a phonetic mystery

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Shannon West wrote:

> > It had nasalization associated with the morph preceding ktA.
> > If I recall correctly, Winnebago or Chiwere preserves the [iN].
>
> Okay.  I'm not sure I'm following this, so correct me if I'm off in left
> field.  Would this be what is going on in Assiniboine:
>
> wayaga - he sees
> wayagiNkta - he will see
...
Yes.  This is it, precisely.
>
> It goes on and on.  A lot of verbs with stress on the first syllable seem to
> be suseptible to this A--> iN ablaut (?) when -kta appears.

In theory, any verb that has a ~ e (or aN ~ e) [or as some write it A or
AN] should have iN as a third alternant before ktA.  Often, but not
always, A will be unaccented even when it is in the second syllable.  In
fact, unaccented "epenthetic" a in C-final roots is independent of A,
though it's strongly correlated with it.  The best survey of this is Pat
Shaw's dissertation.

The two major analyses are:

wayagA + kta => wayagiN-kta  (or A => iN / __#kta)

or

wayaga + iNkta => wayag-iNkta

As far as I know, only the first of these has ever been seriously
entertained by Dakotanists.

Also, while from a Dakotan perspective it makes sense to see a and aN as
the underlying final vowels, elsewhere in Siouan it's e that is seen as
the underlying vowel.  For one thing, only Dakotan does anything with aN;
for another only Dakotan uses a in what amount to citation forms.  In OP
essentially all e-final stems ablaut.  Most languages follow the Dakotan
pattern in which only some stems with the suitable final vowel ablaut.  I
suspect other Dhegiha languages follow the OP pattern.  I'm not sure about
Chiwere.

JEK