Friend, town words.

[Robert L. Rankin]

> I've mentioned that I think that Winnebago allowing the augment/plural
> =wi with the first person strikes me as an archaism.

Assuming that proto-Siouan had an inclusive person marker, I'd assume this
pecularity of Winnebago was an innovation that came from having lost the
older inclusive or having it merge with other prefixes.  At least among
the patient pronoun set, Winnebago /wa:~g-/ looks just like the root for
'person' and it isn't shared with Chiwere.  I've written on the possible
nominal origin of the inclusive pronoun prefixes in Mississippi and Ohio
Valley Siouan, but I can't say that we have the definitive word yet.  

> A good point, and one that I've considered in the past.  I wasn't sure
> it would convince anyone, since some consider the final vowels to be
> "variable and unpredictable" due to the absence of a simple a = a = a =

True that final vowels in nouns can be messy in some of the languages if
they go back to *-e (which in some synchronic Siouan grammars are
considered epenthetic), but the fact that they are in fact present in all
major subgroups bespeaks antiquity in my book.  There are several points
of view.  Personally, I think the problem (often called ablaut) probably
spread to nouns from verbs, where it's endemic.  Nevertheless, at the
Winnebago-Chiwere node in the Stammbaum, your -e is safely present,
whatever its original source, I think.

> There are some nice sets with -Vke from *-h-ka, but I don't remember
> them.  Heron?  Badger? 

Yes, something like that.  I think *mah + -ka 'earth' is one -- as you
say, there are several.

> > Chiwere has frozen relics of the -re portion of the causative.  
> > Sag-re and the like. 

> Yeah.  I guess these are like the -ya "adverbial" suffix in Dakotan,
> though you have to consider as well whether these -re might be from 'to
> go'.

Not in 'to dry' I think.  These look like real causatives and I have no
evidence that these are cognate with the Lakota "adverbials", but of
course, we don't have a full chiwere grammar yet. 

Bob