Hochunk wa-

[Johannes Helmbrecht]

Dear Subscribers,

since its the first time that I post something on this list, I would
like to introduce myself a little bit. I am a linguist from Germany
currently affiliated at the newly founded University of Erfurt. I have
been working on Hochunk for about four years now. My cooperation
partners are the people from the Hocank Language Program in Mauston,
Wisconsin. This is a tribal institution to document and preserve the
Hocank (Winnebago) language. As with many Native languages, Hochunk is a
highly endangered language with probably not more than 200 elders
speaking the language fluently. I am primarily interested in the grammar
of Hochunk (it is my intention to write a grammar of this language), but
I am also planning a large scale documentation of Hochunk (but this is
just an idea - I am still looking for funding).

Since I am interested also in comparative Siouan issues (but have no
idea about it at all) I would like to post the following query here.

There is a third person plural object prefix wa- in Hochunk which is
probably identical to another form (wa-) which seems to function as an
intransitivizer - it occurs with transitive verbs and is usually
translated with 'something' like in waruc = 'eat sth'. In addition, this
form wa- also appears with nouns such as waaruc 'table' (which probably
derives from < wa-ha-ruc 'sth where to eat on', but there is no attested
form *haruc 'to eat on' (ha- = one of the locational prefixes). Lipkinds
(1945)idea is that wa- is a shortened form of the indefinite pronoun
waza 'something'(I neglect diacritics here, z is a voiced palatal
fricative, the second a is nasalized) which in turn derives from a
combination of wa- plus hiza 'a, one', according to Lipkind. This is of
course speculation because there is no noun *wa 'thing' attested.
Otherwise, the idea seems plausible to me (at least on the background of
grammaticalization theory).
Does anyone have evidence for this proposed historical change, and are
there similar processes attested in other Siouan languages ?

Thank you very much
Johannes
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