Locative Postpositions

[VOORHIS at BrandonU.CA]

David S. Rood wrote:
> Here are my thoughts on the locatives, seen strictly from a synchronic
> Lakhota perspective.  I would be happy to have corrections or
> countertheories from others, and I apologize to those who are looking for
> specific diachronic information, because there won't be much here.
>
>         There is a contrast between postpositional or "inflectional"
> (suffixal)) -ta and verbal -tu; the verb e'tu means 'to be in/at a
> particular place', and I am not convinced that this stressed "e'" is
> the "neutral" demonstrative root John has talked about; the latter is
> probably extant in ekta 'to/toward', etaN 'from' etc.  I think the
> stressed "e" is the verb root 'be', found in e.g. the so-called
> personal pronouns (miye', niye', unki'yepi) and the definite existential
> verb e' seen in sentences like "He' Robert e'" 'that's Robert'. The -l/-n
> marker is, in my opinion, the reduced form of e'tu, not the -ta
> postposition, but I can't give you any good arguments for that assertion.

For what it's worth, I took this up with a sophisticated, educated, Dakota
speaker.  I pointed out that a voiced stop at the end of a word is normally
reduced from a voiceless stop plus an unstressed vowel, and then I asked her
for the unreduced form of "ed".  Without hesitation she said "eta".  She took
the "-ta" to be the same as in "tiyata", "ekta" and in placenames.  I told her
I thought maybe it was "etu" rather than "eta", and she allowed that I could be
right.  She is not one to let "the great linguist" lead her astray, so I gather
from this that she had either actually heard "etu" spoken sometime in the past,
or that she associated it at that moment with words like "xtayetu/xtayed".

One point of this is that for Manitoba Dakota speakers at least, the reduction
of "etV" to "ed" is no longer productive.  "ed" must be verbalized by
collocation with "uN, wauN, yauN", etc., so the language has true postpositions
now.  And the question about whether "ed" comes from *etu or *eta IS now one of
etymology; it has become diachronic rather than synchronic in the local Dakota.

>         I am not aware that modern day speakers use the "thil" form for
> the locative of 'house'; I've heard thima'hel for 'in the house' and
> 'thi(y)a'ta' for 'toward the house', but I'm the first to assert that I
> have limited exposure to this language and probably haven't heard
> everything that's out there.

I'll second your doubts.  I've never heard *thid, but "thimahed" and "thiyata",
yes.
	Paul