new track: ?uN

[R. Rankin]

I'm afraid it's Dakotan that's out of step on this one.  As far as I can tell
(and I could easily be corrected), in the languages that have both, 'do' and
'be' should behave exactly the same and may well be the same verb in a
pan-Siouan context.  Dakotan is peculiar in that it seems to have mixed up
reflexes of 'be' and 'use'.  It "should" have the mu, nu, etc. conjugation for
'be' (and *perhaps* use the regular wa-, ya- allomorphs with 'use'.  At least
'use' should be different because it has a prefix historically.)  'Use' is
really *i-?uN 'to do with'.  Most of the other languages have clear reflexes
of the expected *i- 'instrument', and I've never been able to figure out why
Dakotan doesn't.

By the way, I still can't account for the fact that 'be' and 'do' seem to be
the same.  It bothers me semantically, but I think the conjugations are the
same.

> 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