Nez Perce linguistics

[Scott DeLancey]

This is apparently a recent development in Nez Perce,
representing two different developments of an old frozen
imperfective *-s suffix.  The c-stems originally had final
*-n, and the modern /c/ < *ns.  Swadesh figured it out a long
time ago, Noel Rude has written about it.  Some of those final
*-n may have been morphological and meaningful, but probably
not all of them.

Scott DeLancey

On Wed, 7 May 2008, jess tauber wrote:

> I've been looking through the Aoki et al. dictionary (don't have the
> grammar on hand but can get to it next week). Verbs are mainly divided 
> into two sets. It's beginning to look as if Aoki's VS set is more about 
> fine, high control activities etc. (the things apparently normally 
> encoded by high tone in Niger Congo languages), though admittedly it 
> will take me a day to compile all the forms. The VC set, on the other
> hand, seems more about less controlled or finely grained or focused 
>activities (low tone in N-C).
>
> Neighboring Salishan languages are overtly marked for verbal control- is
> Sahaptian generally recognized to have similar marking, including what I 
> seem to be seeing as above in N.P.? I'm also curious, if this is so, how 
> such marking interacts with vowel harmony, root consonant makeup, 
> aug/dim shifting, and choice of thematic/instrument prefixes.
>
> Has anyone written about this? Thanks.
>
> Jess Tauber
> phonosemantics at earthlink.net
>
>