Omaha/Dakota k?uN cognates.

[Koontz John E]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2000, ROOD DAVID S wrote:
> > Do articles always precede demonstratives in Dakotan?  In Dhegiha it's the
> > other way around!
> >
> The demonstrative may begin the NP, or follow the article at the end of
> the NP; the latter is more common:
> 	
> 	he/hena wiNyaN ki/k?uN 'the/those/ woma/en'
>
> 	or wiNyAn ki/k?uN  he/hena.
>
> 	But of course there are lots of compounds with initial
> demonstrative roots.

Omaha-Ponca patterns, which are, I think entirely typical of Dhegiha, are
that demonstratives follow nouns and articles follow demonstratives.  It
is possible to get reinforced structures with a demonstrative or
demonstrative + article preceding.  There's no plural of the
demonstrative, but the -na morpheme that does this in Dakotan is used
after demonstratives like a postposition in the sense of 'be so many', so
a=naN 'how many', e=naN 'that many', dhe=naN 'this many', etc.

wa?u=akha 'the woman'
wa?u s^e=akha 'that woman (near you)'
wa?u s^e 'that woman'
s^e wa?u 'that woman' (rare)
s^e=akha wa?u=akha 'that woman' or maybe 'that one, the woman'

It's dangerous to see syntactic order as historical order, but I wonder if
this doesn't suggest that the Dakotan articles, which are not obviously of
positional origin like the Dhegiha ones (as described by Robert Rankin in
his 1970s MALC paper on positionals), are something older retained in
Dakotan and lost in Dhegiha.  I wonder if the -gi in wakkaNdagi might not
actually be a fossil remnant of something like the Dakotan article.

The articles in Chiwere and Winnebago, of course, are something else
again.  t occurs to me that I have no idea what the relative orders are of
articles and demonstratives in these languages.

JE Koontz