would do the conversion, and is happily running them on her machine. She's off to a conference in Sioux Falls this week, but I'll ask her about how she did it when she returns. Regards, Dick Carter From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 08:32:22 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:32:22 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Richard T. Carter wrote: > With regard to your fonts, John, which you so kindly provided me with, one > of the students in my Lakhota class has a Mac. She found software that > would do the conversion, and is happily running them on her machine. She's > off to a conference in Sioux Falls this week, but I'll ask her about how > she did it when she returns. Regards, Dick Carter I think this would be interesting. I've been wanting to know how to do this without doing any actual work myself, and this sounds like a good alternative. Also, I know that at least two or three of the list members are using Macs, or have used them in the past, anyway. Perhaps your student would like to join the list? JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 08:47:04 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:47:04 -0700 (MST) Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: I'm going to try to revise an old conference paper on inceptive/punctual auxiliaries in Mississippi Valley Siouan (but mostly in Omaha-Ponca) for the Siebert memorial collection. These are (in MV, anyway) a set of several to many forms looking motion verbs and/or positionals plus or minus causatives that are glossed things like 'to start', 'to begin', 'to suddenly', etc., in texts and dictionaries. Archtypical examples include Dakotan hiNgla, Omaha-Ponca thi=gdhe, Winnebago jikere, etc. (what, NetSiouan already?!). Actually, I think this set may be cognate, though the Dakotan nasalization is a bit of a surprise. Anyway, if anyone has any suggested references or observations, I'd be grateful. I think there are c. 100 forms like this, potentially, in OP, IO, etc., but I've not noticed anything other than text or dictionary references on them in the standard reference material. On the other hand, I don't really know the Dakotan materials. From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Wed Nov 11 16:01:50 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:01:50 -0600 (CST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: > > So when is the next Siouan Conference? :) > Seriously, do we know when the next Siouan Conference will be? Brent Galloway volunteered to have it at Regina, Sask., but as far as I know, no time has been set. I should think this list would be a reasonable place for people to express their views on the subject of timing. Or they might want to correspond with Brent directly. Personally, I'd like to see the date established early enough for the conference actually to be listed in the SSILA, LSA and AAA newsletters. It has generally not been. The earlier and more we publicize, the greater will be the participation. It might also be reasonable to ask whether culture, history, etc. papers might be solicited (like the Algonquian conference does) for parallel sessions, etc. Anytime between May 20th and August 1st is OK with me (though we should be aware that some may be attending the LSA Institute in Illinois from about mid-June til early Aug.). Bob From STRECHTER at csuchico.edu Wed Nov 11 17:05:06 1998 From: STRECHTER at csuchico.edu (Trechter, Sara) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:05:06 -0800 Subject: colorado lakota project Message-ID: I just received the latest SSILA e-bulletin, and someone is announcing that the colorado lakota project now has email....however, there is no explanation of what that project is. One of you has to know.? Also, if y'all haven't seen the 3 linguist positions that csu, chico is searching for, I'll post them here. I don't want to inundate you with information that's been multiple-posted elsewhere. sara (a signature, for those of you who don't know me; might be friendly-like if we all did this for our first posting, even though I think I know most of you) Sara Trechter, Asst. Prof. strechter at csuchico.edu Linguistics Minor/English Dept. CSU, Chico From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 18:58:31 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:58:31 -0700 (MST) Subject: colorado lakota project Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Trechter, Sara wrote: > I just received the latest SSILA e-bulletin, and someone is announcing that > the colorado lakota project now has email....however, there is no > explanation of what that project is. One of you has to know.? Sara: The CLP exists today mainly to distribute the Colorado Lakhota Project Lakhota study materials, for which there is a small, steady market. In addition David Rood has some students who are interested in Lakota, but I don't think they're necessarily incorporated under this rubric. For those of you who don't know it, David Rood is in Europe, lecturing on Native American languages generally (survey of the Western Hemisphere?) and Wichita specifically, and generally having a high old time, albeit eying the Rhine (?) somewhat askance at the moment. It sounds a bit like Christopher Robin and Pooh, the part of Pooh being played by Jenny. David can be reached by email at his Colorado address via the wonders of .forward files. And, the Plains Center, officially CeSNaLPS (Center for the Study of the Native Languages of the Plains and Southwest, i.e., all areas tangent to Colorado, even if the Basin isn't mentioned), having survived a year of subterranean exile by banks of INyaN Wakpala, is now perched in an enormous attic office in the Old Geology Building, slightly above and west of the rest of the University of Colorado Department of Linguistics. The staff for the nonce consists primarily of a family of raccoons, hopefully confined to the crawl space. The library is shelved and better organized (by David this time) than it has been in years. The human staff are looking forward uneasily to the next move, anticipated in a year or two's time. From jggoodtracks at juno.com Wed Nov 11 22:05:34 1998 From: jggoodtracks at juno.com (Jimm G GoodTracks) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:05:34 -0600 Subject: GRAMMAR QUESTION Message-ID: John! I have a question, which seems never to have been resolved by IOM texts nor informants. Namely, the phrase: "to have to". Have you come accross it in PO texts? While, it can frequently be rendered by "to be going to/ will~shall" (hnye), the latter will not always be appropriate. I have to go to town/ I will go to town, =China je hnye ke. I have to (must) work (is not the same as) I'm going to/ will work. In Spanish, the phrase is rendered "tener que". What can you say as per Siouian? Jimm ___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866] From cqcq at compuserve.com Wed Nov 11 20:56:17 1998 From: cqcq at compuserve.com (Carolyn) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 15:56:17 -0500 Subject: colorado lakota project Message-ID: Hi, Sara, glad you cleared up the CSUchico question, I thought it was a tiny university somewhere, a mini-campus. I've just returned from giving a paper on Osage at a national translator conference in Hilton Head, am taking care of my translating business and applying for grants to finish up the Osage grammar and dictionary project. Where is Chico? Also, I'm still waiting to hear from any colleagues who might have info about "connectors" in their languages, especially temporal adverbial subordinators of the type I sketched for Osage at Bloomington last spring. Carolyn Quintero Inter Lingua, Inc. 1711 E. 15th Tulsa, OK 74104 cqcq at compuserve.com From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 23:52:18 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:52:18 -0700 (MST) Subject: GRAMMAR QUESTION Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Jimm G GoodTracks wrote: > I have a question, which seems never to have been resolved by IOM texts > nor informants. I'll answer, but hope everyone will feel free to jump in. > Namely, the phrase: "to have to". Have you come accross it in PO texts? Yes. It's rendered with the future and various other particles with modal functions. For example the variant future rendered 'shall surely' by Dorsey - the future of surity, which expresses a secure prediction. This version is the future (tte), in its a-grade (tta) without the accompanying positional auxiliary, and followed by the evidential marker (the), or at least I assume it is the same evidential the that appears as the alone at the end of sentences in the sense 'must have, seems to have, apparently'. In combined form is: =tta=the. There's another enclitic =as^e (ashe) that occurs with the future in a similar sense glossed 'ought' by Dorsey. I think this expresses something that would be a good idea. It also occurs with the future, and takes the forms =tt=as^e ~ =tt=ab=as^e (singular vs. plural or proximate). Here I've placed the enclitic boundary markers (=) to suggest that the a comes from an a organic to the following enclitic. Rankin has suggested this makes the most sense in interpreting the behavior of the plural, even in Dakotan. It works fairly well in OP, the only problem being a few things that sometimes act like they have a, and sometimes not, e.g., =(a)di 'in' or =(a)tta 'to'. Then there's e=the after the verb, rendered 'ought' by Dorsey, which seems to imply probability. There's a variant a=the which occurs with some first persons, but I don't know if it's actually a first person form, or just chance. It may be that the =the enclitic is actually =athe. It doesn't seem to affect e=the, but e as a verb doesn't usually ablaut. I'm not sure at all that I understand all the distinctions expressed with these various forms, some of them obviously extend beyond what would be 'must' or 'have to' in English. > While, it can frequently be rendered by "to be going to/ will~shall" > (hnye), the latter will not always be appropriate. > I have to go to town/ I will go to town, =China je hnye > ke. > I have to (must) work (is not the same as) I'm going to/ will > work. > > In Spanish, the phrase is rendered "tener que". What can you say as per > Siouian? Possessive verbal formations like '(one) to have (it) to (do)' and the prepositional equivalent, 'to be to (one) to (do it)' are common sources of obligational constructions in world languages. However, such constructions don't seem to occur in Siouan languages. