How

[David Rood]

I was just looking up something else and came across these examples in
Kimball's Koasati Grammar, p. 222. The sentence "we are here", he
says is said by people arriving at someone's house.  Sounds familiar, and
a propos of Paul Voorhis's remarks, the context is one where joking is
invited, since the morphophonemics makes this sentence homophonous with
one that means "it is dead".  Naturally, the response (without further
attention to greetings, apparently) is "What's dead?"

David S. Rood
Professor of LInguistics
Institut fuer Sprachwissenschaft
Universitaet zu Koeln
D-50923 Koeln
email: rood at uni-koeln.de
email: rood at colorado.edu