CHIWERE etymology

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Alan H. Hartley wrote:
> Hodge's Hdbk I.287 s.v. Chiwere has the following Dorsey forms:
>
> Ti-re'-wi (1879)

Not in IO form.  Not clear what it is.

> 'Ce'kiwere (1880)
> 'Ciwere (1880)
> Tcekiwere (1882)
> Tciwere (1882; Dorsey?)

Successive pairs of orthographic variants for J^egiwere, J^iwere.

> Tcekiwere (1884; T, c and k inverted)

Additional orthographic variant of first form in pair only, confirming
lack of aspiration in tc (i.e., t + s^, representing c^) and k, or,
actually, since unaspirated, j^ and g.

The variants J^egiwere ~ J^iwere shed additional light on the form.  It
appears that the first element is probably j^e 'this', and that it becomes
j^i only by contraction with a following i, i.e., probably the underlying
forms are j^e'=giwere and j^(e)'=iwere.  Again, I don't thing I'm
completely sure of the inflectional/derivational forms involved in the gi-
and i-, but now we have something more or less parallel with OP dhe'=giha.

j^e   gi         we                        re
dhe   gi         ha                        0
this  VERTITIVE? HORIZONTAL-POSITIONAL     ???

The final -re is still a bit of a mystery, but checking the Dorsey OP
texts for -gih- turns up only a series of examples of e'=gihE glossed
'(headlong|right) (0|into|through|beneath)'.  Here the first element is e
'the aforesaid, it', and the second element is a stem somewhere along the
path between verb and postposition.  This stem occurs as gihe mostly, but
as giha sometimes, when followed by =xti, and, interestingly, when
followed by a verb of motion (beginning in its own separate a) or a
'suddenly' auxiliary. A typical 'suddenly' auxiliary is idhe, which may
explain the -re of the Chiwere form.

Somebody recently (last SIuan COnference?) suggested a term (in actual use
in other language families) for 'suddenly' auxiliaries.  Anyone know or
remember it?

Note that 0 (nothing) or 'into' are typical in the glosses, e.g., with
such things as a thicket, while 'through' occurs with lodge smoke holes,
and 'beneath (the surface of)' with water.

I'm going to guess that dhe'=giha and e'=gihE involve the same stem gihe,
posibly made up of the elements VERTITIVE + HORIZONTAL, and that it covers
the sense 'pertain/belong to, be(come) an element of, enter (completely)
into'.  The available derivatives seem rather lexicalized.

Ioway-Otoe seems to have the a parallel construction j^e'=(g)iwe=re, which
requires the addition of a 'suddenly' auxiliary =re.  Note that Bob Rankin
is always on the lookout for cases of causative =re in Chiwere, and this
is one that I'd have a hard time fighting off, without a lot of supporting
paradigmatic information that's probably not available, in spite of my
instincts.

I don't understand why sometimes gi and sometimes i, though i- is an
initial component of positional verbs, and in OP forms like ihe=...dhe
(dhe is the causative here) mean 'to lay (horizontally)', and in these ihe
is i=he 'motion hither' + 'horizonal', which can occur independently,
e.g., as a 'suddenly' auxiliary.

Note that LaFlesche maintains that Dhegiha is in no sense an ethnonym and
essentially means something like 'a member of the same team for a game'.
This is not too different from what Dorsey claimed, i.e., 'a local, a
member of the group', though he may also have considered the term suitable
as a self-designation for Omahas, etc.  By analogy it would appear that
Chiwere was posssibly once only a possible internal designation for the
Otoe, and not (originally) a name in the proper sense, especially not one
that others might apply to them.  As such, speculatively, it might even
have been something an Ioway might have said of him or herself at some
point in the (forgotten) past, before it came to imply 'Otoe' in a
specific way.

It's interesting that Ioway has that /we/ form for the horizonal
positional.  It's /he/ in Dhegiha, and the correspondence w:h isn't
regular, except ...  OP has uhe 'to follow' (< *ophe) and IO has uwe'.
Unfortunately, the rest of Dhegiha has, as far as I know, reflexes of h in
the positional and reflexes of ph (with the p intact) in the verb, cf.
Osage ops^e.  If there's anything in this, either gihe:giwe(re) don't
involve the positional, or perhaps we're seeing the origin of the
positional?

> Can the Dorseyists among you explain these?

Well, I've tried!  The simple answer is now something along these lines:
J^(e)(g)iwere may be something like 'belonging here; located here; one of
these', from j^e 'this' and (g)iwere, a (set of related) lexicalized
form(s)  meaning something like 'belong to, be located at, be one of', cf.
Dhegiha, an Omaha-Ponca term with a parallel analysis.