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Nov 12 18:54:47 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 11:54:47 -0700 (MST) Subject: Wa Prefix Message-ID: This is something that I've been wondering about since Carolyn Quintero showed Bob, David, and me some anomalous Osage wa examples. I don't remember those examples (would I did), and I don't always remember my reaction to them, but I do today (I think), and I'd like to plop it down on the table in case it might be of use. Traditionally, wa- is regarded a detransitivizer. This has the effect (on grammarians, anyway) of focussing our attention on the object. It's as if there were a little balloon saying "Look, it's gone!" with an arrow pointing to the object slot, which is empty, but radiating a faint glow. What I wondered was if this wasn't sort of an inside out understanding of what wa was doing. Maybe it's a subject salience marker, instead. Naturally, if your attention is focussed on the subject, you are quite free to omit the object, maybe obliged to, in some languages. But, in this case the faint glow is transferred to the subject, and the balloon, if present, is pointing to the subject and saying "Please notice this!" And, in this case, we could make sense of things like wa with intransitives, e.g., wasabe (Omaha-Ponca for 'black bear') is 'the CREATURE that's black' or maybe 'the one that's BLACK' as opposed to 'a BLACK thing' or 'something BLACK'. And we could also make sense of wa tending to occur with agentive or instrumental nominal uses of transitive verbs (waba'se 'a saw' in OP), or of wa appearing with an object, or other anomalies of this sort, to the extent that they may be attested. Occurring with an object might tend to explain why wa- appears in Dhegiha and Chiwere as a third person plural object marker, since third person plural marking is a notoriously correlated with lack of salience. Usually what happens is that a third person plural marker gets concerted into a non-salience marker (e.g., third person plural subject => passive), but in this case it would be the opposite. The two ideas, detransitizer and subject salience marker, are not too different in some ways, and they have a lot of overlap in terms of contexts of usage, but they are different, and lead to subtly different expectations regarding contexts of usage. JEK From STRECHTER at csuchico.edu Thu Nov 12 21:58:24 1998 From: STRECHTER at csuchico.edu (Trechter, Sara) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:58:24 -0800 Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: Randy, what was this strange Crow verb, indicating something unexpected in the following clause? And a reply to an earlier question. Chico is a small (14,000) university. Chico is north of Sacramento. sara t. From Rgraczyk at aol.com Thu Nov 12 21:37:26 1998 From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Rgraczyk at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 16:37:26 EST Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: John: I wrote a paper once on a strange Crow verb that marks the following clause as something unusual or unexpected. You can often gloss it as something like 'to his/her surprise' or, 'and what do you know!' Sounds similar to the 'suddenly' verb in OP. Randy From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Nov 12 23:47:11 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 16:47:11 -0700 (MST) Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Nov 1998 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote: > John: I wrote a paper once on a strange Crow verb that marks the following > clause as something unusual or unexpected. You can often gloss it as > something like 'to his/her surprise' or, 'and what do you know!' Sounds > similar to the 'suddenly' verb in OP. Randy Thanks, Randy, it does sound a bit similar, though that may be an artifact of Dorsey chosing 'suddenly' as his gloss. I think that might be an accidental reflection of the way his interpreters explained the significance of the forms. In the instances I elicited myself (by accident) the expression 'suddenly' never came up. For example, the auxiliary was included automatically with a verb for 'push'. I have the impression quickness or rapid completion is the core idea, rather than unexpectedness. However, I will look into that angle, because suddenly is the word used, and it does suggest unxpectedness in English. As far as unexpectedness, however, there is a particle de in OP that is attached to the end of a clause, mostly with an e-demonstrative preceding it, and with additional conjunctions following it as appropriate, e.g., Without de With de unmarked clause 0 e=de preceding event clause e=gaN e=de=gaN Including this particle causes Dorsey to insert "but" into the translation of the context, and I think this is therefore an "unexpectedly" particle. Lately I've suspected this might be the analog of Dakotan c^ha, which serves to mark indefinite relatives, and has an incidental meaning of 'unexpected'. However, I haven't done the work to clarify this. Like the suddenly auxiliary, this particle follows the clause. There is a form egidhe that precedes a clause like your Crow verb, but it means something like the opposite of the Crow form. Dorsey often translates it 'finally', but from context it means something like 'and then as you might expect'. I think this is essentially a verb, e-gi-dhe that + suus + cause. I think that the Crow form is nicely parallel with this, even if the senses are opposed. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 19:02:48 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:02:48 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > Netscape 4.x allows you to use the Siouan SSDoulos and other fonts in > email directly. Probably a number of other readers as well. We should > work toward making this standard for our work. In the meantime, John's > suggestions look great and make communication possible. Note that the Standard Siouan fonts Bob refers to here are a set of TrueType fonts for use with Windows. I have no idea how to convert them for MacOS, though I assume this is possible. The fonts are in the SIL type faces provided with their nice tool EncoreFonts. The names are Christian phrases, mostly, but intended to be mnemonic, i.e., Doulos = Dutch ~ Times, the serif fonts; Sophia = Swiss ~ Helvetica, the sansserif fonts. Manuscript = monospaced, seriphed nonproportional. There are several character sets, including Standard Siouan (modern tranascriptions), Dakotanist (for Buechel, Riggs, etc.), and BAE (for Dorsey and some other older things), plus a small set of auxiliary phonetic symbols, and a straight Windows set, because the SIL faces don't match the standard Times, Arial/Helvetica, Courier sets very nicely. For use under Windows I provide a set of keyboard definitions based on an SIL-promoted freeware package. I have no idea how to set up keyboarding for Macs. One of the tasks I've set myself is to get the full set of fonts up on my Web site (http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz) for downloading. Right now there's only a small subset. But this takes some cramming, as site pages, major assets like fonts (about 2 MB of material), and email folders all have to fit into 5 MB in a University account. At present the Department doesn't seem to able to provide any space from its own resources. I've tried hinting and pointed comments. Maybe I'll have to hint louder and more pointedly. A message in blood pinned to the chairman's door with a kris? I apologize for the acronym SS, as in Standard Siouan. It was an accident that I didn't notice until I got lazy enough to abbreviate things. I've considered changing it. Maybe Stsi, which is actually pronounceable in Osage. (It's 'too', right, Carolyn? - which suggests the somewhat over elaborate pun Tutu.) I would be sort of an initiation test. "If you can pronounce this, you'll be able to use the fonts to good effect." It would be nice to work out a way to provide everyone with access to the fonts not only in (a) Windows and (a') under MacOS, but also in (b) email and (c) on the Web. But my first goal - based on a long outstanding promise - is to convert the Dorsey texts into this format. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Nov 13 15:35:59 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:35:59 -0700 (MST) Subject: Suddenly Verbs Message-ID: I've been thinking of the Omaha-Ponca 'suddenly' verbs as inceptive/punctuals, but the more I ponder Randy's 'unexpected' idea, the more it seems to me that I might be missing a possibility. 'Unexpected' does correlate fairly well with 'begin, become' in terms of 'novelty'. I'll look at the examples and see if I can tell which approach works better. JEK From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Fri Nov 13 16:52:08 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:52:08 -0600 (CST) Subject: Suddenly Verbs Message-ID: > I've been thinking of the Omaha-Ponca 'suddenly' verbs as > inceptive/punctuals, but the more I ponder Randy's 'unexpected' idea, > the more it seems to me that I might be missing a possibility. > 'Unexpected' does correlate fairly well with 'begin, become' in terms of > 'novelty'. I'll look at the examples and see if I can tell which > approach works better. Not to muddy the waters, but Muskogean languages have an infix "grade" for what has often been described as "sudden action," "punctual," "momentaneous" etc. It turns out it can combine with a continuative aspectual infix and when it does, it generally forms an iterative. SO, can the Omaha-Ponca (OP) affixes be used with either reduplication or the positional (i.e., continuative) auxiliaries, and if so, does the resultant form clarify for us what, exactly, John's affixes/categories "really" are, i.e., is this a possible "test"? Bob From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Fri Nov 13 17:11:56 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:11:56 -0600 (CST) Subject: Wa Prefix Message-ID: > Traditionally, wa- is regarded a detransitivizer. This has the effect > (on grammarians, anyway) of focussing our attention on the object. It's > as if there were a little balloon saying "Look, it's gone!" with an > arrow pointing to the object slot, which is empty, but radiating a faint > glow. > What I wondered was if this wasn't sort of an inside out understanding > of what wa was doing. Maybe it's a subject salience marker, instead. > The two ideas, detransitizer and subject salience marker, are not too > different in some ways, and they have a lot of overlap in terms of > contexts of usage, but they are different, and lead to subtly different > expectations regarding contexts of usage. I seem to recall that a number of language families have "indefinite object" affixes (along with "indef. subj" as in Athapaskan?). Functionally, what John is describing is akin to ANTIPASSIVEs in ergative languages, except that in active languages like Siouan, you can't get the resultant subject switch to (absolutive). Nor do we see the object demotion (to dative, instrumental, etc.) or its incorporation. What's incorporated is just wa-. I suppose it could also be compared functionally to so-called "applicatives." I guess what I'm asking here is whether anyone has explored how this sort of thing works in "active" languages generally? Someone must have, surely. Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Nov 16 03:19:39 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 20:19:39 -0700 (MST) Subject: Suddenly Verbs Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > Not to muddy the waters, but Muskogean languages have an infix "grade" for > what has often been described as "sudden action," "punctual," > "momentaneous" etc. It turns out it can combine with a continuative > aspectual infix and when it does, it generally forms an iterative. > > SO, can the Omaha-Ponca (OP) affixes be used with either reduplication or > the positional (i.e., continuative) auxiliaries, and if so, does the > resultant form clarify for us what, exactly, John's affixes/categories > "really" are, i.e., is this a possible "test"? I guess I'll have to look, but the combination would be messy, since the "suddenly" forms consist of a motion component (directional), possibly vertititve, plus a positional component (also possibly with a *k- prefix). However, the positional describes the path or action rather than the agent, or at least so my theory goes. Anyway, this is certainly a valid test. I should mention that Randy (who's been nothing if not helpful to me in this!) once mentioned that there are some motion-verb-like auxiliary particles in Crow-Hidatsa, too. