Lakota demonstratives

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Wablenica wrote:

> Talking about "ka-" demonstratives, they are not widely used in
> Deloria's Dakota Texts either. Here are the frequencies:

I wanted to see if I could say anything about demonstrative statistics in
Omaha-Ponca easily.  The answer is, probably not, since dhe is homophonous
with 'to go' and the causative, while ga is homophonous with the male
imperative and '(third person) said as follows', and all are widely used
in clitic complexes of considerable length,

However, I do have a list of white-space-delimited character strings form
Dorsey, and perusing the lists there it looks like the ratios could be
several hundred isolated dhe to several tens of isolated s^e to a handful
of isolated ga in about 800 pages of text and free translation.  That is
with forms not in clitic complexes.  There are c. 1000 accented ga, but
they all seem to be from ga'=bi=ama 'he said as follows'.

Actually, checking the texts, it looks like most of the isolated ga are
not the demonstrative.  But there are c. 20 instances of ga'=ama 'that' +
'the moving or plural', for example.

As far as clitic complex forms, here are over 100 intances of s^e=thaN 'so
far', though only some of them are at the end of texts.  S^e'=thaN is
particularly common ending texts from Francis LaFlesche and Mary
LaFlesche, and occurs in some othe texts as well.  S^e=na 'so many',
glossed 'enough', occurs in some letters.

Essentially all instances of du/s^u/gu are in clitic complexes. There are
only a couple dozen du and gu cases. On the other hand, there are hundreds
of cases of s^u- proclitic to motion verbs, e.g., c. 75 of s^u=bdhe 'I go
to you' alone and over 230 of s^u=dhe 'he goes to you'.  This is without
counting the proximate form sh=adha=i of the latter.

There are numerous cases of e and e= of course.

I checked to see what Dorsey did with yonder, and it seems that he
regularly uses this to gloss s^e=hi and s^e=dhu, to derivatives of s^e.
The first uses =hi to indicate a place a bit further away than s^e.  The
second seems to be a locative.  (I remember that dhe=(dh)u was common in
the speech of CW, the man I worked with most.) Dorsey also uses yonder in
glossing s^u=gi 'coming to you', as in 'yonder comes so-and-so'.  Dorsey
does not use yon to gloss ga.  He does once gloss ga=hi= as 'that ... out
of sight'.

JEK