Lumbee

[BARudes at aol.com]

With respect to initial o- and ga- on words on the "Lumbee" list,
to the extent the words are from Seneca or another Northern
Iroquoian language, o- and ga- are the third person singular
patient (o-) and third person singular agent (ka- [pronounced ga-
]) pronominal prefixes.  In the Northern Iroquoian languages, all
nouns with the except of a handful of disyllabic nouns and loan
words MUST begin with one of these prefixes in the elicitation
form.  (In possessive forms, these prefixes are replaced by the
appropriate pronominal prefixes marking the possessor.)  There
have been several attempts to show that these prefixes represent
some sort of classifier system in these languages; none of the
attempts has been convincing, in part because the distribution of
the prefixes differs in weird ways among the Northern Iroquoian
languages.  In Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and
Wyandot (where ka- appears as ya-) any noun may begin with either
o- or ka-, and the languages disagree with one another as to the
prefix on a particular noun (e.g., Onondaga kahw'ehno? 'island',
Seneca o:w'e:no? 'island'; Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga ok'ehta?
'harness, burden strap', Cayuga, Seneca kak'ehta? 'harness,
burden strap').

In Tuscarora, all nouns except those whose roots begin with the
vowel /i/ and two disyllabic exceptions (k'atke~? 'blood' and
k'a:ryu:?) take the prefix u- (same as o-).  Stems beginning with
/i/ take the ka- prefix (e.g., k'e~:ce~? 'fish' -- root -ice~-
'fish').  When a noun occurs compounded with an attributive verb,
the prefix changes from u- to ka-, e.g., uk'e~hseh 'face',
kakehs'i:yu: 'huge face'.  The patterning in Tuscarora appears to
be an innovation.  Many, if not most nouns in the Northern
Iroquoian languages are deverbal in origin and the initial o- and
ka- appear to be relics of a stage when the modern nouns were
predicate nominals.