Fetch

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2001 BARudes at aol.com wrote:
> It is of course possible that the k of the Catawba proclitic duk# is cognate
> with the vertitive in Siouan, but I am not sure how you would prove it.  The
> du part could come from *ru or *nu, but there is no internal evidence in
> Catawba to suggest that duk# was ever bimorphemic.  Duk# is one of a long
> list of locative and directional proclitics that occur before the verb root
> in Catawba.  Others include hap# up, ma# there, c^apa# away, c^ik# forward,
> huk# below, su# in.  I call them proclitics because the following stem
> undergoes the same sound changes it would if it were word initial (e.g., r
> becomes /d/ before an oral vowel and /n/ before a nasal vowel).

If there's anything in the Ca duk= 'back' : PSi *k- vertive comparison, it
wouldn't be necessary for duk= to be bimorphemic.  I don't know that any
case has been made for *raka- being bimorphemic.  This is the form for the
'by striking' instrumental supported in, I think, Crow-Hidatsa and
Southeastern, whereas Mississippi Valley supports *ka-, but with an odd
*ra- allomorph when various *ki- morphemes are prefixed.  The situation is
completely obscured by an odd shift of meanings in Chiwere and Winnebago,
but that's another matter.  Basically, initial *ra, not known to be a
separate morpheme from trailing *ka, disappears.

There may have been some confusion with a homophonous *ka 'by
wind/current', though the existence of this latter instrumental is
somewhat notional.  It does seem to exist in Hidatsa, and the meanings
covered seem to fall under *ka in Mississippi Valley languages where I've
checked.

There's also a loss of initial *hi or final *(r)a in the causative in a
number of languages.  At least it seems clear that the original was
something like *=hi=...(r)a, but usually only half of this survives in the
simplest form of attested causative, e.g., Dakotan =yA or Winnebago =hii,
but cf. Dakotan =khiyA for the longer form.  I don't think this is quite
an apt comparison, since it is probably bimorphemic, and the mechanisms
for reduction are fairly clear, but it does show that derivational
morphology can be eroded fairly severely.

Most of the proclitics you cite are pretty much in line with the semantic
domain of the Siouan locative prefixes, also prefixed to the stem.  The
locatives are covered by *i, *a, or *o and sequences like *i-r-o or
*i-r-a, though there may be several distinct morphemes (or meanings,
anyway) associated with each vowel.  The shapes are certainly different
here, though, between Catawban and Siouan.

Like the locatives the vertitive is primarily directional or
locational in sense.  I think the usual supposition is that the suus or
reflexive possessive *k(i)- is somehow related to the *k- vertitive
('homeward/back') via the concept of '(own) place'.

If something like duk is involved in the origin of the vertitive, one way
to account for the loss of initial du is through absorption into
pronominals.  The closest equivalent to Catawban initial mutation
inflection that I can think of in Siouan is Stoney 1st/2nd/3rd mu/nu/yu
(from Proto-Dakotan mnu/s^nu/yu) for the inflection of the 'by hand'
instrumental.  Some other developments in syncopating inflection come
close.

> The underlying forms of the instrumental prefixes and the verb go by foot
> are: ra:-, ru- and -ra:-, respectively.  The initial r becomes /d/ or /n/ in
> word-initial position, as noted above.

Just out of curiosity, how do we know that the foot instumental ra:- and
the verb 'go by foot' -ra:- are not connected?

'Foot' is essentially *naN- (with a short vowel, I believe) in Siouan.  I
wonder how old the connection between long vowels and nasal vowels is in
Catawban?  I seem to recall similar explanations for nasal vowels in
Eastern Algonquian.

JEK