Locative Postpositions

[Alan H. Hartley]

Paul Voorhis wrote:

> For what it's worth, I took this up with a sophisticated, educated, Dakota
> speaker.  I pointed out that a voiced stop at the end of a word is normally
> reduced from a voiceless stop plus an unstressed vowel, and then I asked her
> for the unreduced form of "ed".  Without hesitation she said "eta".  She took
> the "-ta" to be the same as in "tiyata", "ekta" and in placenames.  I told her
> I thought maybe it was "etu" rather than "eta", and she allowed that I could be
> right.  She is not one to let "the great linguist" lead her astray, so I gather
> from this that she had either actually heard "etu" spoken sometime in the past,
> or that she associated it at that moment with words like "xtayetu/xtayed".

OK, getting really basic--and my apologies to any impatient
Siouanists--what is the difference in meaning of a word in -n/-l/-d if
the suffix represents -etu rather than -ta ? (I'm still waiting for Boas
& Deloria from ILL, which perhaps will answer this sort of question.)

Thanks,
Alan