Another (?) Omaha particle.

[ROOD DAVID S]

Bob, that is very clearly a basic meaning for Lakhota k?uN, which is where
I started to get into this discussion.  Deloria never translates it that
way, at least in the glosses (I've never paid much attention to her free
translations), but it's clearly the "had" past perfect meaning whenever
it's a clause subordinator.  It can also be a discourse particle marking a
solidly completed past event the speaker is very sure about.  So maybe
your kV-?uN theory is right after all.

DAvid

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

On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, R. Rankin wrote:

>
> I have to be careful about starting a new thread here because I've
> already taken on the whole Colorado National Guard and am spending half
> my mornings doing email!  But... In working up a paper on discourse here
> I chose the story of "The rabbit and the turkeys" (Dorsey 1890 pp.
> 557ff.) because I have that story in three different Siouan languages.
> In it Dorsey has numerous instances of the particle /aN'/ (accented
> nasal [a]) with the meaning he translates consistently as 'having'.
> These appear to be essentially perfects in that, in most if not all
> cases, they signal that some event had *already* taken place when the
> action or state of the main verb in the sentence does.  The particle
> never appears as naN or dhaN.  It is this latter auxiliary that seems to
> have an imperfective meaning in Quapaw.  It is clearly derived from *?uN
> 'do' (or maybe 'be') and is conjugated, as we have noted several times,
> m-aN, z^-aN, naN.
>
> Do those of you doing Omaha and Ponca think that the aN from the
> rabbit/turkeys story is the same as the dhaN that Dorsey translates
> 'past'?  or is it something new?
>
> Bob
>
> --
> Robert L. Rankin, Visiting Professor
> Research Center for Linguistic Typology
> Institute for Advanced Study
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