Locatives and wa- problems.

[Rory Larson]

That’s very helpful.  Thanks, Iren!

I think that portmanteau is common across MVS, though I don’t fully understand the phonology.  Dick Carter worked it out on the board for me for Lakhota /chi-/ once when he was teaching at UNL in the 1990s.  He was pleased with himself, but went so fast he left my head spinning.  In Omaha, the corresponding morpheme is /wi(p)/, which again I don’t really understand the derivation of.

I’m very relieved to have confirmation on that pluralization paradigm, that I hadn’t totally lost my mind.  What I told Sky earlier was backwards, though.  It was the ‘I’-plural that was exclusive, and the ‘we’ or ‘dual’ form that is inclusive, as Bob indicated in his earlier message on Saturday.

One other question that has come up that you might want to comment on:  Does Hoocąk ever use the -wi particle in the third person?  I thought a long time ago I had read that in the third person plural, either -wi or -ire could occur, but with somewhat different meanings.  Is there anything to that, or is my memory mistaken?

Best,
Rory


From: Siouan Linguistics [mailto:SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] On Behalf Of Iren Hartmann
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2013 11:44 AM
To: SIOUAN at LISTSERV.UNL.EDU
Subject: Re: Locatives and wa- problems.

Hi all,

sorry, I was away for a couple of days and am having now trouble following the different discussions, but I'm trying my best to catch up :-)

As for loans, I think there were a handful of loans from Algonquian that Miner already marked in his field lexicon of Hoocąk as such. I remember haramįhe (or haramehi) ’week, (Christian) cross’ was one such case.. here is another good reason to get all the dictionaries into good digital shape (also the Algonquian ones), so we can search more efficiently for potential loan words, I think that would be an interesting project..

As for what was written about nį- being first person actor inflection, this is not entirely true, it is first person A acting on 2nd person U, described in the past as a portmanteau of ha- and nį-. (In the past this has been described as being long nįį-, but this I have not found to be true, it is always short just as the 2nd Undergoer pronominal affix.) Doesn’t Lakotha have something like this? Also, we saw something similar for Chiwere at this year’s conference in the presentation about causatives, only there it was theorized that the nį- just expressed the 2nd U and the 1st A remained unexpressed.. Or am I missing something here?

Also there was the question of the pluralization of the different person forms, the Hoocąk paradigm (for class 1 conjugations) looks like this:
S/A (subjects, actor)

1 excl SG / PL: ha- / ha- ... -wi
du / 1 incl: hį- / hį-... -wi
2 SG/ PL: ra- /ra- ...-wi
3 SG / PL:  [zero] / -ire

I hope this helps.
Best,
Iren

> This is the first I've heard that Hochunk ní for first person is from Algonquian -- what would the word be expected to be in Hochunk, based on Chiwere and Proto-Siouan?

Proto-Siouan for 1st sg.agentive was probably *wa-.  It has allomorphs *b-, p-, m-.  and in Chiwere-Winnebago evolved into *ha-.  In Dhegiha *a-.  There is no trace of any 1st person  ni- in Siouan anywhere except in Hochunk (Winnebago).

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