new track: ?uN

[ROOD DAVID S]

Bob, As you  know, I don't know the comparative material as well as I hope
I will in a couple of months, but I'm somewhat dismayed to see you
treating ?uN 'do' and ?uN 'be' in the same breath, since they are
conjugated totally differently in Lakhota.  'do' looks related to 'use':

	mu 'I use'	ec^hamu 'I do' 		wa?uN 'I am'
	nu 'you use'	ec^hanu 'you do'	ya?uN 'you are'
	?uN '3 uses'	ec^huN '3 does'		?uN '3 is'
	uNkuN 'we'	ec^huNkuN 'we...'	ec^unk?uN 'we are'

In other words, 'do;use' seems to have pure vowel initial, while 'be' has
an organic (underlying) initial glottal stop.  Surely glottal stops don't
pop up out of nowhere, especially after consonants????

That makes it even more unlikely that this is the second element of k?uN
'the aforementioned; past completed', since the /?/ doesn't belong there.

David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
Campus Box 295
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu