CHIWERE etymology

Koontz John E John.Koontz at colorado.edu
Sat Mar 4 23:26:40 UTC 2000


On Fri, 3 Mar 2000, Robert L. Rankin wrote:
> In some instances the strings of particles get lexicalized
> and acquire some meaning greater that the sum of their semantic parts.
>
> As for Siouan 101, I don't think any of us understands these things,
> especially the lexicalized ones ...

That about sums it up.  Things I don't understand about this form or
Chiwere in general (not that I claim to understand Chiwere in general,
anyway!):

- Why/how j^egi alternates with j^i
- What gi accomplishes in this form
- Why Chiwere has we instead of he
- What Chiwere i- vs. e- indicates, and where the i- forms come from
- What the -re is in this form
- Where Chiwere =gi LOCATIVE comes from
- That wa morpheme or morphemes that Jimm brought up

Does that leave anything I do claim to understand?

I'd be happy to discuss these further, in or out of the context of the
word j^iwere!

Mainly what I can say bout the word is that tit seems to be one of those
deictic/demonstative/verb of motion/causative/auxiliary strings, and that
parts of it sure look like they follow the patterns of these for Chiwere.
The whole is close enough to the OP word Dhegiha in form (as this form
would be mapped into Chiwere's different path out of Proto-(Mississippi
Valley) Siouan) for me to suspect that Dorsey got the meaning right
(presumably from speakers of his time, though, and not by deduction from
the morphology).



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