"WOUND"

Koontz John E John.Koontz at colorado.edu
Fri May 12 15:54:50 UTC 2006


On Mon, 8 May 2006 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote:
> However, the fact that there are several suffixes that follow the
> citation form rather than the stem, as John notes, leads one to wonder
> if there isn't a deeper historical explanation.

The Crow theme vowel-citation forms do have a very "automatic" feel to
them, and since, as Randy mentioned, they are missing in Hidatsa, it is
unclear, within Crow-Hidatsa, whether Crow or Hidatsa innovates.  But, not
only are the theme vowel forms before suffixes suggestive within Crow, but
the suffixes in question seem to be cognate with suffixes in Mississippi
Valley Siouan that have the same behavior.  So, I think we can assume that
Hidatsa is the innovator, not Crow.  This whole area, however, is one that
involves either a small group of irregular relicts (as in Dakotan and in
some Omaha-Ponca cases) or a rather generalized, automatic situation (as
in Crow or Omaha-Ponca), so no doubt there is some work to be done with
it.



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