Omaha/Dakota k?uN cognates.

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 22 Jun 2000, R. Rankin wrote:
> I think John has discovered the Omaha cognate for Dakotan k?uN 'the
> past'.  It is (e)gaN.  The match is nearly perfect.  Dhegiha dialects
> lost a lot (not all!) of the organic glottal stop reflexes.  *uN > aN in
> Omaha and Ponca.  The Kansa cognate for Omaha egaN is (denasalized) ego,
> suggesting that the original nasal vowel in this particle was indeed
> *uN.  The e- on the front is most likely the demonstrative and seems to
> be removable anyway.  And best of all, the semantics match (as David
> pointed out).  A lot of the arguments we have on the list have to do
> with (lack of) semantic confirmation, but in this case it looks really
> good.

I'd have to say that I thought Bob's own explanation in terms of a
contraction of ki and *(r)uN 'past' made good sense to me.

I do think that OP aN is from PS *(?)uN, cf. one or more of the Dakotan
forms under discussion.  But I'm not sure that the evidence for the uNK
form with ?-stems, leading to inclusive persons cf. Da uNk?uN 'it exists
for us' extends outside of Dakotan, and without that sort of form evidence
for ?-initials per se (as opposed to vowle-initials) is rather limited.

In any event Dakotan does have them, and we'd expect perhaps DEM=k?uN for
the dative of DEM=?uN, true enough.

I think that egaN as a 'preceding event subordinator' is restricted to
Omaha-Ponca in Dhegiha.

Though Dakotan has the ?uN stem, it seems to prefer kha ~ c^ha as an alaog
of uN in all the morphological sequences where Dhegiha so loves *uN.  So
you get ec^ha, etc., and even e=c^h(a)=uN 'to do'.  Forms like ga=kha and
to=kha show that it's underlying =kha here.

JEK