Stem 'to come'

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 4 Apr 1999, Robert L. Rankin wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Apr 1999 BARudes at aol.com wrote:
> > extent it is relevant, the corresponding stem for 'arrive, come' in Catawba
> > is -uu?-, not -huu?- ...
>
> That's an interesting observation in light of the fact that 'come' is a
> verb for which the sound correspondences are irregular.  Several languages
> treat it as {hu:}, but Dakotan (perhaps others) has {?u}.

One possible explanation for *u ~ *hu in the verb 'to come' is analogy
with *hi 'arrive there', but, given Blair's observations, I wonder if it
couldn't be that there were competing inflectional systems, one based on
the root proper (*u), and one based on an old third person in hi (*hu).
I'm not sure to what extent such a third person can be hypothesized, but I
do tend to assume that Catawba hi is connected with Siouan *i, even though
evidence of *i in verb paradigms is somewhat sparse.

One other verb with a clear h in the first and second persons and waffling
in the third is 'to say'.  We tend to assume that the h is removed by some
process when it is missing in the third person, but we might want to look
at this more closely.