Attn: Dhegiholics.

[Koontz John E]

This is really great, Rory!

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002 rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu wrote:
> When I tried to conjugate it, though, I got into trouble.  Something
> like
>
>      Dhagdha'the dhathe'!
>
> sounded redundant, as the last word also means 'eat'.  In fact, at
> one point in there it seemed she was telling me that athe' itself
> could also mean 'eat', which it probably does if they elide the
> initial dh-.  (I ruefully recall a moment last semester when I was
> all ready to rush onto the list with news of the discovery of a
> brand new article, iNkhe'.)

I remember that iNkhe' (and the plural aNkha) in my own limited field
work, I think I also got ege for egidhe once.  Intervocalic dh tends to
disappear in fast speech.  I think Carolyn has found iNkshe in Osage, too,
for that matter, if I don't misremember.

I've noticed that Omaha speakers feel comfortable with second persons that
seem to be flat assertions about the hearer.  You notice this as soon as
you start to try to elicit paradigms.  They prefer a question in many
cases.  This discomfort is, I would say, much stronger than the discomfort
with immodest self-assessments in the first person, e.g., 'I am strong'.
I tend to put it down to pragmatic factors, but perhaps, given the use of
assertionals, it's appropriate to think of the unmarked sentence as a term
in the system and treat "unmarked" assertions regarding the hearer as
ungrammatical under some circumstances.  I have never tried to work this
out systematically, however, and this is an area of confusion and
unsupported hypotheses for me.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that there's a possibility that the
difficulty with second persons of -the 'must' falls under this heading.
It may actually be that -the lacks a second person.  It may not be
possible (or maybe it's just not "polite?") to say things like "you must
have tripped" or "you must be a complete idiot" or even more neutral
things like "you must be very happy/tired."  This would produce what
amounts to a defective paradigm, like Dakota epc^e 'I think', which can
only be first person.  (Perhaps this is related to the fact that OP edhe
'to think', can only occur in a sort of mitigated for using egaN 'it's
like, to be like':  ebdh=egaN, etc., though it does have all four
persons.)

In general, this might be a situation where it would be safest to start by
seeing what speakers produce as translations of various "you just have"
sentences in English.  The closest things to this sort of context that I
can recall from the texts involve 'I suspect' as a superordinate verb.  I
remember a sentence 'I suspect you're asleep' for a case where 'you must
be asleep' would have worked.

> In the first person, at least, I think we're clear that this form
> is valid and still used in Omaha.  Emmaline explained the word athe'
> as meaning you must have done something, and even offered an example
> of her own.  If someone tells you they were trying to get a hold of
> you at ten o'clock the previous morning, you can tell them:
>
>      AzhaN' athe'.
>      I must have been sleeping.

I agree that 'you must have been sleeping' or 'you must be asleep' would
be good examples, especially, as you know Ms. Sanchez liked the first
person.

It's also interesting that this is something that Omaha speakers liked,
but Ponca speakers didn't.  I should check the examples in the Dorsey
collection to see who produced them.