Strange use of Quapaw article/aux.

[R. Rankin]

> 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.

That's entirely possible, but we also know that Dorsey had a diacritic for short
vowels rather than long ones (except extra long, which he writes V+++) like
everybody else.  I tend to suspect that he was marking mostly what he heard as
quality differences and never suspected quantity, but the two probably correlate to
a degree as in most languages.  But you're right that he also tended to adopt
"normalized" spellings that might distinguiush what he heard as homophones, etc.

>
> 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.

That's assuming the a- is indeed the pronominal.  By me it should still be thaN or
uninflected.  Maybe we can get confirmation from the field.  Does Osage have this
construction?  If it's in Quapaw, it must be or have been in KS and OS.  I can't
remember any KS analog though.

>
> 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),

The -i- of ttaitte (or ttaithe, whichever) is not the plural -bi.  It is something
else, since it appears as accented -i'- in the Quapaw version, and Quapaw never
reduces -awe/-awi to just -i-.  This -i- is different, tho' I have no idea what it
is.  If it were nasalized, it would be one of the expected forms of 'potential',
but it isn't.

> 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.

Indeed, but this is what comes of our over-using Dorsey 1890.  Without confirmation
of the phonology, we simply don't know which of JOD's "te" are aspirated and which
are tense.

> Fourth, the plural follows the first
> syllable, never the second or both.

Again, unless Omaha has reinterpreted the -i- as 'plural' (or proximate or
whatever), it ain't plural.

> 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'

But that presumes evidentiality, which we can't do until/unless it's confirmed.


> Of course, reduplicated future might also express an "intense
> future"

I think that's more reasonable at this juncture than assuming evidentiality; it is
the standard way of intensifying stative verbs, after all.  But you may be right --
we really need actual data while there are speakers who can help us learn.

>
> 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.

I'd be the last to disagree with that one -- with the proviso that in QU it really
is extremely unlikely that -i- is from *-abi.

Bob

--
Robert L. Rankin, Visiting Professor
Research Center for Linguistic Typology
Institute for Advanced Study
La Trobe University
Bundoora, VIC 3083 Australia
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