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<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=5>Bob:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#0000ff size=5>I would be interested in your paper, in order to
better understand "Ablaut." jimm</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#800080 size=5>----- Original Message ----- </FONT>
<DIV><FONT color=#800080 size=5>From: "Rankin, Robert L" <</FONT><A
href="mailto:rankin@ku.edu"><FONT color=#800080
size=5>rankin@ku.edu</FONT></A><FONT color=#800080 size=5>></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#800080 size=5>To: <</FONT><A
href="mailto:siouan@lists.Colorado.EDU"><FONT color=#800080
size=5>siouan@lists.Colorado.EDU</FONT></A><FONT color=#800080
size=5>></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#800080 size=5>Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 11:30
PM</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#800080 size=5>Subject: RE: Dakota 'orphan'</FONT></DIV></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=5><BR><FONT color=#800080></FONT></FONT></DIV><FONT
color=#800080 size=5>*ni is one of three 'negative' morphemes commonly found in
Siouan languages. The other two are *ð (with þ allomorphs in Dhegiha) and
*ku (often found as a prefix). Dakotan compounds *ð and *ni. Chiwere
and Winnebago combine all three into ðkøni. It seems to me that *ni-ke
'not to be/have, be none' is obviously one of these negative morphemes with the
ordinary stative formative -ka, applied when ni stands as an independent
verb. But I don't think this bears on the problem of wablenica
'orphan'. <BR><BR>"Ablaut" in Dakotan postdates the split between Dakotan
and the other Mississippi Valley languages; the other languages have far more
transparent vowel coalescence rules and lack anything you could really call
ablaut. It predates the split up of Dakotan dialects however, so it must
be several centuries old. I tend to stick by my feeling that wablenica has
simply been reanalyzed as a unit, as Regina says. I have a paper on
comparative ablaut in Mississippi Valley Siouan if anyone is interested.
<BR><BR>Bob<BR><BR><BR>> But note that waxpanicA has ablaut, unlike
wablenica. This is why I am still a little reserved to the theory that the
“nica” component of wablenica comes from the verb “nicA” ‘to lack sth’. Why
would it retain ablaut in one compound and not in another.<BR><BR>> Given
that the waxpa-component of waxpanica 'poor' is etymologically transparent,
while the wable-component of wablenica 'orphan' apparently isn't, we can
hypothesize that wablenica is a whole lot older than waxpanica. I don't know
when the ablaut rule was created in Lakota, but isn't it possible that that
happened *after* wablenica became fossilized as a lexical item, and *before*
waxpanica entered the vocabulary? At the point at which the nica 'lack'
component was not recognized as a separate lexical item any more by Lakota
speakers, there was no motivation for applying the ablaut rule. waxpanica, on
the other hand, might be recent enough to contain that version of nica that has
ablaut.<BR><BR>> there are lots of ka suffixes (ca when palatilized) that are
potential candidates for the wablenica etymology.<BR><BR>> That would leave
us with a component -ni- that needs explanation. I can't come up with really
convincing solutions for this new problem. I do not assume that we're dealing
with ni 'to live' here. An obsolete negator -ni (could be something else though,
cf. Buechel), as in tuwe-ni(-shni) 'nobody', looks like a possibility, but
still, the nica 'lack' analysis is more appealing to me for semantic and other
reasons.</FONT></BODY></HTML>