Conjugation Of A Sentence in Tutelo-Saponi

[Rankin, Robert L.]

I agree with Willem and Dave that we can’t just translate the English word-for-word into Tutelo-Saponi.  The Siouan way of saying ‘I love the smell of sweetgrass’ would not contain an equivalent for “of”, in fact I’m not at all sure that there is ever much of an equivalent of that preposition in Siouan.  I think the way it would be expressed in a Siouan language would be something close to ‘Sweetgrass-smell to.me-it.is.good’.  And actually, the words translated ‘love’ in the literature are a compound of yaⁿt-‘heart’, o- ‘in it’, and steke ‘good’.

I’ve never heard of William Meuse, but from his spellings, it looks as though he just copied the Dorsey file from the Smithsonian letter for letter.  It’s better to use Oliverio, since she standardized the spellings, included all earlier research and includes context with examples.

I don’t know the range of sweetgrass for certain, but I doubt the Tutelos had it in any quantity and I don’t think it grows that far south.  The term for sweetgrass in Dakota-Lakota matches the word for ‘onion’ in Kansa and Osage.  I don’t know which meaning was the original one, though onions are more widespread.

The Tutelo word ‘oto:’ just means ‘to be blue or green’.  In that sense it probably wouldn’t be used for ‘grass' by itself..  So I don’t know what to do about trying to translate ‘sweetgrass’.

I don't think that i- equates to 'the' in any sense, so I'm not sure where that usage is coming from.  In the Sapir transcriptions of Tutelo it appears that -ki after the noun is used for 'the', and since that matches the definite article in Dakotan, I suspect that's as close as we can get in Tutelo.

Bob
________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of Scott Collins [saponi360 at YAHOO.COM]
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 10:52 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Conjugation Of A Sentence in Tutelo-Saponi

Verb at end of sentence
Adjectives follow nouns
Adverbs and Direct Objects before the Verb

I love the smell of sweetgrass.

I = mi (subject/noun)
Love = yato-ste:kE (verb)
The = i- (definite article)
Smell = pi (you can add an infatic such as –se after the word) (adjective)
Of = qekego (preposition)
Sweetgrass = chiko:yo oto: (object/noun)


My final conjugation:
I- pi qekego  chiko:yo oto:  mi yato-ste:kE. ( I love the smell of sweetgrass.)

Is this all correct?




Scott P. Collins
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