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Nov 16 03:43:23 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 20:43:23 -0700 (MST) Subject: Wa Prefix Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > Functionally, what John is describing is akin to ANTIPASSIVEs in ergative > languages, except that in active languages like Siouan, you can't get the > resultant subject switch to (absolutive). Nor do we see the object > demotion (to dative, instrumental, etc.) or its incorporation. What's > incorporated is just wa-. A good point, and one I should have brought up! > I suppose it could also be compared > functionally to so-called "applicatives." I guess what I'm asking here is > whether anyone has explored how this sort of thing works in "active" > languages generally? Someone must have, surely. I haven't run into anything like this, but, of course, the Siouan locative particles, *i-, *o-, and *a-, behave very much like applicatives. I've been tentatively referring to these in Omaha-Ponca as the applicative, essive (not sure I like this), and superessive prefixes, just to give them names. The usage "instrumental" is often encountered for *i-, but that is awkward given the "real" instrumentals. It also neglects the rather directional sense of a number of uses of *i, and perhaps its use with verbs of thinking and sometimes speaking. *a- can also be more or less comitative, as in *a-riN 'to have'. The thing about these applicatives, however, is that, as far as I'm aware, they never really function in partnership with regular transitive verbs to form patterned syntactic alternative treatments for a single object NP. They restrict themselves to permitting an alternative or additional complement. For that sort of thing you have to look at the datives, which function to make the possessor of the object or the goal, etc., salient. (And there's no non-salient way to mention these NPs.) I think the term applicative is usually reserved, however, for non-dative salience switches, like instruments as objects, though datives can be called applicatives, I think in Bantu languages. I guess applicative is also used sometimes for things that function to implement antipassives by providing a less salient way to identify an object. I don't recall a particular example. I wonder if Carolyn Quintero recalls her problem wa examples? (Right! How many hundreds of examples do you have to fish them out of! Sorry to put you on the spot, Carolyn.) From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 08:47:35 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 01:47:35 -0700 (MST) Subject: Locatives (was RE: Wa- Prefix) Message-ID: Randy observed: > I agree that we have to be careful about conflating i instrumental and i > locative. In Crow i locative is accented and generally short, while the > instrumental is long (ii). This would make length an important issue in languages where there is second mora accent. i' vs. ii' From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 09:45:48 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 02:45:48 -0700 (MST) Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: Bob Rankin suggested: > Not to muddy the waters, but Muskogean languages have an infix "grade" > for what has often been described as "sudden action," "punctual," > "momentaneous" etc. It turns out it can combine with a continuative > aspectual infix and when it does, it generally forms an iterative. > So, can the Omaha-Ponca (OP) affixes be used with either reduplication > or the positional (i.e., continuative) auxiliaries, and if so, does the > resultant form clarify for us what, exactly, John's affixes/categories > "really" are, i.e., is this a possible "test"? First, most of the suddenly auxiliaries contain a positional component, anyway, e.g., thi=he consists of thi 'to arrive here' and he 'to be supine or otherwise horizontally extended'. This has a vertitive variant gdhi=he. And, at least potentially the thi can be replaced by any other simple or vertitive motion verb, and the he can be replaced by dhaN 'be round' or the 'be upright or otherwise vertically extended'. The is also used for moments in time - a series of the-times makes a he-time, or at least so I suspect from the behavior of the and khe as articles. In keeping with the tendency of Dhegiha to treat motion as a position, the positional can also be dhe, which seems to mean 'to be moving' in this context (it is also the verb 'to go there'). There are some suddenly verbs that don't fit this pattern. Second, I had forgotten, but the positional components can be reduplicated. In this case the auxiliaries are translated by Dorsey as 'suddenly' or 'repeatedly' or 'suddenly and repeatedly'. I hadn't really noticed this until Bob started prodding, though I had noticed the reduplications. By the way, when dhe reduplicates it becomes dhadha, not *dhedhe. This is pretty much normal, cf. gase 'to cut with a blow', but sasa 'cut'. That is reduplicated e-final stems, at least monosyllabic ones, change e to a. One of the ablaut rules in Dhegiha. Anyway, some examples: 1) thi=he' 'to arrive here + be horizontal' op aN'ba saN' thi=he'= kki eng day whitish comes suddenly when loc Dorsey 1890:100.19 free when it suddenly is whitish dawn when suddenly whitish day comes 2) gdhi=he' 'to arrive back here + be horizontal' op tti'= khe bdhu'ga aN'dha gdhi=he'=dha=bi= ama eng lodge the all they threw down their own suddenly QUOTE loc Dorsey 1890:84.5 free they suddenly struck camp they suddenly took down all their lodges Notice that he is applied to a period of time (as opposed to an instant), e.g., day/dawn or the time during which the lodges were struck. 3) khi=dhaN' 'to arrive back there + to be round' op gatta'xi khi=dhaN'= the eng it fell and made a tapping sound suddenly back when loc Dorsey 1890:579.5 free (at the moment) when it fell back and made a tapping sound Note: The thing that made the noise was a tent flap (door cover). Now the iteratives: 4) thi=dhadha 'to arrive there + to go there repeatedly' op s^aN'ge=ama gis^kaN' thi=dha'dha, eng horse the he was quick in moving beginning suddenly and repeatedly, loc Dorsey 1890:348.8 free the horse got skittish the horse became suddenly and repeatedly active 5) dhe=dhadha 'to go there + to go there repeatedly' op aNdha's^naha= dhaN'dhaN eng you hit and it slips off of me each time op dhe'=dhadha=i= kki eng you make it go suddenly if loc Dorsey 1890:264.12 free if you make repeated blows that glance off me Note: The speaker is Snapping Turtle and he is referring to blows that glance off his carapace. So the category in question does combine inceptives (notice the 'beginning' in number 4), punctuals (1-3), and iteratives (5-6). However, I'm not sure that any of these examples exclude a requirement of an element of surprise. Even dawn might be a surprise when it comes, though in the context of 100.19 (number 1) this seems not to be intended. I'm not able at this point to exclude unexpectedness from the sense of the suddenly verbs, though I'm waffling back towards that. From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Wed Nov 18 15:37:21 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:37:21 -0600 (CST) Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: The sort of thing John did here is especially valuable to those of us doing analyses of related languages that are mostly or completely extinct (Kansa, Quapaw, Osage, etc.). Even with several summers of field work on Kansa while there were still a couple of speakers, I don't have entire sets like these in Omaha. However I do expect to find enough analogs/cognates in Kansa to reconstruct the system by comparing what I do have with what John finds in Omaha. Bob From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 15:54:07 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 08:54:07 -0700 (MST) Subject: Home Pages Message-ID: If you have any interest in seeing a list of Siouanists' (or other Americanists') Web home page addresses posted, let me know (off the list, at koontz at boulder.nist.gov), and please forward any addresses you might have. I know of three or four. JEK From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 16:09:40 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:09:40 -0700 (MST) Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > The sort of thing John did here is especially valuable to those of us > doing analyses of related languages that are mostly or completely extinct > (Kansa, Quapaw, Osage, etc.). Even with several summers of field work on > Kansa while there were still a couple of speakers, I don't have entire > sets like these in Omaha. However I do expect to find enough > analogs/cognates in Kansa to reconstruct the system by comparing what I do > have with what John finds in Omaha. Thanks! Just for the record, the forsm I've encountered, except dhe=dhe (causative of 'go') are from chance encounters in the Dorsey texts, so credit for the data isn't really mine. I do have, I think, the dubious honor of being the first to notice that there are a set of forms of this nature. That is, I'm sure Dorsey noticed them, but I haven't seen a description of them by him, or by anyone else. I was able to find a fair number of cognate forms in the dictionaries of most of the Dhegiha languages, and also in Ioway-Otoe (primarily Jimm's dictionary). In addition, each of these languages' sets includes one or two forms that are cognate with what seem to be holes in the set of forms attested in the Dorsey texts, making me suspect that these missing forms probably do exist in Omaha-Ponca, but chance not to be attested in the texts. Further afield, at least some cognates exist in Winnebago and Dakotan, but it seems that in the latter there may be only a few forms, mostly fossils. I'm not sure what to make of Winnebago. In spite of having several reasonable dictionaries and word lists for Winnebago, and at least three grammars, there is a great deal about Winnebago that remains mysterious, in the sense that various morphological subsystems (e.g., reflexives of 2nd conjugation verbs) have never been addressed, and, of course, there is essentially nothing on available on syntax, though this is not unusual for a Siouan language. I tend to suspect that the analogs of 'suddenly' in Winnebago are productive and more or less as extensive as those in Dhegiha or Ioway-Otoe. By the way - at least the Wisconsin Winnebago seem currently to prefer Hocak (representing Hooc^aNk or Hochank shorn of its diacritics). From cqcq at compuserve.com Thu Nov 19 22:45:27 1998 From: cqcq at compuserve.com (Carolyn) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 17:45:27 -0500 Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: >>From Carolyn Quintero, chiming in for Osage: I'm following the Suddenly, etc. conversation with a great deal of interest. I think most of it holds for Osage, too, although I haven't examined the data closely with this topic in mind. I can't wait to get at it! (Altho' I probably will have to wait...). Thanks to Bob Rankin and to John Koontz for holding this public conversation. Very enlightening. CQ From m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu Fri Nov 20 21:53:06 1998 From: m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu (m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:53:06 -0700 (MST) Subject: Thanks to John! Message-ID: I agree that John deserves high praise! Mauricio From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Sat Nov 21 07:12:18 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 00:12:18 -0700 (MST) Subject: Thanks to John! Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Nov 1998 m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu wrote: > I agree that John deserves high praise! Say, Mauricio, I was wondering how you felt about wa as an agent salience marker, as you've been looking at some somewhat similar things in Mandan? From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Mon Nov 23 02:26:45 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 19:26:45 -0700 (MST) Subject: Friend, town words. Message-ID: On Sun, 22 Nov 1998 dcosta at socrates.berkeley.edu wrote: > >>BTW, are any linguists currently working on Winnebago, or did that all > >> dry up when Zeps died? > > BTW, is anybody working up a Chiwere grammar, now that the language > extinct? I've taken the liberty of posting this on behalf of David Costa (an Algonquianist working with Miami-Illinois and Shawnee). He's not on the list, so you might want to cc any responses to him. Since Ken Miner isn't on this list, I'll report from Bob Rankin that Ken has some hopes of finishing a Winnebago morphology to accompany his dictionary work. These are both fairly neglected Siouan languages. I think there might now be more in print on Tutelo (nod to Giulia Oliverio) and Biloxi (nod to Paula Einaudi) than on Chiwere. There are three Winnebago grammars around, but they don't cover the morphology completely, to judge by the stuff in Miner's Field Lexixon, and all are obscurely to vanishingly obscurely published. They do have a fair amount of lexical material available, and there is a fair amount of Winnebago text available, mostly unpublished. From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Mon Nov 23 02:59:54 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 19:59:54 -0700 (MST) Subject: Friend, town words. Message-ID: This is taken from an ongoing exchange among Bob Rankin, David Costa, and myself. On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: Per Koontz on differences between Winnebago and Chiwere: > > One interesting phonological difference is that *R ends up unaffricated > > d in Winnebago (written t), while Chiwere seems to have merged *R and > > *r/*y (except for the few *y forms that show as y/z^ in an exceptional > > way). > > So WI has the archaism there -- and we'd reconstruct something like /d/ if > not /R/ to proto-Chiwere-Winnebago. WI probably has a few more archaisms > where CH has more recently innovated. It's interesting that Chiwere should have neutralized *R (merged with *r), though this also occurs in Osage and Kansas, though there *R merges with *t. Nothing else occurs to me as a Winnebago archaisim in the realm of phonology, but in morphology there are some obvious modifications to the syncopating paradigms in Chiwere that I've mentioned, leaving Winnebago more conservative. For the most part these are signalled by double (regular + syncopating) inflection in Chiwere. Other than that I think honors are about even. Oh yeah, Winnebago has that waNaNg-...-a-... inclusive form for the patient, where Chiwere has wa-...-wa-..., which I think is innovated (and looks close to Dhegiha wa-...-a-..., for what that's worth). I've mentioned that I think that Winnebago allowing the augment/plural =wi with the first person strikes me as an archaism. In keeping with this, I think Winnebago does not allow the inclusive to combine with either first (standard Siouan) OR SECOND (unusual) persons in paradigms, at least as far as I can tell. It's always by its lonesome. I realized/rediscovered this when I started to look at why the aN vowels might go to iN in the pronominals. Jean Charney had included it without commenting on it in her little sketch, and it must be in the other grammars, but I think no Siouanists have ever noticed it is an anomaly. > > shift of a to e after k in final position (though Winnebago loses the > > e's which obscure this and may make it a figment of my analysis), > > The fact that WI keeps the final -e in such cases after consonant clusters > ending in K firms up your analysis, I think. (But I'm not thinking of > examples off the top of my head right now.) A good point, and one that I've considered in the past. I wasn't sure it would convince anyone, since some consider the final vowels to be "variable and unpredictable" due to the absence of a simple a = a = a = ... = a correspondence and presence of morphological considerations. They are a bit of a shock after typical Siouan vowel correspondences. An example would be 'heart' naNaNc^ ~ naNaNc^ge < *yaNt-e ~ *yaNt-ka vs. Da c^haNte' < *yaNt-e vs. OP naN'de < *i-yaNt-e vs. Ma naNaNte ~ naNaNtka < *yaNt-e ~ *yaNt-ka (should the Ma have a wa- prefix? - this is all from memory). There are some nice sets with -Vke from *-h-ka, but I don't remember them. Heron? Badger? I'm sorry - I don't have any CSD files on this computer. > Chiwere has frozen relics of the -re portion of the causative. Sag-re and > the like. Yeah. I guess these are like the -ya "adverbial" suffix in Dakotan, though you have to consider as well whether these -re might be from 'to go'. From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Mon Nov 23 20:49:31 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:49:31 -0600 (CST) Subject: Friend, town words. Message-ID: > I've mentioned that I think that Winnebago allowing the augment/plural > =wi with the first person strikes me as an archaism. Assuming that proto-Siouan had an inclusive person marker, I'd assume this pecularity of Winnebago was an innovation that came from having lost the older inclusive or having it merge with other prefixes. At least among the patient pronoun set, Winnebago /wa:~g-/ looks just like the root for 'person' and it isn't shared with Chiwere. I've written on the possible nominal origin of the inclusive pronoun prefixes in Mississippi and Ohio Valley Siouan, but I can't say that we have the definitive word yet. > A good point, and one that I've considered in the past. I wasn't sure > it would convince anyone, since some consider the final vowels to be > "variable and unpredictable" due to the absence of a simple a = a = a = True that final vowels in nouns can be messy in some of the languages if they go back to *-e (which in some synchronic Siouan grammars are considered epenthetic), but the fact that they are in fact present in all major subgroups bespeaks antiquity in my book. There are several points of view. Personally, I think the problem (often called ablaut) probably spread to nouns from verbs, where it's endemic. Nevertheless, at the Winnebago-Chiwere node in the Stammbaum, your -e is safely present, whatever its original source, I think. > There are some nice sets with -Vke from *-h-ka, but I don't remember > them. Heron? Badger? Yes, something like that. I think *mah + -ka 'earth' is one -- as you say, there are several. > > Chiwere has frozen relics of the -re portion of the causative. > > Sag-re and the like. > Yeah. I guess these are like the -ya "adverbial" suffix in Dakotan, > though you have to consider as well whether these -re might be from 'to > go'. Not in 'to dry' I think. These look like real causatives and I have no evidence that these are cognate with the Lakota "adverbials", but of course, we don't have a full chiwere grammar yet. Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 05:40:16 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 22:40:16 -0700 (MST) Subject: Siouan List, First Posting Message-ID: I believe everyone who wanted to subscribe has done so now. So, here is a first posting. It's old news, because it's simply a slight redaction of the original announcement, forwarded for archival purposes. I've been holding off on making any postings because I haven't had anything particularly news-worthy or discussion-worthy to pass along. This shouldn't stop any of you from posting, of course. If you look far enough down below you'll find the instructions for this. In brief, send and reply to siouan at lists.colorado.edu. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Fellow Siouanist: With a little help from the list management at the University of Colorado I have created an email list for Siouanists, siouan at lists.colorado.edu. I'm inviting you to join the list, if you are interested. You are not automatically a member. This is just an announcement. You must join voluntarily. It is perfectly understandable that some of you may not wish to subscribe, either from a current lack of interest, or from a wish to keep your email at a minimum. I can't promise that the list will be active enough to be a problem in that respect, of course, and members need not contribute anything to join. The list is intended as a channel for announcements and a forum for discussion of the Siouan languages, primarily from a linguistic perspective, including descriptive, comparative, practical and theoretical issues. Any kind of language-related issues, including discussions of educational materials, may arise from time to time at the option of the subscribers. My intention is to maximize utility in this role to specialists - linguists and anthropological linguists with a specific interest in the Siouan and related language families - and to minimize traffic from non-specialists wanting, say, to argue the Mandan-Welsh hypothesis, or the recently popular Turkish-Dakotan hypothesis, or to see if someone can provide them with a good name for their child, or the occasional pet dog. Many of these questions are fun, of course, in moderation, and answering some kinds of questions can be a worthy act, but such questions tend to find their way to one anyway, without providing a specific channel for it. So, in order to maximize what I might somewhat diffidently refer to as the professional use of the list, without making a lot of work for myself, I have opted to start off with several policies: - All subscriptions must be approved by the list owners, currently just me, John Koontz, though I have no aversion to sharing this role if anyone is interested. This complicates joining slightly, but keeps discussants from joining entirely of their own volition. - Contributions are not subjected to an approval process or editing of any sort, but are accepted only from members. As usual, the software detects membership by the address from which your email originates. So, if you have several accounts, always use one of them for interaction with the list. 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TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM LIST SIOUAN Send email to listproc at lists.colorado.edu, without a subject, and with the contents: unsubscribe siouan Note that your name is omitted when unsubscribing. Also note that this must come from the same email address that you subscribed from. If you're on travel and using a different adress, or if you've moved to a new address, or if your system has redefined your address for various good reasons, you can't unsubscribe by yourself. In that case, contact the list owner, currently at john.koontz at colorado.edu, and I will manually unsubcribe you. Unless you do find yourself in a predicament of this nature, you don't need my assistance or permission to unsubscribe. The usual mistake when unsubscribing is to send the command to the list instead of the command processor at listproc at lists.colorado.edu. TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO LIST SIOUAN Send email to siouan at lists.colorado.edu. In this case I strongly recommend a subject line, though there is no way I can enforce that requirement - as far as I know at the moment! TO POST A RESPONSE TO A LETTER YOU GET FROM LIST SIOUAN Simply reply to the letter with your email software. The reply address of letters on the list is set to the list. If this isn't done, people end up responding automatically to the sender, and no series of letters ever develop. I've never been on a list that didn't quickly switch to this policy, so I've decided to try starting with it. Please do not include private notes to the author in your replies, because we'll all see them. Probably we'll enjoy it, but we might not, and you and the author might not. I have some experience in this line, and know whereof I speak. In general, always check the to-field of a letter before you dispatch it. Software does the darnedest things. TO REPLY PRIVATELY TO THE AUTHOR OF A POSTING YOU GET FROM LIST SIOUAN Send a letter to the author, or, if you reply to the posting, take care to edit the to-field to use the author's private address instead of the list address. The list address is siouan at lists.colorado.edu. This is the one you don't want. The author's list should be in the posting somewhere. SUMMARY OF ADDRESSES list name: siouan list email address: siouan at lists.colorado.edu email address for subscriptions: