Ablaut (RE: Obviative/Proximate and the Omaha verb system)

[Wablenica]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> [mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of Koontz John E
> Most Siouan languages behave as if in the ablauting set e ~ a the e were
> basic.  Dakotan, does not, in two ways.  One is that there are also some e
> ~ aN stems, like yatkaN 'to drink' (cf. OP dhattaN).  The other is that a-
> and aN-final variants seem to be preferred as citation forms.

--Talking about citation forms, I'm inclined to think that at least two of
the native speaker use -e form as a basic one - Violet Catches and Albert
WhiteHat in their language books.

> It's sort of challenge to Dakotanists - one they haven't really taken up -
> or to comparative Siouanists in general - likewise - to explain how
> Dakotan came to be so different.  Why does aN alternate with e?  Why are
> the a-vowel grade the citation forms?

--Besides other reasons, -a form is a "default" form when any of the 25 000
words that do not trigger ablaut is following an -A/-AN verb. Among any
class of words - enclitics, determiners, postpositions - there are both
triggers and non-triggers of ablaut.

>
> The iN allomorph of A and AN in Dakotan doesn't occur in all the dialects,
> but it is found in Teton with the future =ktA.  Nothing exactly like it is
> found elsewhere in Siouan.

=ktA triggers -a > -iN ablaut in Assiniboine too, at least in some
subdialects (Shaw, 1980)
Besides, -iN ablaut occurs in Lakota before:
conjunctions na, nahaN, naiNsh;
familiar imperative yetxo' (m.s.) (not everywhere?);
polite imperative ye (all sexes) (interchangeably with -i : o'makiyi ye!
help me! - o'kiyA, to help)

Connie miye yelo.