Another (?) Omaha particle.

[R. Rankin]

I have to be careful about starting a new thread here because I've
already taken on the whole Colorado National Guard and am spending half
my mornings doing email!  But... In working up a paper on discourse here
I chose the story of "The rabbit and the turkeys" (Dorsey 1890 pp.
557ff.) because I have that story in three different Siouan languages.
In it Dorsey has numerous instances of the particle /aN'/ (accented
nasal [a]) with the meaning he translates consistently as 'having'.
These appear to be essentially perfects in that, in most if not all
cases, they signal that some event had *already* taken place when the
action or state of the main verb in the sentence does.  The particle
never appears as naN or dhaN.  It is this latter auxiliary that seems to
have an imperfective meaning in Quapaw.  It is clearly derived from *?uN
'do' (or maybe 'be') and is conjugated, as we have noted several times,
m-aN, z^-aN, naN.

Do those of you doing Omaha and Ponca think that the aN from the
rabbit/turkeys story is the same as the dhaN that Dorsey translates
'past'?  or is it something new?

Bob

--
Robert L. Rankin, Visiting Professor
Research Center for Linguistic Typology
Institute for Advanced Study
La Trobe University
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