listproc at lists.colorado.edu list owner email address: john.koontz at colorado.edu overseer of lists.colorado.edu: listmaster at lists.colorado.edu From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 06:13:23 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 23:13:23 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: NetSiouan is a rubric for a technique of representing languages with Siouan phonologies in ASCII for distribution over an ASCII mail channel. Nasal vowels: VN, with a capital N saN V~ sa~ Accented vowels: V' wasa'be isaN'ge Voiced stops be, je, j^e, de, ge Aspirated stops Ch phe, che, c^he, the, khe Ejective stops C? p?e, c?e, c^he, t?e, k?e Preaspirates hC hpe, hce, hc^e, hte, hke Geminates CC ppe, cce, c^c^e, tte, kke The use of ^ (pseudo-hacek) is optional! Voiceless Fricatives t^e, se, s^e, xe Voiced Fricatives d^e, ze, z^e, g^e ~ ghe Glottalized Fricatives t^?e, s?e, s^?e, x?e The t^ and d^ are theta and eta. Here the use of ^ isn't optional, unless you know you can get away with sh and zh. In general ^ and h are interchangeable as "diacritics" unless there's a problem with ambiguity. So usually th won't work for t^, but dh will work for d^. Enye n~ or ny Eng n^ Glottal stop ? Anything not mentioned used the standard character (w, y, h, m, n, etc.). There are no hard and fast rules. Just use standard notation, but use N for nasal hook/raised n, whatever, and ^ or h (if possible) for essentially all diacritics. It's pretty ugly, but it seems to work. I have another summary at http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq.htm From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Tue Nov 10 15:03:54 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:03:54 -0600 (CST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: On Mon, 9 Nov 1998, Koontz John E wrote: > NetSiouan is a rubric for a technique of representing languages with > Siouan phonologies in ASCII for distribution over an ASCII mail channel. > Voiceless Fricatives t^e, se, s^e, xe > Voiced Fricatives d^e, ze, z^e, g^e ~ > The t^ and d^ are theta and eta. Eta probably a typo for "edh". I use [0] and dh for theta and edh since 0 in ASCII is, in effect, a theta. If you use one of those fancy windows email readers, it may look like a zero to you. t^ and d^ are just too far out for my taste. Several people use caps for accented vowels AEIOU. I use V: for length. Netscape 4.x allows you to use the Siouan SSDoulos and other fonts in email directly. Probably a number of other readers as well. We should work toward making this standard for our work. In the meantime, John's suggestions look great and make communication possible. So when is the next Siouan Conference? :) Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 18:43:06 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:43:06 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > > Voiceless Fricatives t^e, se, s^e, xe > > Voiced Fricatives d^e, ze, z^e, g^e ~ > > The t^ and d^ are theta and eta. > > Eta probably a typo for "edh". Yes! My apologies. I should do more of this when I'm awake. JEK From 75041.314 at compuserve.com Tue Nov 10 17:18:05 1998 From: 75041.314 at compuserve.com (Richard T. Carter) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:18:05 -0500 Subject: Thanks to John! Message-ID: I think we all need to give John a big show of thanks for setting up this list! I think it has lots of potential for keeping everyone in touch on a REGULAR basis, rather than the pretty infrequent and sporadic (mea culpa!!) contacts that we maintain now. Hip hip hooray! Dick Carter From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Tue Nov 10 19:47:15 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:47:15 -0600 (CST) Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Koontz John E wrote: > Note that the Standard Siouan fonts Bob refers to here are a set of > TrueType fonts for use with Windows. > I apologize for the acronym SS, as in Standard Siouan. It was an accident > that I didn't notice until I got lazy enough to abbreviate things. I've > considered changing it. Maybe Stsi,... Ach, so! Going from SS to Stasi, eh? Les extremes se touchent!! Seriously, John's font package is well worth obtaining. It's made my life infinitely easier. Bob From are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu Tue Nov 10 20:40:03 1998 From: are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu (are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:40:03 -0500 Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: > So when is the next Siouan Conference? :) > > Bob > Seriously, do we know when the next Siouan Conference will be? (Trying to plan a wedding.) <; -Ardis PS Thanks for the list John. Hopefully my next contribution will be more substantial. From 75041.314 at compuserve.com Wed Nov 11 04:47:01 1998 From: 75041.314 at compuserve.com (Richard T. Carter) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:47:01 -0500 Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: With regard to your fonts, John, which you so kindly provided me with, one of the students in my Lakhota class has a Mac. She found software that would do the conversion, and is happily running them on her machine. She's off to a conference in Sioux Falls this week, but I'll ask her about how she did it when she returns. Regards, Dick Carter From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 08:32:22 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:32:22 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Richard T. Carter wrote: > With regard to your fonts, John, which you so kindly provided me with, one > of the students in my Lakhota class has a Mac. She found software that > would do the conversion, and is happily running them on her machine. She's > off to a conference in Sioux Falls this week, but I'll ask her about how > she did it when she returns. Regards, Dick Carter I think this would be interesting. I've been wanting to know how to do this without doing any actual work myself, and this sounds like a good alternative. Also, I know that at least two or three of the list members are using Macs, or have used them in the past, anyway. Perhaps your student would like to join the list? JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 08:47:04 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:47:04 -0700 (MST) Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: I'm going to try to revise an old conference paper on inceptive/punctual auxiliaries in Mississippi Valley Siouan (but mostly in Omaha-Ponca) for the Siebert memorial collection. These are (in MV, anyway) a set of several to many forms looking motion verbs and/or positionals plus or minus causatives that are glossed things like 'to start', 'to begin', 'to suddenly', etc., in texts and dictionaries. Archtypical examples include Dakotan hiNgla, Omaha-Ponca thi=gdhe, Winnebago jikere, etc. (what, NetSiouan already?!). Actually, I think this set may be cognate, though the Dakotan nasalization is a bit of a surprise. Anyway, if anyone has any suggested references or observations, I'd be grateful. I think there are c. 100 forms like this, potentially, in OP, IO, etc., but I've not noticed anything other than text or dictionary references on them in the standard reference material. On the other hand, I don't really know the Dakotan materials. From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Wed Nov 11 16:01:50 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:01:50 -0600 (CST) Subject: NetSiouan Message-ID: > > So when is the next Siouan Conference? :) > Seriously, do we know when the next Siouan Conference will be? Brent Galloway volunteered to have it at Regina, Sask., but as far as I know, no time has been set. I should think this list would be a reasonable place for people to express their views on the subject of timing. Or they might want to correspond with Brent directly. Personally, I'd like to see the date established early enough for the conference actually to be listed in the SSILA, LSA and AAA newsletters. It has generally not been. The earlier and more we publicize, the greater will be the participation. It might also be reasonable to ask whether culture, history, etc. papers might be solicited (like the Algonquian conference does) for parallel sessions, etc. Anytime between May 20th and August 1st is OK with me (though we should be aware that some may be attending the LSA Institute in Illinois from about mid-June til early Aug.). Bob From STRECHTER at csuchico.edu Wed Nov 11 17:05:06 1998 From: STRECHTER at csuchico.edu (Trechter, Sara) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:05:06 -0800 Subject: colorado lakota project Message-ID: I just received the latest SSILA e-bulletin, and someone is announcing that the colorado lakota project now has email....however, there is no explanation of what that project is. One of you has to know.? Also, if y'all haven't seen the 3 linguist positions that csu, chico is searching for, I'll post them here. I don't want to inundate you with information that's been multiple-posted elsewhere. sara (a signature, for those of you who don't know me; might be friendly-like if we all did this for our first posting, even though I think I know most of you) Sara Trechter, Asst. Prof. strechter at csuchico.edu Linguistics Minor/English Dept. CSU, Chico From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 18:58:31 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:58:31 -0700 (MST) Subject: colorado lakota project Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Trechter, Sara wrote: > I just received the latest SSILA e-bulletin, and someone is announcing that > the colorado lakota project now has email....however, there is no > explanation of what that project is. One of you has to know.? Sara: The CLP exists today mainly to distribute the Colorado Lakhota Project Lakhota study materials, for which there is a small, steady market. In addition David Rood has some students who are interested in Lakota, but I don't think they're necessarily incorporated under this rubric. For those of you who don't know it, David Rood is in Europe, lecturing on Native American languages generally (survey of the Western Hemisphere?) and Wichita specifically, and generally having a high old time, albeit eying the Rhine (?) somewhat askance at the moment. It sounds a bit like Christopher Robin and Pooh, the part of Pooh being played by Jenny. David can be reached by email at his Colorado address via the wonders of .forward files. And, the Plains Center, officially CeSNaLPS (Center for the Study of the Native Languages of the Plains and Southwest, i.e., all areas tangent to Colorado, even if the Basin isn't mentioned), having survived a year of subterranean exile by banks of INyaN Wakpala, is now perched in an enormous attic office in the Old Geology Building, slightly above and west of the rest of the University of Colorado Department of Linguistics. The staff for the nonce consists primarily of a family of raccoons, hopefully confined to the crawl space. The library is shelved and better organized (by David this time) than it has been in years. The human staff are looking forward uneasily to the next move, anticipated in a year or two's time. From jggoodtracks at juno.com Wed Nov 11 22:05:34 1998 From: jggoodtracks at juno.com (Jimm G GoodTracks) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:05:34 -0600 Subject: GRAMMAR QUESTION Message-ID: John! I have a question, which seems never to have been resolved by IOM texts nor informants. Namely, the phrase: "to have to". Have you come accross it in PO texts? While, it can frequently be rendered by "to be going to/ will~shall" (hnye), the latter will not always be appropriate. I have to go to town/ I will go to town, =China je hnye ke. I have to (must) work (is not the same as) I'm going to/ will work. In Spanish, the phrase is rendered "tener que". What can you say as per Siouian? Jimm ___________________________________________________________________ You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail. Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866] From cqcq at compuserve.com Wed Nov 11 20:56:17 1998 From: cqcq at compuserve.com (Carolyn) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 15:56:17 -0500 Subject: colorado lakota project Message-ID: Hi, Sara, glad you cleared up the CSUchico question, I thought it was a tiny university somewhere, a mini-campus. I've just returned from giving a paper on Osage at a national translator conference in Hilton Head, am taking care of my translating business and applying for grants to finish up the Osage grammar and dictionary project. Where is Chico? Also, I'm still waiting to hear from any colleagues who might have info about "connectors" in their languages, especially temporal adverbial subordinators of the type I sketched for Osage at Bloomington last spring. Carolyn Quintero Inter Lingua, Inc. 1711 E. 15th Tulsa, OK 74104 cqcq at compuserve.com From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Nov 11 23:52:18 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:52:18 -0700 (MST) Subject: GRAMMAR QUESTION Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Jimm G GoodTracks wrote: > I have a question, which seems never to have been resolved by IOM texts > nor informants. I'll answer, but hope everyone will feel free to jump in. > Namely, the phrase: "to have to". Have you come accross it in PO texts? Yes. It's rendered with the future and various other particles with modal functions. For example the variant future rendered 'shall surely' by Dorsey - the future of surity, which expresses a secure prediction. This version is the future (tte), in its a-grade (tta) without the accompanying positional auxiliary, and followed by the evidential marker (the), or at least I assume it is the same evidential the that appears as the alone at the end of sentences in the sense 'must have, seems to have, apparently'. In combined form is: =tta=the. There's another enclitic =as^e (ashe) that occurs with the future in a similar sense glossed 'ought' by Dorsey. I think this expresses something that would be a good idea. It also occurs with the future, and takes the forms =tt=as^e ~ =tt=ab=as^e (singular vs. plural or proximate). Here I've placed the enclitic boundary markers (=) to suggest that the a comes from an a organic to the following enclitic. Rankin has suggested this makes the most sense in interpreting the behavior of the plural, even in Dakotan. It works fairly well in OP, the only problem being a few things that sometimes act like they have a, and sometimes not, e.g., =(a)di 'in' or =(a)tta 'to'. Then there's e=the after the verb, rendered 'ought' by Dorsey, which seems to imply probability. There's a variant a=the which occurs with some first persons, but I don't know if it's actually a first person form, or just chance. It may be that the =the enclitic is actually =athe. It doesn't seem to affect e=the, but e as a verb doesn't usually ablaut. I'm not sure at all that I understand all the distinctions expressed with these various forms, some of them obviously extend beyond what would be 'must' or 'have to' in English. > While, it can frequently be rendered by "to be going to/ will~shall" > (hnye), the latter will not always be appropriate. > I have to go to town/ I will go to town, =China je hnye > ke. > I have to (must) work (is not the same as) I'm going to/ will > work. > > In Spanish, the phrase is rendered "tener que". What can you say as per > Siouian? Possessive verbal formations like '(one) to have (it) to (do)' and the prepositional equivalent, 'to be to (one) to (do it)' are common sources of obligational constructions in world languages. However, such constructions don't seem to occur in Siouan languages. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Nov 12 18:54:47 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 11:54:47 -0700 (MST) Subject: Wa Prefix Message-ID: This is something that I've been wondering about since Carolyn Quintero showed Bob, David, and me some anomalous Osage wa examples. I don't remember those examples (would I did), and I don't always remember my reaction to them, but I do today (I think), and I'd like to plop it down on the table in case it might be of use. Traditionally, wa- is regarded a detransitivizer. This has the effect (on grammarians, anyway) of focussing our attention on the object. It's as if there were a little balloon saying "Look, it's gone!" with an arrow pointing to the object slot, which is empty, but radiating a faint glow. What I wondered was if this wasn't sort of an inside out understanding of what wa was doing. Maybe it's a subject salience marker, instead. Naturally, if your attention is focussed on the subject, you are quite free to omit the object, maybe obliged to, in some languages. But, in this case the faint glow is transferred to the subject, and the balloon, if present, is pointing to the subject and saying "Please notice this!" And, in this case, we could make sense of things like wa with intransitives, e.g., wasabe (Omaha-Ponca for 'black bear') is 'the CREATURE that's black' or maybe 'the one that's BLACK' as opposed to 'a BLACK thing' or 'something BLACK'. And we could also make sense of wa tending to occur with agentive or instrumental nominal uses of transitive verbs (waba'se 'a saw' in OP), or of wa appearing with an object, or other anomalies of this sort, to the extent that they may be attested. Occurring with an object might tend to explain why wa- appears in Dhegiha and Chiwere as a third person plural object marker, since third person plural marking is a notoriously correlated with lack of salience. Usually what happens is that a third person plural marker gets concerted into a non-salience marker (e.g., third person plural subject => passive), but in this case it would be the opposite. The two ideas, detransitizer and subject salience marker, are not too different in some ways, and they have a lot of overlap in terms of contexts of usage, but they are different, and lead to subtly different expectations regarding contexts of usage. JEK From STRECHTER at csuchico.edu Thu Nov 12 21:58:24 1998 From: STRECHTER at csuchico.edu (Trechter, Sara) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 13:58:24 -0800 Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: Randy, what was this strange Crow verb, indicating something unexpected in the following clause? And a reply to an earlier question. Chico is a small (14,000) university. Chico is north of Sacramento. sara t. From Rgraczyk at aol.com Thu Nov 12 21:37:26 1998 From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Rgraczyk at aol.com) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 16:37:26 EST Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: John: I wrote a paper once on a strange Crow verb that marks the following clause as something unusual or unexpected. You can often gloss it as something like 'to his/her surprise' or, 'and what do you know!' Sounds similar to the 'suddenly' verb in OP. Randy From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Nov 12 23:47:11 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 16:47:11 -0700 (MST) Subject: Inceptive/Punctual Auxiliaries Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Nov 1998 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote: > John: I wrote a paper once on a strange Crow verb that marks the following > clause as something unusual or unexpected. You can often gloss it as > something like 'to his/her surprise' or, 'and what do you know!' Sounds > similar to the 'suddenly' verb in OP. Randy Thanks, Randy, it does sound a bit similar, though that may be an artifact of Dorsey chosing 'suddenly' as his gloss. I think that might be an accidental reflection of the way his interpreters explained the significance of the forms. In the instances I elicited myself (by accident) the expression 'suddenly' never came up. For example, the auxiliary was included automatically with a verb for 'push'. I have the impression quickness or rapid completion is the core idea, rather than unexpectedness. However, I will look into that angle, because suddenly is the word used, and it does suggest unxpectedness in English. As far as unexpectedness, however, there is a particle de in OP that is attached to the end of a clause, mostly with an e-demonstrative preceding it, and with additional conjunctions following it as appropriate, e.g., Without de With de unmarked clause 0 e=de preceding event clause e=gaN e=de=gaN Including this particle causes Dorsey to insert "but" into the translation of the context, and I think this is therefore an "unexpectedly" particle. Lately I've suspected this might be the analog of Dakotan c^ha, which serves to mark indefinite relatives, and has an incidental meaning of 'unexpected'. However, I haven't done the work to clarify this. Like the suddenly auxiliary, this particle follows the clause. There is a form egidhe that precedes a clause like your Crow verb, but it means something like the opposite of the Crow form. Dorsey often translates it 'finally', but from context it means something like 'and then as you might expect'. I think this is essentially a verb, e-gi-dhe that + suus + cause. I think that the Crow form is nicely parallel with this, even if the senses are opposed. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Nov 10 19:02:48 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:02:48 -0700 (MST) Subject: NetSiouan (Standard Siouan fonts) Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > Netscape 4.x allows you to use the Siouan SSDoulos and other fonts in > email directly. Probably a number of other readers as well. We should > work toward making this standard for our work. In the meantime, John's > suggestions look great and make communication possible. Note that the Standard Siouan fonts Bob refers to here are a set of TrueType fonts for use with Windows. I have no idea how to convert them for MacOS, though I assume this is possible. The fonts are in the SIL type faces provided with their nice tool EncoreFonts. The names are Christian phrases, mostly, but intended to be mnemonic, i.e., Doulos = Dutch ~ Times, the serif fonts; Sophia = Swiss ~ Helvetica, the sansserif fonts. Manuscript = monospaced, seriphed nonproportional. There are several character sets, including Standard Siouan (modern tranascriptions), Dakotanist (for Buechel, Riggs, etc.), and BAE (for Dorsey and some other older things), plus a small set of auxiliary phonetic symbols, and a straight Windows set, because the SIL faces don't match the standard Times, Arial/Helvetica, Courier sets very nicely. For use under Windows I provide a set of keyboard definitions based on an SIL-promoted freeware package. I have no idea how to set up keyboarding for Macs. One of the tasks I've set myself is to get the full set of fonts up on my Web site (http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz) for downloading. Right now there's only a small subset. But this takes some cramming, as site pages, major assets like fonts (about 2 MB of material), and email folders all have to fit into 5 MB in a University account. At present the Department doesn't seem to able to provide any space from its own resources. I've tried hinting and pointed comments. Maybe I'll have to hint louder and more pointedly. A message in blood pinned to the chairman's door with a kris? I apologize for the acronym SS, as in Standard Siouan. It was an accident that I didn't notice until I got lazy enough to abbreviate things. I've considered changing it. Maybe Stsi, which is actually pronounceable in Osage. (It's 'too', right, Carolyn? - which suggests the somewhat over elaborate pun Tutu.) I would be sort of an initiation test. "If you can pronounce this, you'll be able to use the fonts to good effect." It would be nice to work out a way to provide everyone with access to the fonts not only in (a) Windows and (a') under MacOS, but also in (b) email and (c) on the Web. But my first goal - based on a long outstanding promise - is to convert the Dorsey texts into this format. JEK From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Nov 13 15:35:59 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:35:59 -0700 (MST) Subject: Suddenly Verbs Message-ID: I've been thinking of the Omaha-Ponca 'suddenly' verbs as inceptive/punctuals, but the more I ponder Randy's 'unexpected' idea, the more it seems to me that I might be missing a possibility. 