interrogative -indefinites

shokooh Ingham shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Sep 30 13:10:06 UTC 2005


Dear Siouanists
Since Willem deReuse's interesting paper at our last
conference about morphological resemblances between
Siouan and Athabaskan, I'm becoming interested in
resemblances between Lakota and Cree.  Obviously (I
suppose) any resemblances there are would be the
result of contact or linguistic diffusion and not
cognates.  One feature that I note is that both have,
though not to the same extent, the phenomenon of
interrogative-indefinites.  Lakota has this to a very
highly developed extent with its T-words taku 'what,
something', tuwe 'who, someone', tuktel 'where,
somewhere', tohan 'when, sometime' etc.  Cree has it
but not to such a degree as Lakota and they even begin
with T- in some cases.  I was wondering whether the
interrogative-indefinites also ocur in other
Siouan-Caddoan languages.  My La Flesche volume on
Omaha is not very clear on the point.  My Ojibway does
not reveal such a system and my English-Crow
dictionary is not clear on the point.
So first question is do other Siouan languages have
T-words.  Second question is are they interrogatives,
indefinites or interrogative-indefinites?

Yours
Bruce




		
___________________________________________________________ 
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com



More information about the Siouan mailing list