Some proto-Siouan verbal auxiliary particles.

[Catherine Rudin]

What Bob said!!
I'm not going to take it on, certainly not any time soon, but SOMEBODY
should definitely take a careful look at all this data and tell the rest
of us the results.  Fascinating!!
Catherine

>>> "Rankin, Robert L"  09/15/11 5:55 PM >>>
For those of you who are bored with the back and forth about Siouan
syllable structure, I wanted to repeat here a portion of my latest reply
to Rory.  It's on a different topic.  Any of you who have taken a look
at the Comparative Siouan Dictionary may have noticed several recurring
endings on reconstructed verbs.  Many aspects of these remain
unidentified and there should be several nice paper topics in these
data.  I will attach a version of the comments below to this posting. 
It is a Word file with all the italics, etc. intact.  My current email
program won't reproduce italics, bolding, different fonts, etc.

Here's the info:

... you bring up a genuinely interesting question, or actually set of
questions.  There are several proto-Siouan verb suffixes that need a lot
of work.  And they show that several of your “CVC” roots are actually
CV.  The second C belongs to a proto suffix or enclitic when it’s an /r/
or /h/.

If you go through all the verbs in the CSD you find a lot with the
suffixes *-re, *-he, and *-ų or –ą.  These occur with such frequency
that they must have been morphemes.  In an OV language like Siouan they
must have had some sort of auxiliary status.  Nobody has attempted to
explain these, but someday it will surely be profitable to do so, and it
could help explain some of the phonological structures we’re discussing.
 Several of these crop up as verb suffixes in modern Siouan languages,
often with very vague or indeterminate meaning.  In the proto language
the meanings must have been much more specific.

-Re is one common proto-Siouan verb suffix.  (Dick Carter believes that
there’s an element of epenthesis in *-re.  He wrote this up for Mandan
at one of the Siouan Conferences.)  I believe it is definitely a
morpheme related to one of the notions we translate as ‘be’.  It’s also
commonly found in Catawba.  No one has tried to determine if it is ‘be
of existence’, ‘be of class membership’, ‘locative be’, etc.  But it
must have had a function.  

The suffix or enclitic *-he found at the end of many verb
reconstructions may or may not be related to the auxiliary –he found
with virtually all the Dhegiha positional auxiliaries:  k-hé, ðįk-hé,
athą́-he, t-hé, aðį-he, etc.,( the defective verb conjugated only in the
2nd person).  It is certainly prominent in the CSD verb reconstructions.
 In Dhegiha it’s meaning seems to be related to ‘locative be’.

The other apparent proto-Siouan auxiliary is apparently derived from *-ʔųˑ
‘be, do’.  There is clearly a conjugated auxiliary: m-ų́, ž-ų́, ʔų,
seemingly ‘did’ or ‘was’, but there is also an invariant version with
the shape –ų or an apparent reduced *-ą that is just the final phoneme
of many verb stems.  There is also an invariant enclitic with the usual
epenthetic –r- to separate vowels:  *rą = [ną] or [na].  It functions to
mark ‘anterior mode’ in most languages and is post-verbal.  It’s found
throughout Dhegiha, in Biloxi and, I think, in Mandan and
Chiwere/Hochunk.

Many of you will have noticed by now that at least two of these affixes
or enclitics, -re and –he also turn up prominently as demonstrative
particles, ‘this’ or ‘that’.  This may be coincidence, but it may not
be.  Somebody, sometime needs to attack these data and see what shakes
out.  

Bob
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