vowel initial stems are not glottal initial in Lak

[David Rood]

Dear Bob, John,  et al,
	Naturally it would behoove me to do some homework before plunging
into this, since I haven't memorized even the regular sound laws for
Dakotan or Siouan yet, but I jump in recklessly anyway.  I need to point
out, in the light of the 'come' discussion with Blair et al., that there
is a CONTRAST synchronically in Lakhota between vowel-initial and
glottal-initial stems.  It shows up in the dual forms by contrasting uNkV
with uNk?V.  (By the way, dollar signs appear just fine on this computer.)
	I haven't memorized all the right examples, but 'come' is
definitely vowel-initial (uNku pi), whereas 'use' and 'be' are both
glottal initial (uNk?uN pi).  "i" 'to arrive going' is vowel initial, I
think, and I'm not sure about 'shoot' or 'wear around the shoulders'
(stems "o" and "iN", respectively).  Buechel gives "uNk?o" for shoot, and
that sounds right, but I can't check "iN" since it occurs in Buechel
only in compounds (and I can't think of an example to look up right now).
So it seems to me that your alleged parallel between 'come' and 'shoot'
might be wrong -- it's not analogy that keeps 'shoot' from having *bo as
the first person, but whatever the ancestor of that glottal stop is.  'to
think', echiN, conjugates echami, echani, but uNkechiN pi, unfortunately
-- and I'm not sure this "iN" is the same as the shawl verb anyway.  It is
perhaps significant, however, that it's echiN and not *ec?iN.
	David
David S. Rood
Professor of LInguistics
Institut fuer Sprachwissenschaft
Universitaet zu Koeln
D-50923 Koeln
email: rood at uni-koeln.de
email: rood at colorado.edu


On Sun, 4 Apr 1999, Robert L. Rankin wrote:

>
> On Sun, 4 Apr 1999 BARudes at aol.com wrote:
>
> > extent it is relevant, the corresponding stem for 'arrive, come' in Catawba
> > is -uu?-, not -huu?- as sometimes listed elsewhere (e.g., Siebert 1945, which
> > contains a number of underanalyzed forms).  The conjugation is: c^uu?- 'I
> > come', yuu?- 'you come', huu?- 'he comes' (where h- is the 3rd singular
> > marker), etc.
>
> That's an interesting observation in light of the fact that 'come' is a
> verb for which the sound correspondences are irregular.  Several languages
> treat it as {hu:}, but Dakotan (perhaps others) has {?u}.  And there are
> also interesting correspondences between syllable-initial and
> syllable-final glottalization across Siouan.  If the Catawban 3rd person
> can definitively be shown to have been h- and Siebert proved wrong on
> this, we would have a good analogical model to explain the Siouan
> reflexes.
>
> Bob
>
>