Verb auxiliaries.

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Robert L. Rankin wrote:
> > OK, technically, it isn't an article, but another class of morpheme
> > homophonous with them and concordant with them.
>
> These are fully conjugatable in most instances and are only homophones
> with articles in the 3rd person.  I gave examples of 1st and 2nd persons
> the other day while discussing -he 'to be'.
>
> 'animate to be standing'  'be moving'
> 1sg  a-thaN-he		  a-riN-he
> 2sg ra-thaN-s^e		 ra-riN-s^-e
> 3sg    thaN		    riN

Well, in fact, the articles themselves, or at least articulate uses of
these whatever they ares, can also be inflected.  It depends on whether
you want to call the occurrences after relative clauses articles, and I
do.  For example:

PpaNkka=mas^e! 'Oh ye Poncas!'

I believe there are non-vocative occurrences, though vocatives provide a
natural context for the second person cases.

> These particular auxiliaries are functionally distinct from the -akha/-aWa
> set of articles (?) that mark agent in that the latter don't have the full
> set of inflection (?).

After contemplating Catherine Rudin's assessment of the situation, I
believe I agree with her that these forms (akha and ama) are, in effect,
suppletive, and employ the personal forms of dhiNkhe in the first person,
etc.

> Interestingly they only seem to occur in Omaha-Ponca, Kansa and Osage.
> So they may be a recent characteristic of Dhegiha that separates Quapaw
> from the other 4 languages.  In any event, there is an on-going
> grammaticaliztion process involving the set of articles.

It would be interesting to know more about the Quapaw situation.  I guess
I'd better dig out Bob's sketch of a few years ago.

JEK