Information

[David Kaufman]

Your point is well taken.  But at the risk of perhaps sounding too "Whorfian," I can't help but wonder if there is a different concept at work in many Native American languages which display this type of grammatical construct.  I hark back to Whorf's example from Hopi in which he says that the English version of rehpi, "flashed," must be translated into English as "It flashed" or "a light flashed" as if there is a separate entity doing the flashing, even though the English "it," "light," and "flash" are one and the same.  And this is only because we MUST have a noun and a verb for a "complete" English sentence, forced by English grammar, which is obviously not true in many of these Native languages.  There seems to be ample evidence from several Native languages that there is a much more "fluid" thought process going on, including a story I heard that a Mikmaq speaker, when translating from English into his own language, did not utter a single noun in his translation, even though the English version was full of them!  The crux of my proposed article is that there may indeed be a different thought process among many Native American speakers in which they think in a more verby way, with the grammars of their languages permitting an implicit sense of a perceiver-perceived relationship and process/systems thinking not grammatically permitted in Indo-European languages where we tend to ignore fluidity and process and focus more on concrete "objects."  I keep wondering if this indeed could lead to a different "thought" process based on the inherent differences in grammar.

Perhaps I'm too "out there" with this, but it is an interesting question and debate and might make for good reading!

Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: Rgraczyk at aol.com
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2002 11:55 AM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Information

In a message dated 12/12/2002 1:45:29 PM Mountain Standard Time, dvklinguist at hotmail.com writes:


I know Hidatsa, for instance, has a grammatical construct which essentially makes any noun into a verb by adding a sentence final -c, which is also a sentence-final marker.  Thus, I think the word wacawiri "bowl" can become wacawiric, which, as best I can tell, would literally mean something like "It is bowl-ing."




In constructions like these, Hidatsa and Crow simply lack a copula.  I don't think it's accurate to say that this construction transforms a noun into a verb; perhaps it would be better to say that the noun functions as a predicate.  Wacawiric is best translated 'it is a bowl', not 'it is bowl-ing.'

Randy
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