Outer instrumentals.

Rankin, Robert L rankin at ku.edu
Fri Jan 11 19:19:21 UTC 2002


Many thanks to Randy for pointing out those truly interesting forms in Crow.
So it looks like ALL the instrumentals are reconstructible in Proto Siouan
now.  But there is still some sort of relative chronology separating the
"inner" ones from the "outer" ones.

John Koontz writes:

>In Omaha-Ponca, and, I think, Dhegiha generally, the equivalent of
*wa-o- > *wo'- is accented u'- (or uu'-) as opposed to unaccented u- from
just *o-.  The development of *wa-?o > *Wo# > OP mu(u)'= is a bit different,
because of timing (when in the history of Siouan) and/or the glottal stop.

>Is there any possibility that Crow oo' could be a case of wa-o-?  I'm
interested, because I'm not entirely convinced that the ?-initial of
?-stems is organic.  It sometimes looks to me more like just the onset
of V-initials combined with some reanalysis.

I tend to agree that vowel-initial stems do funny things. Some insert [?] in
some languages, some seem to insert /r/ and some /w/ also, and Winnebago
inserts /h/ before initial short V's.  BUT I think we mustn't confuse these
synchronic constraints/processes with the, clearly very old /?/ that occurs
consistently with roots like ?iN 'wear', ?u:N 'do, be', ?o: 'wound', ?e:
'demonstrative' and others. These are quite different phenomena.  It may be
that these "organic" glottal stops were at some remote time epenthetic, but
it is clear from the cognate sets we have that they were phonologized in
pre-proto-Siouan.

There's still a lot of comparative phonology yet to be done!!

Bob



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