Strange use of Quapaw article/aux.

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, R. Rankin wrote:
> > > I haven't seen the inanimate articles conjugated but of course the
> > > inanimate ones shouldn't have 1st and 2nd person forms.
> >
> > I had't either, so I was pretty surprised at the following.  I can't think
> > what that a- is if not first person.
> > Na!  agdha'the  athe',       e'=     ama.
> > Why! I ate mine I must have, said he they say.
> > ------------
> > Na!  agdha'sniN=kki        az^aN'  athe',      e'=     ama.
> > Why! when I swallowed mine I slept I must have he said they say
> > jod 1890:63.5-6
>
> I was thinking of those as examples of  -tte/-tta 'potential mode' with the
> confusion of th/tt that Dorsey evinced early on.  Quapaw has similar usages,
> but they're all transcribed with the symbol JOD used for tt in that language
> (around 1890). Quapaw doubles up the tte sometimes, and you find ttaitte and
> the like.  They always get some sort of conditional or modal translation.  I
> was assuming it was the same morpheme as what we erroniously call 'future
> tense' in other words.  I think we agreed a long time ago that it's some sort
> of irrealis or potential mode marker derived from 'want' (which meaning it
> still has in Hidatsa and Biloxi as I recall).
>
> How confident are you of Dorsey's transcription here?

Pretty confident.  The give away of the aspirate is the breve above the e,
i.e., this is ate<breve> in both cases.  The articles "te" and "ke", and
the whens "te" and "ke"0 and the "evidential" "te"  as Dorsey spells them
for OP are essentially always breved.  The breve itself isn't a mark of
aspiration, but it seems to be a mark of the combined states lax (not
tense) and unstressed.

Plus if it were the future, it would be still off that it were inflected,
prefixally and not with a following article auxiliary, whereas prefixal
inflection like this is not odd for articles, albeit it is for inanimate
articles.

And, in OP, when it's "taite" or "tate" that's the future of surity
translated 'shall surely'.  In these cases it's always -te<accent>, so you
don't see the breve, just as with dhiNke, etc., but, I am still pretty
sure it is *the*, for the following reasons.  First, it never ablauts
itself.  It is invariant.  Second, it always conditions ablaut itself
(note "tate", not just "taite", where it's (b)i that conditions the
ablaut), and the grade of ablaut it conditions is not the grade that the
future conditions, which is e. Third, there are a passel of other "modal"
and "evidential" markers with the same structure, all ending in a
non-ablauting "te", so that even when you're still wrestling with what
might be the underlying sense of all these "te" you're still suspicious
that they're possibly connected.  Fourth, the plural follows the first
syllable, never the second or both.  Fifth, and this is a more recently
argument, it seems that 'shall surely' can easily be analyzed as 'shall
from the evidence, shall evidently, shall seemingly' instead of regular
'shall (by intent or unsupported prediction or polite suggestion), can,
irrealis'.  Of course, reduplicated future might also express an "intense
future" and this was a factor I considered before finally rejecting that
notion and settling on the analysis *tta(=i)=the* for these sequences.

Naturally, I'd have to be a bit timid about asserting things for Quapaw,
but I'm inclined to think that Dorsey's transcriptions must have enough
wiggle room that your ttaitte is probably a *ttaithe* with a similar
analysis to the OP formation.