Locatives and wa- problems.

Rankin, Robert L. rankin at KU.EDU
Mon Sep 9 23:01:37 UTC 2013


Iren,

Yes, nįį is the portmanteau for I/you corresponding to Dakotan chi- and Dhegiha wi-.  That's not the nį I'm talking about.  We corresponded about this a couple of months ago.  In the Zeps and Miner dictionaries there is a nįe that is translated simply 'I'.  Like most disjunctive pronominals in Siouan it is attached to ?e as a prefix.  I'll need to go back through our correspondence or the dictionaries and double check the form.

Bob
________________________________

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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