Biloxi "ko"

[David Kaufman]

Thanks John.  I'll see what comes up after I look further into this.

By the way, did you have any comments on my prior email about Dorsey's Biloxi u-circumflex actually representing /a/ based on a few more cross-comparative examples I found with Dakota, as well as a Muskogean borrowing (Chickasaw falammi > x[u circum]n[u circum]mi) which looks to be actually "xanami"?   I think I have Bob fairly convinced, although I would like to gather some more cross-linguistic data to further support it.  But perhaps there is at least the draft of a presentation or paper in the works with what I have so far.....

Thanks,
Dave

Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu> wrote:
Compare Omaha-Ponca gu, something like 'thither' or 'yonder', presumably
related to ga 'that (more remote)', maybe 'yon'. The glossing of
demonstratives is a tricky business, and the glosses I'm providing are not
necessarily idiomatic or apt in context. The OP set is something like dhe
'this', s^e 'that (near you)', ga 'yon', and, in parallel with these, du,
s^u, and gu. S^u is definitely 'toward you' and is regularly compounded
with motion verbs, though du and gu occur in the pattern less commonly,
too.

There's also a locative particle dhu used with dhe in dhedhu. Wes Jones
has an article or two in print on the tendency of similar shapes to show
up on Siouan languages as both demonstrative and locative pospositions,
and the probable non-coincidence of this.

You can find variants of the standard Siouan demonstratives *Re (or *re ?
or *te ?), *s^e (or *he ?), and *ka with the substituted vowel o or u in
many of the Siouan languages, though I don't recall any clear Dakotan
examples. Perhaps this results from prepending demonstratives to verbs
with the *o-locative.

You can find a lot of material on Siouan locatives and positionals in the
archives of the Siouan list.

Although use of positional verbs (stand/sit/lie/walk) with demonstratives
is a Southeastern feature as Bob points out, it's pretty common in Siouan,
southeastern or not. It's more or less common in Mandan, Winnebago, and
Dhegiha, and, of course, in Biloxi. In Dhegiha the particles in question
have become the definite articles, or, rather, some of the definite
articles, but still occur regularly with demonstratives. Bob has a
published article on Siouan positionals that you should probably track
down.

Cross-linguistically, if a language has some kind of classifier or
shape/positional scheme, it is likely to use them with counting and/or
with demonstrative constructions.


		
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