animate _wa-_

[Rory M Larson]

Hello Alfred,

> Yes, you totally convinced me on that :-) (But there are real typos in
> the list, too, which nevertheless is an important, interesting and even
> somewhat touching historical document.)

Sorry for the overkill.  I got carried away, and I
actually wasn't too clear on how widespread the sound
was even in English.


> I'm not a linguist of German language either - rather than an aged
> native 'speaker' ;-),

Better yet!

> yet, thinking it over, I can say that, not unlike
> in Dakota, all this stuff is higly idiomatic also in German (and
> especially with regard to verbal expressions!).  Rendering your nice
> sentence to be grammatical (I remember Steven Pinker's examples like
> 'bringed'), as "er hat sie hausumgebracht",

Ouch!  I was afraid I was going to get dinged on that!
I had no references at hand, and somehow it crept into
my mind that German considered the act of killing
somebody to be dative.  Thanks for setting me straight;
it seems it is accusative, as expected!

> it still isn't possible to
> say that! The only German equivalence in structure to Lakota _tikte_
> etc.  coming to my mind is 'hausschlachten', more commonly used as
> nominal '(die) Hausschlachtung' (lit. about: to home-slaughter). It's a
> comparably old - hence familiar! - term for the butcher coming to the
> farm to kill the cattle there instead of bringing it to the slaughter
> house. So, the following utterances are possible:

   [numerous examples of valid, invalid, and dubious
    noun-modifying-verb possibilities in German and Hungarian]

Alright, I guess it isn't completely free in German
either, though it still looks like it's a little more
used than in English.  A complicating factor occurs to
me.  In English, we can fairly freely use a noun to
modify another noun to get a noun result.  We can also
easily coin a verb from a noun without any alteration
to the original word.

       rail + road => railroad
       noun + noun => noun
       (rail describes the kind of road)

       railroad =C> railroad
       noun     =C> verb
       (railroad, v. to push a measure through without
                  proper discussion.)

Then what about 'ice-skate', used as a verb?  Is this
an English example of modifying a verb with a noun, or
is it noun modifying noun to get the noun 'ice-skate',
then converted into the verb of what one does with them?

In any case, your point about these terms being idiomatic
is well taken.  Some combinations are pretty free; others
can occur, but only in traditional combinations.  In
English, and I think in German and MVS, noun + noun
modification is fairly free: if I wanted to describe the
(improbable) concept of a class of desks that are
specifically used in forests, I could immediately speak
of forest desks, and this would be quite acceptable.
But it would not be acceptable for me to say that I am
going to forest view, though I could say that I am going
to ice skate.  So what is the situation in Siouan?  If I
can say ti-kte, 'house-kill', and mni-kte, 'water-kill',
are these idiomatic, or can I freely substitute any other
semantically reasonable noun for ti and mni?  Could I
freely say 'forest-kill', 'hearth-kill', 'bed-kill',
'prairie-kill', 'hill-kill', 'snowdrift-kill', or
anything similar, as might be appropriate?

Best regards,

Rory