Irregular "to eat" in Dakotan

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2001 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote:
> > For the record, I believe that this is the regular pattern for the lu-
> > instrumental in Crow, ...
>
> I'm not sure I'm understanding John correctly, but duushi' does not follow
> the regular pattern for du- 'by hand' instrumentals in Crow.  It is irregular
> in two respects: in the first person form the initial vowel of the stem is
> replaced by the first person marker b-, and the accent is on the final vowel
> of the stem (duushi').  In all the du- instrumentals, the instrumental prefix
> bears the accent, e.g., du'tchi 'take'.

Which is the polite way to say I was wrong.  The first person of an l-stem
in Crow would have buru'... (not sure of length).  And it looks like the
length would be different, too, since 'eat' is long (duushi'), while the
instrumental is short.

So, rapidly reversing direction on Crow, I point out that at least the
first person is somewhat comparable to the Dakotan or Winnebago treatment,
though the vowel that follows is the stem vowel, not the usual pronominal
vowel.  It looks like Crow supports a stem analysis of *u't(e) in the
first person, as opposed to *ru-t(e) (stress not clear to me).

And, carefully checking the paper I referred to (in lieu of the original
sources) it appears that Hidatsa has the same treatment of the first
person as Crow:

A1  wuu'ti
A2  raruu'ti
A3  ruu'ti

But the instrumental ru is inflected:

A1  wa-ru-  (where Crow has bu-lu-)
A2  ra-ru-  (where Crow has di-lu-)
A3  ru-

I'm not sure about the accent in Hidatsa in either case, or the manner of
marking it, but I do know that initial w is actually pronounced (and
usually written) m and initial r is actually pronounced (and usually
written) n.

Thanks Randy!