More on Long Vowels

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2001, Rankin, Robert L wrote:
> > I have the impression
> >that some of these stems have initial stress when the plural/proximate
> >marker is missing, e.g., ga'ghe, daN'be, etc.  But dhathe'?

Catherine:

> I certainly always hear(d) first syllable accent in these.  But then I
> nearly always marked initial accent with the plural/proximate too -- lots of
> ga'gha=i=the etc. in my texts.  As John knows I sometimes hear(d) accent
> on a different syllable than where he marks it, perhaps because I expected
> stress instead of pitch accent...

Bob:

> I do too. But gaaghe always has a long vowel for me (that's in Kaw, of
> course).  It's conjugated ppaaghe, $kaaghe, gaaghabe, oNgaaghabe, with
> accent on the long V throughout. doNbe 'see' also has initial accent
> throughout the 1st, 2nd, 3rd person. I am not so sure about 'chew, eat'. I
> am pretty sure though that it is conjugated bláche, hnáche, yachábe, but I
> am uncertain of the vowel length here. I think the á is long in the 1st and
> 2nd person forms.

Dorsey has ppa'ghe 'I do', s^ka'ghe 'you do', and ga'ghe 'to make', and,
of course, if there's a prefixed inflectional string, that pulls accent
onto the first syllable in any event (or further forward, depending on the
number of syllables).  And he has lots of ga'gha=ga (male imperative) and
some ga'gha=a (female imperative).  Also once ga'gha=i=ga (male plural
imperative), and once each ga'gha=bi=ama 'they say he made' and
ga'gha=bi=kki 'if he made'. However, he has many instances of
gagha'=bi-ama, gagha'=bi=the, gagha'=bi=egaN, gagha'=i=ga.

I don't know quite what to make of this.  Perhaps he heard
ga<H>gha<L>bi<L>a<L>mA with a fall from ga<H> to gha<L> so that gha<L>
appeared to be the point of stress.  It may even have been louder or at
least more salient in some sense, from the English speaker's point of view
I can't think of a way to interpret this in terms of the influence of
length.

With 'see' it's ttaN'be 'I see', s^taN'be 'you see', daN'be, daN'ba=i 'he
sees'.  He has lots of both daN'ba=bi=ama and daNba'=bi=ama, daN'ba=ga and
daNba'=ga.  What's really interesting is that he has a lot of aN'daNbe 'to
see me' and dhi'daNbe 'to see you' in subordinate positions, and even
aN'daNba=i 'they see me'.  But the "expected" aNdaN'be and dhidaN'be also
occur.

In my own notes I don't seem to have anything useful on interpreting
these.  (Lots of 'see', but that now has an extra syllable, and I elicited
next to no quotatives or subordinate clauses of the right kind.)

WHat I do notice about the stems that have initial stress in the third
person (unprefixed) forms is that they are more or less the cognates of
(or in some other way the behavioral analogs of) Dakotan CVC verb roots.
They differ from roots that have initial stress because of syncopating b-
'I' or s^ 'you' or g- SUUS prefixes, because I think we all hear these as
finally stressed (well, second syllable stressed) in third persons.  For
example, I can't think, of hand, of a dh-stem that behaves like gaghe or
daNbe in terms of stress.  Even examples like dhathe 'eat' that may not be
instrumental stems seem to treat dha as a "light" syllable.

Does anyone hear length in an analog of gaghe' 'to cry'?

This seems to suggest that CVC stems are CVVC stems, at least mostly.

In skimming my fieldnotes I noticed one place where in desperation I had
written ppaa'dhiN for 'Pawnee'.

JEK