Silly terminological question.

[John Boyle]

Bob,

I gloss the i-/i:- as INST and I gloss the other as more specific
instrumentals (i.e. INh - instrumental 'by hand', INf - instrumental
'by foot' etc.).  I have found that this helps me keep them straight.

John


>This is a minor but annoying problem I keep encountering when trying to do
>interlinear glosses in Siouan linguistics papers.
>
>We regularly deal with two different types of verb prefixes that we often
>call "instrumental".  One is generic, the prefix /i/ or /i:/, often
>translated 'with', 'by means of' but sometimes with its meaning pretty much
>bleached out.
>
>Then there are the more specific "instrumentals" like pa-, yu-, ka-, na-,
>ya-, etc., etc., the familiar 'by hand', 'by mouth', 'by striking', etc.
>
>In interlinear translations I mark these latter as INSTR.  But then what do
>I do with the former type?  It distributes like the locatives, but it isn't
>a locative.  Sometimes I've called the "instrumentive", which sounds silly
>and is confusing to boot.  I'm just revising a paper in which I have to
>solve this problem.  Anyone have an opinion??
>
>Bob