1st person wa- vs. other wa-'s in Siouan.

[Robert L. Rankin]

> I think I was wrong in wondering about hibu as *thiWu.  It's *thiwu, or
> maybe the w is a special "pronominal w" as opposed to *w and *W.
> I've often wondered if something like that might explain why *wa A1 =>
> (h)a in Dhegiha, Chiwere, Winnebago, while *wa INDEF => wa.

I'd say *rhi_?u.  But John is right that the 1st person wa- in Siouan
languages routinely behaves differently from the other prefixes with the
shape wa-.  There is evidence for 1st person *wa- in virtually every
Siouan language, so its existence is indisputable.  But it misbehaves in
many of the languages:  It loses its w- in DH, CH and WI as John mentions
above, replacing w with h, which may simply be epenthetic, in WI.  It is
regularly b- instead of w- in Ofo, a language which lost initial w's
regularly.  Why?

There is a possibility that the one or more of the other wa- prefixes was,
in fact, long, /wa:-/ rather than just /wa-/.  That might explain why
syncope regularly affects the pronominal but not the other(s).  So
might relative chronology of the morphology; pronominals have been on
verbs forever but other wa-'s are derivational and they come and go.  But
vowel length wouldn't explain why the labial "misbehaves" so often.

It could have to do with the phonology involved in replacement of the
older, dental Proto-Siouan-Catawban 1st person marker, d-~n- with the
innovated Proto-Siouan *wa-.  If you think about it, such replacements
don't just get substituted overnight.  Speakers didn't just get up one
morning and say "hey, enough of those antiquated dental 1st persons, let's
replace it with something cool, like wa-!"  Presumably the old pronominals
became morphologically opaque (Catawba shows them fusing with verb roots
in a variety of confusing paradigms).  Comparing Siouan and Catawban, we
see that what Siouan did was apparently form new 1st persons by prefixing
*wa- (from whatever source) to the *third* person form of the verb,
totally dropping the old, fused 1st person forms.

Two things could have happened: (a) some of the new wa- prefixes could
have been added to the older 1st persons in d- or n-, yielding as yet
unexplored morphophonemic changes that give us the peculiar 1st person
forms we get in Siouan, or, I think more likely, (b) the 3rd person always
served as the analogical model for new 1st persons with wa-.  And if Blair
is right and the earlier 3rd person marker was not "zero" but *h(i)-, then
we have an h- that would have interacted with wa- in various ways.

One could always appeal to the fact that the pronominals are often closer
to the accent than other wa-'s, which often are in the outer, derivational
layer, but I personally think that the Proto-Siouan *wa- '1st person' must
have had some interaction with older 1st or 3rd person prefixes.

> On the other hand, a potential problem, we have lots of cases where we
> want *pr clusters to come from *wV + r. The *wV here is presumably one
> of Bob's classifiers, though, rather than *wa INDEF.

The 'animate' classifier (if it was a classifier) was *wi-.  Why not think
of wa- as the inanimate one?  It shouldn't matter whether w- goes back to
*wi- or *wa- from the point of view of sound change.  They should both
work the same.  Some languages (Ofo, at least) have different reflexes of
secondary *wr and *pr clusters. As I recall 'flat' and some of its
derivatives had *p.

Bob