Catawba 'go' & 'come'

[VOORHIS at BrandonU.CA]

Blair Rudes wrote:
> I am more skeptical about ha:ra being a
> compound of hu:?- and da:?-, since a change of /u:/ to /a(:)/ would be
> unprecedented;

There is occasional confusion between a and u in Speck's transcription; hence
the possibility that written hara might represent hura, but I think the
confusion only occurs when the vowels are short and all indications are that
this syllable has a long vowel.  So I agree that it is very unlikely that ha:ra
contains hu:'.

> similarly, I am not convinced that mahu:ci contains kuci,
> since a /h/, /k/ alternation would be unusual; to me, mahu:ci looks more like
> a compound of ma- cislocative' + hu:?- arrive, come' plus an element -ci-,
> just as kuci looks like ku:- leave' plus the element -ci-.)

Could be.  I don't know what -ci- might be, but it would join a lot of
syllables I'm similarly unsure about in the same location.  Root extentions?
-wa- in ku:wa is another, fairly frequent one.

> duk- back, backwards' (Siebert, notes): dukh'u:re: ( = stress) he comes
> back, returns'. Catawba verbs of motion compound with a variety of adverbial
> preverbs indicating direction/location, some of which behave like prefixes
> and some like proclitics.  Others include haap- 'up, towards the top', huk-
'below, down',

ha:p- with da:'- seems to provide the missing progressive form for verbs of
ascending that I listed previously.  Absent from that list is any parallel set
of verbs referring to descending.  huk- with da:'- forms the progressive 'to be
descending', but how does Catawba say 'to leave (descending)' and 'to arrive
(descending)'?  Perhaps ha:ra is one of the descending verbs, but the examples
aren't convincing.  The other may be ha:tkut which refers once to going down a
hill and once to the sun setting.

> The verb hau- is intriguing for it bears an uncanny resemblence to the
> widespread particle hao?, h'au? (Seneca and Tuscarora forms, respectively)
> which variously means o.k., already, hello, come on in, welcome in languages
> throughout the east and into the plains.  It might be a predication of that
> particle.

Or could hau and ha:ra both contain an obsolete ha(:)-, before da:'- in the
latter verb and before (h)u:' in the former?  Obviously this speculation needs
the meaning of ha:ra to be firmed up.

hau appears a few times written as haw@ (@ = schwa) so its phonemic form might
be more like ha:wi, making my proposal of its origin untenable and Blair's less
likely.  It seems to form an exotic 3pl by reduplication: ha'au.

Whatever the exact details of the history of these verbs, the Catawba system of
verbs of locomotion appears to me to be rather similar to the present Siouan
one.  But the two seem to have arrived at the same place from different
starting points.  Using Dakota examples for Siouan, the primitive verb roots
seem to be:

Dakota                    Catawba
ya/e 'to be going'        da:' 'to be going'
u 'to be coming'          hu:' 'to be coming'
i 'to arrive going'       hau originally just 'to arrive' ?
hi 'to arrive coming'     --- none ---
--- none ---              ku:' originally just 'to leave' ?

And it's possible that Catawba hau isn't primitive either.

Doesn't this all suggest that the present similarity might be due to recent
contact more than to remote common origin?
	Paul