animate _wa-_

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

1)
In an historical listing of family heads in "Records of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs
Standing Rock Agency, Fort Yates, North Dakota Roll 5A: Record of
Rations Issued 1885
(http://www.primeau.org/StandingRock1885families.html) I found the
following proper names:

"Miniowicakte  -  Kill In the Water" (a)
"Tiowicukte     -  Kill In the House" (b)

2)
Buechel S.J. has in his dictionary:

tiwicakte [thi'wic^hakte]  -  a murderer, to commit murder (c)
tikte [thikte']  -  to murder (d)
and also
tiokte [thio'kte]  -  to kill in the house, commit homicide (e)

As it seems,
(a) is _mni owicakte_ [mni-o'wicha-kte] or [mni-owi'cha-kte]??,
(b) tiowicakte [thi-o'wicha-kte] or [thi-owi'cha-kte ??] (*_wicu_  looks
like a typo, as there are quite some mistakes in the listing)

Given that Dakotan namings very often refer to specific events/deeds in
the past, I'm inclined to assume that the English renderings here are
not specific enough. So, I'd translate

(a) as: "(he) has killed them in (the) water" and
(b) as: "(he) has killed them in the/a house"

with _-wica-_ refering to specific animate 3.Pl objects (which, from
context, most likely here have to be human <- enemies).
With regard to (b), I'd still tend to read _-wica-_ as a reference to
"enemies" (despite Buechel's pejorative denotation in (e) ):  Given that
Native names very often are given to honour their bearers, it would be
hard to assume that in this case someone was named by the term "Murderer").

So, I'd like to imagine that (a) and (b) are 'normal' sentences
following the topic-comment pattern

TOPIC
	COMMENT
mni
	owicakte
ti (kin/wan) 	owicakte


with the comment's wica-particle in its 'regular' function.


With regard to (c) and (d), this  might be different. With no locative
indicated in the 'word',  I'm getting the impression that it might be
kind of a fossilized term with a former topic (ti) now incorporated in
the comment sentence, not much unlike in expressions as _tii'un_
[thi-i'uN] [thi-i'yuN] (to do house-painting), where also from the
word's stress put on the second syllable one might deduce that it's a
comment-sentence:

TOPIC 	COMMENT
0
	tiwicakte
0
	tikte


Also, as it appears to me, the wica-part here seems to be different from
that in the 'regular' examples above. As Buechel's entry seems to
suggest, and Kostya has pointed out, it kind of indicates a nonspecific
(generic) object, here, that also might be more narrow in its 'animate'
meaning, namely referring to humans (wicasa?).

These being my amateurish considerations on the context of
"house-killing" (which - in Native society - apparably had been
regarded/estimated in a way different from "war/battle-killing" and
"hunt-killing"). But, maybe, it's all BS :(

Best regards

Alfred


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