Reduplicated 'say'

[Robert L. Rankin]

On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, Koontz John E wrote:

> This week Bob Rankin pointed out to me that Buechel's dictionary lists a
> Teton stem hey'aya (Buechel 1983:174a) 'to say much, to keep saying'. 
> This a reduplication of heya' 'to say that or this' (same page).  The
> inflectional pattern is hepha'pha, heha'ha, heya'ya, uNke'yaya=pi. 
> What's interesting here, of course, is that the reduplicated syllable
> includes the irregular inflection in the first and second person. 

> David Rood tells me that his instinctive feeling with these forms is
> that they represent reduplication before inflection. Either way it's
> interesting that the inflection gets repeated in the first and second
> persons. 

This does pose an interesting ordering problem for morphology.  What's
happened historically I think is that the inflection has simply become
opaque to speakers, who now no longer recognize -p- as an allomorph of wa-
'1st person actor', i.e., the inflection has simply been lexicalized.  I
wonder if those few other archaic verbs do the same thing.  Either hi
'arrive' or ?u 'come'(or both) has a 1st sg. in p-, which, if
reduplicated, should produce *phVphV. 

Bob