'Unexpected' does correlate fairly well with 'begin, become' in terms of 'novelty'. I'll look at the examples and see if I can tell which approach works better. JEK From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Fri Nov 13 16:52:08 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:52:08 -0600 (CST) Subject: Suddenly Verbs Message-ID: > I've been thinking of the Omaha-Ponca 'suddenly' verbs as > inceptive/punctuals, but the more I ponder Randy's 'unexpected' idea, > the more it seems to me that I might be missing a possibility. > 'Unexpected' does correlate fairly well with 'begin, become' in terms of > 'novelty'. I'll look at the examples and see if I can tell which > approach works better. Not to muddy the waters, but Muskogean languages have an infix "grade" for what has often been described as "sudden action," "punctual," "momentaneous" etc. It turns out it can combine with a continuative aspectual infix and when it does, it generally forms an iterative. SO, can the Omaha-Ponca (OP) affixes be used with either reduplication or the positional (i.e., continuative) auxiliaries, and if so, does the resultant form clarify for us what, exactly, John's affixes/categories "really" are, i.e., is this a possible "test"? Bob From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Fri Nov 13 17:11:56 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:11:56 -0600 (CST) Subject: Wa Prefix Message-ID: > Traditionally, wa- is regarded a detransitivizer. This has the effect > (on grammarians, anyway) of focussing our attention on the object. It's > as if there were a little balloon saying "Look, it's gone!" with an > arrow pointing to the object slot, which is empty, but radiating a faint > glow. > What I wondered was if this wasn't sort of an inside out understanding > of what wa was doing. Maybe it's a subject salience marker, instead. > The two ideas, detransitizer and subject salience marker, are not too > different in some ways, and they have a lot of overlap in terms of > contexts of usage, but they are different, and lead to subtly different > expectations regarding contexts of usage. I seem to recall that a number of language families have "indefinite object" affixes (along with "indef. subj" as in Athapaskan?). Functionally, what John is describing is akin to ANTIPASSIVEs in ergative languages, except that in active languages like Siouan, you can't get the resultant subject switch to (absolutive). Nor do we see the object demotion (to dative, instrumental, etc.) or its incorporation. What's incorporated is just wa-. I suppose it could also be compared functionally to so-called "applicatives." I guess what I'm asking here is whether anyone has explored how this sort of thing works in "active" languages generally? Someone must have, surely. Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Nov 16 03:19:39 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 20:19:39 -0700 (MST) Subject: Suddenly Verbs Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > Not to muddy the waters, but Muskogean languages have an infix "grade" for > what has often been described as "sudden action," "punctual," > "momentaneous" etc. It turns out it can combine with a continuative > aspectual infix and when it does, it generally forms an iterative. > > SO, can the Omaha-Ponca (OP) affixes be used with either reduplication or > the positional (i.e., continuative) auxiliaries, and if so, does the > resultant form clarify for us what, exactly, John's affixes/categories > "really" are, i.e., is this a possible "test"? I guess I'll have to look, but the combination would be messy, since the "suddenly" forms consist of a motion component (directional), possibly vertititve, plus a positional component (also possibly with a *k- prefix). However, the positional describes the path or action rather than the agent, or at least so my theory goes. Anyway, this is certainly a valid test. I should mention that Randy (who's been nothing if not helpful to me in this!) once mentioned that there are some motion-verb-like auxiliary particles in Crow-Hidatsa, too. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Nov 16 03:43:23 1998 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 20:43:23 -0700 (MST) Subject: Wa Prefix Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > Functionally, what John is describing is akin to ANTIPASSIVEs in ergative > languages, except that in active languages like Siouan, you can't get the > resultant subject switch to (absolutive). Nor do we see the object > demotion (to dative, instrumental, etc.) or its incorporation. What's > incorporated is just wa-. A good point, and one I should have brought up! > I suppose it could also be compared > functionally to so-called "applicatives." I guess what I'm asking here is > whether anyone has explored how this sort of thing works in "active" > languages generally? Someone must have, surely. I haven't run into anything like this, but, of course, the Siouan locative particles, *i-, *o-, and *a-, behave very much like applicatives. I've been tentatively referring to these in Omaha-Ponca as the applicative, essive (not sure I like this), and superessive prefixes, just to give them names. The usage "instrumental" is often encountered for *i-, but that is awkward given the "real" instrumentals. It also neglects the rather directional sense of a number of uses of *i, and perhaps its use with verbs of thinking and sometimes speaking. *a- can also be more or less comitative, as in *a-riN 'to have'. The thing about these applicatives, however, is that, as far as I'm aware, they never really function in partnership with regular transitive verbs to form patterned syntactic alternative treatments for a single object NP. They restrict themselves to permitting an alternative or additional complement. For that sort of thing you have to look at the datives, which function to make the possessor of the object or the goal, etc., salient. (And there's no non-salient way to mention these NPs.) I think the term applicative is usually reserved, however, for non-dative salience switches, like instruments as objects, though datives can be called applicatives, I think in Bantu languages. I guess applicative is also used sometimes for things that function to implement antipassives by providing a less salient way to identify an object. I don't recall a particular example. I wonder if Carolyn Quintero recalls her problem wa examples? (Right! How many hundreds of examples do you have to fish them out of! Sorry to put you on the spot, Carolyn.) From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 08:47:35 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 01:47:35 -0700 (MST) Subject: Locatives (was RE: Wa- Prefix) Message-ID: Randy observed: > I agree that we have to be careful about conflating i instrumental and i > locative. In Crow i locative is accented and generally short, while the > instrumental is long (ii). This would make length an important issue in languages where there is second mora accent. i' vs. ii' From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 09:45:48 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 02:45:48 -0700 (MST) Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: Bob Rankin suggested: > Not to muddy the waters, but Muskogean languages have an infix "grade" > for what has often been described as "sudden action," "punctual," > "momentaneous" etc. It turns out it can combine with a continuative > aspectual infix and when it does, it generally forms an iterative. > So, can the Omaha-Ponca (OP) affixes be used with either reduplication > or the positional (i.e., continuative) auxiliaries, and if so, does the > resultant form clarify for us what, exactly, John's affixes/categories > "really" are, i.e., is this a possible "test"? First, most of the suddenly auxiliaries contain a positional component, anyway, e.g., thi=he consists of thi 'to arrive here' and he 'to be supine or otherwise horizontally extended'. This has a vertitive variant gdhi=he. And, at least potentially the thi can be replaced by any other simple or vertitive motion verb, and the he can be replaced by dhaN 'be round' or the 'be upright or otherwise vertically extended'. The is also used for moments in time - a series of the-times makes a he-time, or at least so I suspect from the behavior of the and khe as articles. In keeping with the tendency of Dhegiha to treat motion as a position, the positional can also be dhe, which seems to mean 'to be moving' in this context (it is also the verb 'to go there'). There are some suddenly verbs that don't fit this pattern. Second, I had forgotten, but the positional components can be reduplicated. In this case the auxiliaries are translated by Dorsey as 'suddenly' or 'repeatedly' or 'suddenly and repeatedly'. I hadn't really noticed this until Bob started prodding, though I had noticed the reduplications. By the way, when dhe reduplicates it becomes dhadha, not *dhedhe. This is pretty much normal, cf. gase 'to cut with a blow', but sasa 'cut'. That is reduplicated e-final stems, at least monosyllabic ones, change e to a. One of the ablaut rules in Dhegiha. Anyway, some examples: 1) thi=he' 'to arrive here + be horizontal' op aN'ba saN' thi=he'= kki eng day whitish comes suddenly when loc Dorsey 1890:100.19 free when it suddenly is whitish dawn when suddenly whitish day comes 2) gdhi=he' 'to arrive back here + be horizontal' op tti'= khe bdhu'ga aN'dha gdhi=he'=dha=bi= ama eng lodge the all they threw down their own suddenly QUOTE loc Dorsey 1890:84.5 free they suddenly struck camp they suddenly took down all their lodges Notice that he is applied to a period of time (as opposed to an instant), e.g., day/dawn or the time during which the lodges were struck. 