land=mother???

Koontz John E John.Koontz at colorado.edu
Thu Aug 22 21:40:36 UTC 2002


On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, R. Rankin wrote:

> Ioway-Otoe hiN- is, I think, definitely to be associated with earlier
> *miN-.

Agreed.  Of course, I'm referring here to the first person inalienable
possessive prefix.

> There are a few other terms that show the same h/m/w alternation (or
> replacement) pattern.

As far as I can recollect hiN- ~ miN- within IO only in the sense that
certain auxiliary verbs have miN- in the first person, whereas most verbs
gave hiN- for the first person patient.

Actually, there's not trace of w ~ m in the first person in Mississippi
Valley except in Dakotan (where w ~ m are general), in syncopated first
persons that have *p- still represented as b or m (like Dakotan y-stems or
?-stems bluha, muN), in Dhegiha wi- A1P2 (equivalent of Dakotan c^hi-), in
Dhegiha first person possessive wi-, and in those IO miN- forms.  Other
forms have h- (IO and Wi) or 0 (zero) (Dhegiha).  So:

                Da        OP        IO         Wi
Possessive      ma/i(N)-  wi-/iN-   hiN-       ---
Regular A1      wa-       a-        ha-        ha-
Regular P1      ma(N)-    aN-       hiN-/miN-  hiN-
Notes           mi(N)-    iN-

Notes:  Da mi(N)- is the form in the possessive and second dative.
        Dh iN is the P1 form in the (only) dative.
        IO miN- occurs with certain positional stems as first person.

Winnebago has epenthetic h- before initial V, but IO does not.  Both IO
and Wi lose initial h in the first person when some other morpheme comes
before the first person.

I've suggested elsewhere that the IO and Wi regular P1 forms are
contamination from the dative paradigm.  In essence the old dative
paradigm as attested in OP has replaced the regular transitive paradigm.
There is serious rearranging of the dative paradigms in IO and Wi anyway.
This part looks essentially like an antipassive run wild.

> I seriously wonder/doubt if Dhegiha iN- is cognate with the IO prefix;
> the alternation is semi-regular for IO but not at all in Dhegiha.  I
> guess I always just assumed that terms for 'ones own parent' didn't
> need a possessor since they were always possessed by their antecedant.
> And I don't think iN- a loan either.

The iN- is definitely extra on the front of the first persons of father
and mother, e.g., dadi' 'father (VOC) vs. iNda'di 'my father'.  These
forms have the stem -dadi. The second person is dhi-adi, the third is
idh-adi (epenthetic dh after i).  These have the alternate stem -adi.

The two things that may explain iN- here as something other than an
arbitrary fact are the IO first person possessive hiN- and the OP dative
iN-, which are not necessarily related of course other than by both being
first persons.  Etymologically the iN- on the front of iNs?a'ge 'elder' is
also extra, but it's apparently fixed in OP.

I don't mean to imply that the first person possessive in OP 'father' and
'mother' is borrowed from IO, but only that it arises in the same way in
Proto-MV, but is restricted as to which kin terms it applies to.
Elsewhere in OP the first person possessive prefix is wi- as in wine'gi
'my mother's brother'.  Dh wi- actually looks more like an innovation than
iN- given the Dakotan and IO forms.



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