Crow Motion Verbs

[Rgraczyk at aol.com]

The discussion on motion verbs started me thinking about kuu' 'return, come
back', the only vertitive motion verb in Crow.  It has a rather strange
paradigm, even by Crow standards:

bakku'		ba'akkuu
dala'akku	dala'akkuu
kuu'		da'akkuu

kk is phonetically kh, so the 3sg form is really not different from the forms
with kk.  So we rewrite the paradigm:

bakhu'		ba'akhuu
dala'akhu	dala'akhuu
khuu'		da'akhuu

Now if we subtract khu(u), we come up with something very close to the
paradigms for other motion verbs in Crow, minus the plural marker u:

baa'		ba'a(u)
dala'a		dala'a(u)
--			da'a(u)

The following are the paradigms for hi'i 'arrive', de'e 'go', and hu'u 'come':

baa'	bi'io		baale'e		ba'au		boo'	bu'uo
dala'a	dali'io	dale'e		dala'au		dalo'o	dalu'uo
hi'i		di'io		de'e		da'au		hu'u	du'uo

The paradigm with kuu' subtracted looks like the singular of hi'i combined
with the plural of de'e.  About the short a in the 1sg form: Crow disfavors a
long unaccented vowel in the initial syllable followed by a cluster, i.e.
*CVVCCV'.  That's just too heavy a beginning!  So that vowel could have been
shortened to give it a more acceptable syllable structure/accentual pattern.

There are still some details to be worked out, but I am suggesting that kuu'
is actually a compound motion verb composed of forms of the 'arrive' stem
(Crow and Hidatsa have merged the two PSi 'arrive' stems) plus vertitive
kuu'.  This fits the patterns noted in Taylor's article: 'arrive' stem plus
'motion prior to arrival' stem.

Randy

I have no idea what happened to the missing stem in the 3rd person of kuu',
except to suggest that it was lost after the compound nature of this verb was
no longer transparent.  While there is no trace of double inflection in these
forms, I note that at least some of the Lakhota compound motion verbs are not
doubly inflected.