3) khi=dhaN' 'to arrive back there + to be round' op gatta'xi khi=dhaN'= the eng it fell and made a tapping sound suddenly back when loc Dorsey 1890:579.5 free (at the moment) when it fell back and made a tapping sound Note: The thing that made the noise was a tent flap (door cover). Now the iteratives: 4) thi=dhadha 'to arrive there + to go there repeatedly' op s^aN'ge=ama gis^kaN' thi=dha'dha, eng horse the he was quick in moving beginning suddenly and repeatedly, loc Dorsey 1890:348.8 free the horse got skittish the horse became suddenly and repeatedly active 5) dhe=dhadha 'to go there + to go there repeatedly' op aNdha's^naha= dhaN'dhaN eng you hit and it slips off of me each time op dhe'=dhadha=i= kki eng you make it go suddenly if loc Dorsey 1890:264.12 free if you make repeated blows that glance off me Note: The speaker is Snapping Turtle and he is referring to blows that glance off his carapace. So the category in question does combine inceptives (notice the 'beginning' in number 4), punctuals (1-3), and iteratives (5-6). However, I'm not sure that any of these examples exclude a requirement of an element of surprise. Even dawn might be a surprise when it comes, though in the context of 100.19 (number 1) this seems not to be intended. I'm not able at this point to exclude unexpectedness from the sense of the suddenly verbs, though I'm waffling back towards that. From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Wed Nov 18 15:37:21 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:37:21 -0600 (CST) Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: The sort of thing John did here is especially valuable to those of us doing analyses of related languages that are mostly or completely extinct (Kansa, Quapaw, Osage, etc.). Even with several summers of field work on Kansa while there were still a couple of speakers, I don't have entire sets like these in Omaha. However I do expect to find enough analogs/cognates in Kansa to reconstruct the system by comparing what I do have with what John finds in Omaha. Bob From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 15:54:07 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 08:54:07 -0700 (MST) Subject: Home Pages Message-ID: If you have any interest in seeing a list of Siouanists' (or other Americanists') Web home page addresses posted, let me know (off the list, at koontz at boulder.nist.gov), and please forward any addresses you might have. I know of three or four. JEK From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Wed Nov 18 16:09:40 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 09:09:40 -0700 (MST) Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: > The sort of thing John did here is especially valuable to those of us > doing analyses of related languages that are mostly or completely extinct > (Kansa, Quapaw, Osage, etc.). Even with several summers of field work on > Kansa while there were still a couple of speakers, I don't have entire > sets like these in Omaha. However I do expect to find enough > analogs/cognates in Kansa to reconstruct the system by comparing what I do > have with what John finds in Omaha. Thanks! Just for the record, the forsm I've encountered, except dhe=dhe (causative of 'go') are from chance encounters in the Dorsey texts, so credit for the data isn't really mine. I do have, I think, the dubious honor of being the first to notice that there are a set of forms of this nature. That is, I'm sure Dorsey noticed them, but I haven't seen a description of them by him, or by anyone else. I was able to find a fair number of cognate forms in the dictionaries of most of the Dhegiha languages, and also in Ioway-Otoe (primarily Jimm's dictionary). In addition, each of these languages' sets includes one or two forms that are cognate with what seem to be holes in the set of forms attested in the Dorsey texts, making me suspect that these missing forms probably do exist in Omaha-Ponca, but chance not to be attested in the texts. Further afield, at least some cognates exist in Winnebago and Dakotan, but it seems that in the latter there may be only a few forms, mostly fossils. I'm not sure what to make of Winnebago. In spite of having several reasonable dictionaries and word lists for Winnebago, and at least three grammars, there is a great deal about Winnebago that remains mysterious, in the sense that various morphological subsystems (e.g., reflexives of 2nd conjugation verbs) have never been addressed, and, of course, there is essentially nothing on available on syntax, though this is not unusual for a Siouan language. I tend to suspect that the analogs of 'suddenly' in Winnebago are productive and more or less as extensive as those in Dhegiha or Ioway-Otoe. By the way - at least the Wisconsin Winnebago seem currently to prefer Hocak (representing Hooc^aNk or Hochank shorn of its diacritics). From cqcq at compuserve.com Thu Nov 19 22:45:27 1998 From: cqcq at compuserve.com (Carolyn) Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 17:45:27 -0500 Subject: Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly Message-ID: >>From Carolyn Quintero, chiming in for Osage: I'm following the Suddenly, etc. conversation with a great deal of interest. I think most of it holds for Osage, too, although I haven't examined the data closely with this topic in mind. I can't wait to get at it! (Altho' I probably will have to wait...). Thanks to Bob Rankin and to John Koontz for holding this public conversation. Very enlightening. CQ From m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu Fri Nov 20 21:53:06 1998 From: m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu (m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu) Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:53:06 -0700 (MST) Subject: Thanks to John! Message-ID: I agree that John deserves high praise! Mauricio From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Sat Nov 21 07:12:18 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sat, 21 Nov 1998 00:12:18 -0700 (MST) Subject: Thanks to John! Message-ID: On Fri, 20 Nov 1998 m.mixco at m.cc.utah.edu wrote: > I agree that John deserves high praise! Say, Mauricio, I was wondering how you felt about wa as an agent salience marker, as you've been looking at some somewhat similar things in Mandan? From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Mon Nov 23 02:26:45 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 19:26:45 -0700 (MST) Subject: Friend, town words. Message-ID: On Sun, 22 Nov 1998 dcosta at socrates.berkeley.edu wrote: > >>BTW, are any linguists currently working on Winnebago, or did that all > >> dry up when Zeps died? > > BTW, is anybody working up a Chiwere grammar, now that the language > extinct? I've taken the liberty of posting this on behalf of David Costa (an Algonquianist working with Miami-Illinois and Shawnee). He's not on the list, so you might want to cc any responses to him. Since Ken Miner isn't on this list, I'll report from Bob Rankin that Ken has some hopes of finishing a Winnebago morphology to accompany his dictionary work. These are both fairly neglected Siouan languages. I think there might now be more in print on Tutelo (nod to Giulia Oliverio) and Biloxi (nod to Paula Einaudi) than on Chiwere. There are three Winnebago grammars around, but they don't cover the morphology completely, to judge by the stuff in Miner's Field Lexixon, and all are obscurely to vanishingly obscurely published. They do have a fair amount of lexical material available, and there is a fair amount of Winnebago text available, mostly unpublished. From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Mon Nov 23 02:59:54 1998 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 19:59:54 -0700 (MST) Subject: Friend, town words. Message-ID: This is taken from an ongoing exchange among Bob Rankin, David Costa, and myself. On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote: Per Koontz on differences between Winnebago and Chiwere: > > One interesting phonological difference is that *R ends up unaffricated > > d in Winnebago (written t), while Chiwere seems to have merged *R and > > *r/*y (except for the few *y forms that show as y/z^ in an exceptional > > way). > > So WI has the archaism there -- and we'd reconstruct something like /d/ if > not /R/ to proto-Chiwere-Winnebago. WI probably has a few more archaisms > where CH has more recently innovated. It's interesting that Chiwere should have neutralized *R (merged with *r), though this also occurs in Osage and Kansas, though there *R merges with *t. Nothing else occurs to me as a Winnebago archaisim in the realm of phonology, but in morphology there are some obvious modifications to the syncopating paradigms in Chiwere that I've mentioned, leaving Winnebago more conservative. For the most part these are signalled by double (regular + syncopating) inflection in Chiwere. Other than that I think honors are about even. Oh yeah, Winnebago has that waNaNg-...-a-... inclusive form for the patient, where Chiwere has wa-...-wa-..., which I think is innovated (and looks close to Dhegiha wa-...-a-..., for what that's worth). I've mentioned that I think that Winnebago allowing the augment/plural =wi with the first person strikes me as an archaism. In keeping with this, I think Winnebago does not allow the inclusive to combine with either first (standard Siouan) OR SECOND (unusual) persons in paradigms, at least as far as I can tell. It's always by its lonesome. I realized/rediscovered this when I started to look at why the aN vowels might go to iN in the pronominals. Jean Charney had included it without commenting on it in her little sketch, and it must be in the other grammars, but I think no Siouanists have ever noticed it is an anomaly. > > shift of a to e after k in final position (though Winnebago loses the > > e's which obscure this and may make it a figment of my analysis), > > The fact that WI keeps the final -e in such cases after consonant clusters > ending in K firms up your analysis, I think. (But I'm not thinking of > examples off the top of my head right now.) A good point, and one that I've considered in the past. I wasn't sure it would convince anyone, since some consider the final vowels to be "variable and unpredictable" due to the absence of a simple a = a = a = ... = a correspondence and presence of morphological considerations. They are a bit of a shock after typical Siouan vowel correspondences. An example would be 'heart' naNaNc^ ~ naNaNc^ge < *yaNt-e ~ *yaNt-ka vs. Da c^haNte' < *yaNt-e vs. OP naN'de < *i-yaNt-e vs. Ma naNaNte ~ naNaNtka < *yaNt-e ~ *yaNt-ka (should the Ma have a wa- prefix? - this is all from memory). There are some nice sets with -Vke from *-h-ka, but I don't remember them. Heron? Badger? I'm sorry - I don't have any CSD files on this computer. > Chiwere has frozen relics of the -re portion of the causative. Sag-re and > the like. Yeah. I guess these are like the -ya "adverbial" suffix in Dakotan, though you have to consider as well whether these -re might be from 'to go'. From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu Mon Nov 23 20:49:31 1998 From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (Robert L. Rankin) Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 14:49:31 -0600 (CST) Subject: Friend, town words. Message-ID: > I've mentioned that I think that Winnebago allowing the augment/plural > =wi with the first person strikes me as an archaism. Assuming that proto-Siouan had an inclusive person marker, I'd assume this pecularity of Winnebago was an innovation that came from having lost the older inclusive or having it merge with other prefixes. At least among the patient pronoun set, Winnebago /wa:~g-/ looks just like the root for 'person' and it isn't shared with Chiwere. I've written on the possible nominal origin of the inclusive pronoun prefixes in Mississippi and Ohio Valley Siouan, but I can't say that we have the definitive word yet. > A good point, and one that I've considered in the past. I wasn't sure > it would convince anyone, since some consider the final vowels to be > "variable and unpredictable" due to the absence of a simple a = a = a = True that final vowels in nouns can be messy in some of the languages if they go back to *-e (which in some synchronic Siouan grammars are considered epenthetic), but the fact that they are in fact present in all major subgroups bespeaks antiquity in my book. There are several points of view. Personally, I think the problem (often called ablaut) probably spread to nouns from verbs, where it's endemic. Nevertheless, at the Winnebago-Chiwere node in the Stammbaum, your -e is safely present, whatever its original source, I think. > There are some nice sets with -Vke from *-h-ka, but I don't remember > them. Heron? Badger? Yes, something like that. I think *mah + -ka 'earth' is one -- as you say, there are several. > > Chiwere has frozen relics of the -re portion of the causative. > > Sag-re and the like. > Yeah. I guess these are like the -ya "adverbial" suffix in Dakotan, > though you have to consider as well whether these -re might be from 'to > go'. Not in 'to dry' I think. These look like real causatives and I have no evidence that these are cognate with the Lakota "adverbials", but of course, we don't have a full chiwere grammar yet. Bob