"to wound"

Koontz John E John.Koontz at colorado.edu
Sat Jul 22 05:42:51 UTC 2000


On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, R. Rankin wrote:
> Speaking of peculiar verbs, we still do not have a Dhegiha conjugated
> set for *?o: 'to wound' or 'to shoot at and hit'.  Dorsey 1890 pretty
> consistently puts the glottal stop in this one in Omaha:
...
> wi u dhiNgexti  (439.8)  'I wound no one'

I was bothered by this example, as inflection with an independent pronoun
alone would be very interesting.  I've finally gotten around to looking it
up, and it turns out to be something else, unfortunately:

439.8

wi'   u'    dhiNge'=xti      ubdhaN=tta=miNkhe
I  [0 wound he-really-lacks] I-will-seize-him

It's from a series of bosts by participants in a warparty as it sets out.
This person promises to take hold of an unwounded enemy.

I had no better luck in finding an inflected form in the Dorsey texts, but
I found the following in LaFlesche's ms. text:

a-u-te shti woN
a[?]u=        the=         s^tewaN
I wounded him the (places) (where)so ever
"the wounds that I made "

This suggests that the verb was inflected regularly for Francis LaFlesche.

Marino gives the Winnebago inflection as:

'o 'to shoot', ha?o=naN 'I shoot', s^?o=naN 'you shoot'

=naN is the declarative, length is not marked here

This is the regular ?-stem inflection, cf.

'u 'to be, to do, to use, make, act, work at' ha?uN..., s^?uN..., ... form
the same source.  Again. length is not marked.

Buechel lists o 'to shoot, to hit when shooting' with wao for the first
person [wa?o (?) JEK] and uNk?opi for the inclusive (k', upright
apostrophe).

(I've been substituting orthography as I got in all sources, as usual, but
not trying to intuit length in the Winnebago forms.)

JEK



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