Demonstratives

[Kathleen Shea]

I can offer only a few anectodal examples of uses of gu- I've recently heard
in Ponca.  I'm told that the phrase "Guda, guda, guda!"  (roughly, "Watch
out! Get out of the way!") is very useful in shinny games.  Also, recently
at a sermon by the minister of the Ponca Holiness Church, in which he
interspersed Ponca with English, he addressed the devil with the command,
"Gudiha maNdhiNga!" (translated later for me by the minister as "Get the
hell out of here!").  By the way, I happened to hear at the same sermon a
seemingly rare example of the second person form addressed to God,
"Egis^e...." ("That's what you've said...."), the first person form egiphe
("Thus I said...") being more common in my experience.  S^aN ("enough,
finished") is often used to end prayers or talks, but so far I haven't heard
s^enaN or s^edhaN.  However, very little spoken Ponca is heard nowadays in
Oklahoma, which is why you'll have to forgive me if I'm rhapsodizing about
the few phrases that I do hear in public speeches or conversations!

Kathy Shea

----- Original Message -----
From: "Koontz John E" <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>
To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 1:08 PM
Subject: Re: Demonstratives


> >From rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu Mon Apr  9 09:34:24 2001
> > In English, we normally restrict ourselves to a two-level system:
> > "this" = "look toward the speaker"; and "that" = "look away from
> > the speaker".  The Siouan languages have a three-level system,
> > e.g. Lakhota:  le / he / ka, or Omaha:  dhe / she / ga.  Could we
> > reasonably gloss these as:  le / dhe = "look toward the speaker";
> > he / she = "look toward the listener, or to an item the listener is
> > familiar with";  ka / ga = "look away from both the speaker and
> > the listener" ?
>
> The 'located relative to you' sense of s^e seems very strong in OP, at
> least to judge from the glosses in Dorsey.  Use of the related s^u form as
> proclitic with motion verbs to form an intermediate set 'toward you'
> opposed to the regular 'to here' and 'to there' forms is also fairly
> pronounced.  There are a lot of examples of this for OP because of the
> number of letters recorded in OP.  Note that in the context of these
> letters s^u definitely can refer to someone out of sight and far away.
> It is possible to use du and gu with motion verbs, too, but this is much
> less common, and most tokens of these are as conversational pronominals
> and directionals, du=akha 'hither-the', du=adi 'this direction', etc.
> There's some waffling on whether du/gu need -a- before =di.  I've also
> seen gu=di ga hau!  '(go) that way IMPERATIVE'.
>
> For the comparativists, the expected form dhu corresponding to dhe occurs
> as a locative suffix, mostly with dhe, e.g., dhedhu=di (often dheu(=di)).
> The form used in analogy with dhe in the "u" series is du.  The regular
> correspondent of Lakota le would be *ne, not found (dhe occurs instead),
> and the analogical *nu is also not found (du occurs instead), so du
> doesn't seem to revert to a more regular or less reduced initial than dhe.
> There are traces of "o" or "u" vowel demonstratives in other Siouan
> languages, e.g., Winnebago.
>
> The main s^u-motion verb instance that I noticed in fieldword (s^u=dhe 'to
> go toward you') occurred when there was a power failure at the school that
> left the interior room full of elders where I was working completely
> blacked out.  The supervisor (WW) of the group stood up and maneuvered
> through the darkened room to open the door, announcing as he came
> "s^u'=bdhe!  s^u'=bdhe!" or 'I am going to you, I am going to you'.
>
> I've also noticed that the s^e demonstrative is common as story enders,
> e.g., s^e'=naN 'so many wrt you', s^e'=thaN 'so far wrt you'.  I take this
> is a sort of listener orientation or involvements strategy with the
> implicit references being to the words or incidents of the story and to
> the progression of the plot or story cycle.  This is from Dorsey,
> primarily, not personal experience.
>
> I'm inclined to suggest that in the OP context s^e/s^u is the added
> axis, as it were, and that the basic spatial references are dhe and ga.
>
> I noticed in eliciting demonstratives that Omaha speakers felt no need to
> map dhe/ga to the English set in my stylized way.  I was told flatly that
> ga was this and dhe was that.  I fell back in disarray for the moment and
> later concluded without having a chance to investigate further that the
> pragmatics of using the OP demonstratives were sufficiently distinct from
> those of English that speakers did not see the analogical mapping that
> linguists did.  I had already noticed a similar disjunction between
> linguistic glossing of motion verbs and speaker glossing in translations.
> Putting it another way, linguists gloss these terms the way they do
> because they see some general analogy between this/that and dhe/ga (etc.),
> but I hypothesize that speakers know that in practical use dhe maps to
> both this and that and ga to both this and that, depending on the context
> and lack any presumption, for example, that dhe is primarily or
> prototypically equivalent to this.
>
> Or, on the other hand, it might have been a shifter problem:  my 'this'
> was the speaker's ga.
>
> > If so, would this be the general rule for three-level demonstrative
> > systems?  (If this has all just been discussed, I apologize-- I just
> > got on the list and haven't gone through the archives yet.)
>
> It's been alluded to in passing only.  Actually the basis distinctions
> among terms in demonstrative sets with more than one terms is fairly
> variable, though proximal vs. distal is common for two terms.  A third,
> more distal term might involve person, distance, visibility, time, death,
> or other factors.  I'm afraid I'm not actually able to suggest any
> typological studies.  Anyone?
>