Oglala (was Re: Locative Postpositions)

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Ardis R Eschenberg wrote:
> With regards to the below part of John's message about the derivation of
> river names, I thought it might be nice to give an example I obtained
> yesterday when making a worksheet for second graders here in Macy with
> Omaha elder Mrs. Marcella Cayou.

> I was given the form 'uga' to mean to color.  Here's an example:
>
> Wamuske skithe niashiNga zi     shabe  uga.
> bread    sweet man       yellow dark   color
> 'Color the gingerbread man brown.'
>
> This supports that such morphemes might occur with rivers with colors in
> their names.

That's interesting, though I wonder if it would be the same uga as in
forms like ugazi, etc.  I'd assume (perhaps incorrectly) that the latter
would be u LOCATIVE + ga INSTRUMENTAL + zi 'yellow', inflected u(w)agazi,
udhagazi, ugazi=i, aNdhaNgazi=i, whereas a bare stem uga couldn't involve
the instrumental.  How is uga inflected?  I'm assuming that it's in the
female imperative in Mrs. Cayou's sentence:  uga a, perhaps with the a
omitted?  My active vocabulary of Omaha is miniscule, of course, and I
don't happen to remember uga.  If the verb uga does occur in these forms,
I'd wonder if the inflectional pattern might be different from that with
ga instrumentals.

N.B.  Without the locative before the pronominal slot, ga instrumentals
inflect as follows:  a(a)..., dha(a)..., ga..., aNga...  I think the g is
retained in the inclusive.  If not, it's aNa.  How embarassing to forget!