More on Long Vow(e)ls

Koontz John E John.Koontz at colorado.edu
Mon Mar 19 21:02:20 UTC 2001


As long as I'm thinking about it, there are some other accentual things
in OP that I noticed in Dorsey after my fieldwork that I've always
wondered about.

One of them is pretty straight forward and not much real help, except
perhaps historically.  This is that the syncopated pronominals with
dh-stems (or th-stems) and others behave as if they were moras for
accentuation.

So it's

bdha'the 'I eat'
(s^)na'the 'you eat'

and

aNdha'tha(=i) 'we eat'

but

dhatha'(=i) 'he/she eats'

Notice that the b and (now lost) s^ act like syllables (in some sense) to
pull stress to the first syllable of the root, just as the inclusive aN
and various other prefixes do.

(Yes, *r or *dh in *s^r or *s^dh is acting like *R, and it does so in
Dakotan, too, but not in Ioway-Otoe or Winnebago.)

I guess that something like this is happening in gaghe, too:

ppa'ghe
s^ka'ghe

aNga'gha(=i)

gagha'=i


And in daNbe 'see':

ttaN'be
s^taN'be

aNdaN'ba(=i)

daNba'(=i)

Of course with the pleonastic modern first and second persons in attaN'be,
dhas^taN'be this pattern is erased here.

I think I am remembering all this correctly, but I have the impression
that some of these stems have initial stress when the plural/proximate
marker is missing, e.g., ga'ghe, daN'be, etc.  But dhathe'?  Which would
seem to be saying that OP has an analog of the unaccentable final vowels
in Dakotan in some contexts.

Needless to say, these are the kind of stems where one might expect to
find some long vowels perhaps varying under different accentual schemes,
e.g., ??gaa'ghe ~ ??ga(?)gha'=i.

JEK



More information about the Siouan mailing list