new track: ?uN

[ROOD DAVID S]

A couple of things I need to point out in case people reading this
exchange don't know Dakotan very well.  First, the mu, nu 'use' set is NOT
using the stative prefix set -- you can say ma?uN 'he used me'; so
historically these prefixes are active, but show the reduced form of the
pronoun (which would be /b/ beofre a /y/ or an oral vowel), nasalized
because of the following nasal vowel.  Second, the meaning 'be' is not a
copula (you all knew that, of course), but 'exist', and in language after
language which has an active/stative intransitive verb distinction, the
'exist' verb is always active, contrary to my English-speaking
expectations.


Now as to the semantics of "be" and "do" in the same verb, I can see some
kind of connection though a path like do>act>active>lively>living>exist;
cf. Latin ago and English 'agitated', perhaps.
where "lively" might even be unnecessary.  Note also that there is an
auxiliary use of ?uN 'be' in Lakhota similar to that of haN but with a
different set of verbs -- a student of mine started to investigate this
once, but didn't get very far and I've forgotten just what he did find
out.  I don't know whether the auxiliary use is connected or not, but
there's another spot where 'be' and 'do' could overlap.

I better quit.  I'm usually the one to object to any kind of speculative
semantic path suggestions....must have been something odd in the coffee
this morning.  I'm still not at all content with deriving k?uN 'the
aforementioned' from ki+?uN.  The syntax of finding a verb in that
position is weird, and those semantic suggestions don't fit my intuitions
at all.
	David


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