BL accent patterns.

[Sky Campbell]

I’ll toss in something that may help you guys.  Much of what you are talking about is beyond me but I am studying it J.

 

I first noticed the idea of what I thought was one syllable like “gre” actually being something like “guh-lay” (to use the spelling that Wistrand-Robinson used in her Otoe-Iowa Indian Language Book I (1977) to describe the pronunciation for “hawk”).  I didn’t think too much about it at the time.  I noticed it but didn’t worry about it.  And when I help others learn Otoe-Missouria, I don’t bother with splitting it up and just call “gre” one syllable since I don’t want to over-complicate things for learners.

 

Back on topic…

 

I noticed this a while ago but couldn’t make sense of it.  Then I remembered how Wistrand-Robinson separated those syllables.  Currently our spellings for 8 and 10 are:

 

grerabri – eight (sometimes that final “i” is nasalized)

 

grebrą – ten

 

But Hamilton has in his An Ioway Grammar on page 26:

 

kræ-ra-ba-ne – eight

 

kræ-pa-na – ten

 

At first I couldn’t figure out what the extra syllables were doing on there.  What did they mean?  Then I realized that “bri” was simply “ba-ne” pronounced quickly and so was “brą (pa-na).  This leads me to think that these two distinct syllables were at one time individually pronounced.  The reason I say this is because there is a clue in those words with at the beginning with “kr.”  Hamilton doesn’t split “kr” into two syllables.  I would assume that if they were enunciated separately, he would have done so like he did at the ends of the words.  So it would appear that we had two syllables in the past which are now “one” (though still technically two if I am understanding these emails correctly).  I should also mention that Hamilton conjugates the heck out of “grahi” (love) throughout that book without ever separating the “gr.”

 

Would this be the kind of precedent to illustrate how two syllables mashed into “one” that some of you have mentioned?

 

Sky

 

From: Siouan Linguistics [mailto:SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] On Behalf Of Rory Larson
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2013 6:43 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: BL accent patterns.

 

Ø  But if Jan is right, and óglas'iŋ is derived from ókas'iŋ, then the G of glas'iŋ is underlying ki-, and the extra underlying syllable. Thus, the five underlying synchronic phonological syllables. 

One way or another our phonology (morphophonolgy) has to account for the b/w and the g/k allomorphy, and either the verb stems or the prefixes, or both, show alternations in all these cases. 

>From earlier: “The term is pretty clearly based on the verb ókas(‘)iŋ, ‘to look into’. In its vertitive form óglasiŋ, it should mean ‘to look into at oneself” (probably into water) 

Forgive my lack of knowledge of Dakota, but do we mean ‘vertitive’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘possessive’ here? I guess it doesn’t matter to our discussion, since the G- will alternate with a full syllable in any of those cases. 

Okay, just to throw one more monkey-wrench into this discussion...

 

I believe something else has happened here, external to a simple historical development of Proto-Siouan phonology.  The *ki- prefix that goes to our G is what should make the verb vertitive, reflexive or possessive.  But the GL cluster comes from the sequence *ki + *r-, where *r- is most often the beginning of either *re, ‘go’, or of the instrumental prefixes *ru- ‘by hand’ or *ra- ‘by mouth:  *ki-ru- => *kru- => GLu-, *ki-ra- => *kra- => GLa-.

 

In this case though, the instrumental prefix of the base verb is *ka-, ‘by force’.  Sticking vertitive *ki- in front of that should get *ki-ka- => *k-ka- => *kka- (?).

 

But in Omaha at least, and apparently in Dakotan as well, it doesn’t come out that way.  Rather, the vertitive/reflexive/possessive of a *ka- verb is GLa-, just the same as for a *ra- verb.  I was astonished to learn that in Omaha a few years ago, but internalized it well enough that I didn’t think twice about declaring ókas’iŋ to be the base verb of vertitive óglas’iŋ.

 

In this case, I think there has been an analogical replacement of a difficult *k-k- series that speakers didn’t want to hack their way through.  When they hit the first *k-, they were momentarily confused as to whether it was the k of the *ki- or the k of the *ka- their verb started with.  They opted for the latter.  Then they wanted to make it vertitive, and remembered from all their *kru- and *kra- and *kre- verbs that *kr- did just that.  The [a] that followed was the [a] of the *ka- rather than that of *ra-.  They just infixed an *r into the *ka- prefix to make it vertitive.  The resulting GLa- thus became vertitive for both *ra- and *ka-.  The difference is that for *ra-, it is the G makes it vertitive, while for *ka-, it is the L that signals vertitive/reflexive/possessive.

 

Now if we could peep into something by means of our mouth, perhaps Lakhota would describe this with the verb **óyas’iŋ.  The vertitive form of this would be óglas’iŋ, and a mirror that we use our mouth to look into would be a miyóglas’iŋ.  This would have five syllables, counting the underlying *ki- that is represented by the G.  But the actual word is the homonym miyóglas’iŋ which is based on ókas’iŋ.  We do not have an underlying affixed *ki-.  We have only the instrumental prefix ka- which has been modified with an infixed L to signal vertitivity.  Assuming this analysis of the vertitive/reflexive/possessive of *ka- verbs is correct, I think the phonological argument would indicate that while miyóglas’iŋ, a mirror that we look into by means of our mouth, has five syllables, its homonym miyóglas’iŋ, a mirror that we look into forcefully, has only four.

 

Hoping that Willem, Jan and David still support my etymology for miyóglas’iŋ, and otherwise ducking and running for cover,

 

Rory

 

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