(In)dependent body parts in Dakotan?

[Robert L. Rankin]

This is a nice coincidence.  I have an M.A. student, Dan Kelty, who is
defending a thesis entitled "The Inalienability Opposition in the Siouan
Languages"  tomorrow afternoon.  He discusses these phenomena in Dakotan
and more.

I noticed a couple of years ago that a number of Siouan languages split
their inalienably possessed nouns in the 1st sing. into a group with a
reflex of ma- and a group with a reflex of mi- (Crow ba-/bi-, Mandan
ma-/mi-, etc.).  The interesting thing is that there does NOT seem to be
any semantic congruity from language to language in the groups of nouns
that take one over the other prefix.  And if there were a semantic split
in the 1st person, why not in the 2nd person?

So I think the alleged semantic division in Dakotan into body parts over
which you can exercise will power, substantive vs. ephemeral, etc., etc.
is the result largely of (a) accident and (b) later on folk taxonomy.
People perceived an (inexact) match between prefixes and semantic classes
and as a result, furthered the taxonomy by shuffling body parts from one
class to the other, or, sometimes, creating doublets (shadow/spirit)

The development of the two prefixes in the 1st person may be due to a
number of factors originally.  In Crow and some other languages, for
example, it appears to be partly phonological.  If the older prefix was
mi-, the /i/ was lost if the noun began with /a/, so bi- > ba- (or vice
versa if a noun begins with /i-/).  Randy's grammar has lots of examples.

As for the original, proto-Siouan prefix, there is room for speculation
both ways.  The vowel may have been i- in all three persons, and ma- may
have developed on analogy with wa- '1sg actor'.  Or the prefix may have
been ma- with the i of the 3rd person replacing the /a/ via phonotactic
rules. I once made the assumption that the prefixes were, roughly, mi-,
yi-, i-.  But I'm no longer so sure, thanks to Kelty's digging.

Bob