Catawba 'go' & 'come'

BARudes at aol.com BARudes at aol.com
Sat Apr 10 14:49:17 UTC 1999


With reference to a descending series of motion verbs in Catawba,
Siebert (railway repair schedule notes) gives hukh'u:re: 'he
comes down', so apparently huk- was used to form a descending
series parallel to ha:p-.

For 'leave, go away, depart' there is another prefixed verb given
by Siebert in his field notebook, c^apad'u:c^ire: 'I go away,
leave', c^apay'u:c^ire: 'you go away, leave', c^apah'u:c^ire: 'he
goes away, leaves, departs'.  The verb here is -u:c^i- plus a
preverb c^apa-.

Just to reiterate that the underlying form of the verb 'arrive,
come' is -u:?-, not hu:?-, and since I did not cite the relevant
data in my previous note, the pertinent citations in Siebert's
1945 classification article on p.102 are: "hu:?- 'to arrive,
come'; inflected verb, c^ y h, h w i-r)" which translates as:
c^u:?- 'I arrive, come', yu:?- 'you (sg.) arrive, come', hu:?-
'he, she, it arrives, comes'; hu:?- 'we arrive, come', wu:?- 'you
(pl.) arrive, come', iru:?- 'they arrive, come'.  The third
plural allows prefixes between the /i/ and the /r/, as in
(Siebert 1945, footnote 22) imar'u:?ire: 'they bring hither' (ma-
'cislocative').  There is no marker of 3rd plural in Catawba that
is /r/ alone.  The /r/ appears to be an epenthetic consonant
between contiguous vowels.  I say "appears to be" because, in
other cases in Catawba, when there are contiguous vowels in
Catawba, either one vowel is deleted or there is contraction.  If
this is the same epenthesis of /r/ that occurs in Plains Siouan
languges, it is archaic in Catawba, which might explain why it
has been lexicalized as a discontinuous marker of third person
plural.  In any event, before a truly /h/-initial verb that takes
prefixed subject markers in Catawba, one would expect the third
person plural to be marked either by /i-/ alone or, more usually,
by hi- (in analogy with the third person singular).

In summary, the "primative" motion verbs in Catawba appear to be
underlying /-ra:?-/ 'to go', /-u:?-/ 'to arrive, come', and /-
ku:?-/ 'to leave (?)'.  (I would second Paul's suggestion that
hau- is probably not "primative", whatever its origin [the
possibility of a prefix /ha(:)-/ does need looking into].)



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