Crow Motion Verbs

Koontz John E John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU
Sun Apr 11 04:18:38 UTC 1999


On Sat, 10 Apr 1999 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote:
> There are still some details to be worked out, but I am suggesting that kuu'
> is actually a compound motion verb composed of forms of the 'arrive' stem
> (Crow and Hidatsa have merged the two PSi 'arrive' stems) plus vertitive
> kuu'.  This fits the patterns noted in Taylor's article: 'arrive' stem plus
> 'motion prior to arrival' stem.

I've always found the Crow-Hidatsa motion verbs fascinating.  It sure
looks like analogy run amuck.  It's interesting to think that some of it
may have come from verb compounding, because that would yet another
indication that Crow-Hidatsa had once been more like a Mississippi Valley
language, but one potential problem with that in this case is that only
the (k)kuu part is clearly vertitive, whereas in the Dakotan examples, if
one stem is vertitive, so is the other.  Of course, this is the only
vertitive stem in Crow, and Dhegiha suggests that MV actually has quite a
bit of variety in verb compounding patterns.

What do you think about the d's in the plural stems of the h-initials,
Randy?



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