Sky and clouds

Shannon West shanwest at uvic.ca
Thu Feb 15 23:46:13 UTC 2001


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> [mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of RLR
> Sent: February 14, 2001 2:20 PM
> To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
> Subject: Re: Sky and clouds
>
>
> > In Mark Swetland's UmoNhoN Iye of Elizabeth Stabler, 'sky'
> is maNghe and 'cloud' is maNxpi (slightly re-spelled, of
> course).  So clouds are plural sky?
>
> I don't think so, but I'm not certain. I suspect the -pi or -piya that
> occurs on maNghe to make 'cloud' is just a derivational
> morpheme of some
> kind -- not the pluralizer. The forms I'm familiar with have
> an umlauted
> [u"] after -p-, not an i. [maxpu"ya]. I would have expected
> the Dakotan
> form then to have -pu rather than -pi, but it doesn't seem
> to, so I'm a
> little unsure of my ground here. In any event, nothing about this is
> obvious to me.

For Assiniboine, I've got maxpiya for 'sky' and amaxpiya for 'cloud', and
aohazi for 'cloudy'.  That last one is from Jerome Fourstar's Assiniboine
Dictionary, the others from my notes.

Shannon



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