"WOUND"

Justin McBride jmcbride at kawnation.com
Mon May 1 15:40:49 UTC 2006


For the Kaw 'wound' verb, Dorsey has the following slip (bear in mind that 
Dorsey's "u" character represents Kaw /o/, and that "aú" is how he writes 
the male declarative):

------------
u, v. to wound

awá e aú, I have wounded it (=á-u-á-ye aú ?)
yúa e aú, hiN, have you wounded it?

taciyaNmaká édji úbe aú, Cayáni abá: the Cheyennes wounded him on his knee;

(note that the é of édji above also bears a bowl-shaped breve mark on the
slip -jm)
------------

Tricky stuff.  For instance, much of his analysis suggests that the headword 
form probably ought to be a causative construction, o ye.  Then again, one 
doesn't usually inflect both verbs used in a causative construction, and his 
3rd person example isn't a causative at all (óbe).  Notice also that he 
doesn't complete a morpheme breakdown for his 2nd person example like he 
does for his 1st, perhaps because it's difficult to account for a regular 
causative inflection under his assumptions (what happened to the y of a2s 
ya-). Furthermore, the verb is made all the trickier by the fact that some 
of the salient details of its construction, i.e., the o root and the y 
element of the causative ye, bear striking resemblances to the usual 
epenthetic glides w and y that emerge in certain casual speech environments 
and that may be omitted generally as non-phonemic.  Here, though, they're 
not epenthetic at all.  Lastly, while the root preserves the entire a1s a- 
and sheds its own primary stress (awá instead of áwa or aóa), it seems to 
"swallow up" the a element of the a2s ya- and take on primary stress (yóa 
instead of yawá or yáwa).

It may be best to think of this verb as an especially ornery bird, and just 
consider it all as is.  At least in Kaw...

-jm 



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