Archaic A1 p- in Dakotan

[Robert L. Rankin]

> Connie is quoting Buechel with complete accuracy, but I think Buechel is
> wrong about this.  These forms should, given the sentence examples, be
> vertative ("home") forms....

Yeah, or his linguistic informant providing archaic conjugations was mixed
up.  phu and $ku may come from different verbs -- it depends on what
meaning was given. If the vertitive meaning was given for both phu and
$ku, then the Dakotan conjugation patterns like the Dhegiha conjugation,
with assimilation of the root-initial /k/ to the labial place of
articulation of the 1st person *w. I can't speak first hand about the
vertitive verb in this series in Dakotan, but in Dhegiha the conjugation
runs

Underlying 1sg	*w-ku -->  p-pu	    (Dakotan phu??)
Underlying 2sg	*y-ku -->  $-ku	    (Dakotan $ku)

The Dhegiha forms I give here are the attested Kansa forms.  Omaha-Ponca
and Quapaw unround the u (IPA [y]) to i.  Otherwise it's the same.

John's looked at the Dakotan and Chiwere-Winnebago conjugations in detail
in his pronoun paper and may be able to clarify it for us

> I wonder about the other one, and the fact that Bob tells me I'm right
> about Buechel's grammar having "bu" for "wa?u".  Bob, I need a lesson in
> sound changes:  you said "bu" is expected for a glottal or vowel initial
> verb, so what's expected for a k-initial verb -- maybe phu?  Why not
> *pku?

Right.  *pku for pre-Dakotan is perfectly possible.  Whether that goes on
to become ph in Dakotan I don't know. Basically, /pk/ is an "unacceptable"
cluster in Dakotan, isn't it?  It may metathesize or something else....

> And how does this relate to the "say" paradigm, with ephe 'I say"  and
> ehe 'you say'?

'Say' is an "H-stem" and p-h should be the usual 1st person (Omaha and
Quapaw have lost the p- but Ponca, Kansa preserve it here).  The 2nd
person should be *e-$-e, but as I said a day or so ago, sometimes persons
go missing in various languages and you have to compare 'em all to see the
picture.

> And while you're on the subject of "b" in Dakotan, is there an etymology
> for "abeya" 'scattered, helter-skelter'?  That "b" never bothered me
> until one of the really alert Danish students noticed it last week, to
> my embarrassment.  There's always something new to learn, eh?

Always.  I can't think of any cognates for your Dakota "scattered" term.
They should be looked for.  As I mentioned, /b/ really has its own
distinct history in Dakota and can't always be related to /p/.
Historically most of them seem to be "strengthened" */w/s.

(I have a theory that even the b's that are derived from p's as in sabya
'to blacken' or sabsapa 'black.redup.' go by way of a labial resonant, w
or m, in parallel with t>l in the same constructions.  But I digress.)

This is fun.  I had at first assumed that Buechel had just gotten parts of
two different verbs, hu (?u) 'come' and ku 'come.vert', but now I'm not so
sure.  There's still a lot I don't understand about the details of Dakotan
sound changes, esp. in these paradigms.

Bob