Ablaut (RE: Obviative/Proximate and the Omaha verb system)

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001 rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu wrote:
> I'm not getting to the conclusion of what you say here from the
> premises you cite.  We want to know which of the ablaut forms
> represents the bare stem of the verb, and which has been
> modified, presumably by an absorbed extraneous morpheme,
> or part of one.
>
> You claim that most Siouan languages seem to have -e as the
> basic form, with -a the derived form.  Dakotan does not appear
> to be this way for two reasons:
>
>     1)  It has verbs that use -aN as well as ones that use -a
>         in opposition to -e, while other languages have only
>         -a / -e variants;
>
>     2)  The citation form is -a in Dakotan, but -e in other languages.
>
> Premise 1 seems to be a strong reason for favoring the -a or
> -aN version as the stem in Dakotan, since if the -e version were
> the stem, there would be no explanation for forking to -a or -aN
> respectively depending on the verb.

Yes, this is the argument the Dakotanists use.  It doesn't hold any
particular water outside Dakotan, of course, and the ablaut of aN-stems
seems to be a secondary development there.

> The fact that other Siouan languages do not have an -aN / -e version
> of ablaut is only negative evidence, however.

True, but nobody suggests that Dakotan is conservative in this, and even
Dakotan is somewhat schizophrenic in this regard, since the e-vowel
appears in the singulars in finite clauses.  The usual explanation of this
in Dakotan grammar is that A => e before the 7-declarative.

> It does not give us any reason to choose -e over -a as basic in a
> series that uses only -a and -e.  In fact, the Dakotan case should
> argue for -a as the stem version not only for itself, but for all the
> other Siouan languages that show this type of ablaut.

Not when it's clear in each of these languages that the e-form is less
marked there in context, and, in fact, is (as far as I know) always the
citation form in these other languages, too.

> I assume the "citation form" is the form native speakers use
> when asked to speak of the word by itself.

In principle, though, it can be a bit difficult to determine this with
languages where metalinguistic discourse is not often practiced.  In such
cases one looks for a very unmarked context.

In OP, for example, this would be under the scope of another verb, e.g.,
in a causative, or in first persons and second persons, or in obviatives.
One has to have proceded far enough in one's studies to have noticed that
proximate third persons pattern with plurals and have the a-grade, and
that imperatives, though not pronominalized, also have the a-grade (and an
enclitic which is ga for male speakers, and a for females).

> This seems to be the only argument given here for favoring the -e form
> as basic in the non-Dakotan languages.  But how strong is this?

It convinces me, but I admit that the evaluation may be in some degree
arbitrary.  If there were as many Siouanists as there are Gemanists, then
debate would probably be perennial.

> It seems to me that a native speaker, asked to cite a word in his own
> language, would tend to present it in its most finite, and least
> verbal, form.  This form might well be inflected, and hence not the
> basic stem.

Do you mean "most infinite" or "most finite"?  Finite usually means
inflected, and for me inflected definitely means verbal, though there are
inflected infinite forms in some languages.

My experience is that Omaha speakers prefer not to extract enclitics from
context, so they can more easily discuss e=di than =di.  This is a general
tendency with Siouan speakers and they prefer to think of, e.g., ga=di as
derived from e=di than composed from dhe and =di.  They also prefer simple
sentences to words in isolation, so it is easier for them to say
"adha[=i]" 'he/she/it went' than adhe or dhe for 'go'.  I think this is a
human tendency that speakers of languages with extensive traditions of
grammatical introspection escape from during education.  When carried to
extreme one arrives at languages for which the stem cannot actually be
cited except as a linguist's abstraction, and these are common enough.
The concept of a citation form is in part just a crutch for approximating
the abstract stem and not all languages have useful citation forms in this
sense.

> Do we have other reasons for favoring -e as the bare stem
> form in non-Dakotan languages, and especially OP?

For OP, I rely on the "least marked context" argument and, given that the
third person singular proximate might be expected to be "least marked,"
but is not, I (would) point this out carefully in working with a new
student of the language, even a native speaker becoming newly
"introspective."  This circumnstance is not unheard of.  The third person
singular is not least marked in English, either, and the conventional
citation forms for classical IE languages are often the first person
singular, though, e.g., for Romance languages there is some tendency (in
classes, anyway) to prefer the infinitive.

> A reduction of ai to e is a common phonetic shift that occurs
> all over.  We get it in Siouan too, as in the common accented
> first syllable of many verbs: we'-, from an original wa-i'-.  This
> occurs in both Lakhota and Omaha.

Touche', but I'm not convinced it explains the e-grade of ablauting sets.
I have pondered whether it might reflect, say, *a=ki, where *ki is an
article, cf. Dakotan, but for the present I'm operating on the hypothesis
that e and a simply have different morphemic sources and that a is not
simply the original underlying vowel.

> I think you yourself mentioned ai and e, "s/he says/said", as
> alternates a few weeks back.  (Or did you just mean that
> these were different conjugates of the same verb?)

Yes, proximate and obviative or *a=pi and *e, variants of *E, if you will.

> Tai' and te certainly seem to be allomorphic in Dorsey at
> least some of the time.  We can illustrate this from the story
> of HiNqpe-Agdhe.  On page 163, line 4, the second brother
> has been challenged to a contest by the four bad guys.
> He says:
>
>      Eda'daN aNaN' te a?
>      "What will we do (by way of a contest)?"
>
> On page 164, line 6, HiNqpe-Agdhe, the fourth brother, has
> been challenged to a contest by the same four bad guys.
> He says:
>
>      Khe', eda'daN aNaN' tai' a?
>      "Come, what will we do (by way of a contest)?"

You'd have to read the first as inclusive "singular" (or dual, or
non-augmented), i.e., 'what will you (sg.) and I do', referring to one of
the four brothers, and the second as inclusive "plural" (or augmented),
i.e., 'what will you-all and I do'.  The =i is the plural or "augment" as
I think the Austronesianists say, indicating that additional third parties
are included as well as the pronominal referents.

> The circumstances and the wording are almost identical.
> In this case, at least, tai' and te seem to be allomorphs,
> presumably of an original sequence of two morphemes,
> ta-i.  (Or perhaps you would argue for te-a(b)i, with
> indifferent use of the pluralizing particle?)

Yes, =tte :: =tt=a(b)i, cf., Dakotan =kte :: =kt=api.  But I think there's
an actual contrast of meaning here.  Non-pluralized or dual, etc., use of
the inclusive pronoun is fairly rare in Dhegiha, but does occur.  Ardis
and Carolyn more or less forced me to see this in separate cases.

This is the rule in Dakotan, of course, and my understanding is that in
Winnebago the augment or plural can be combined with both the first person
(as 'I and he') and the inclusive (as 'you and I and he').

> Are we absolutely sure (checked with native speakers)
> that that final -te in e'iNte is a -the and not a tte?
> Dorsey doesn't mark the potentive particle tte any
> differently from the positional the, as far as the t
> goes, anyway.

He tends to put a breve over e in the vs. e in tte.

I'm pretty sure I've got the tte and the sorted out, partly, but not
entirely with the help of speakers:  =tta=i ~ =tte future, =tta=i=the ~
=tte=the future of surity (Dorsey's 'shall surely') or future + evidently,
=bi=the ~ =i=the ~ =the 'evidently' (sometimes glossed narrative past,
etc.), e=iN=the ~ iN=the 'perhaps', e=the modal.