Number & Counting Comparisons in Dhegiha

[Rankin, Robert L]

> I wondered briefly about switching the instrumental to '-ya-' 'by mouth'
to tweak the meaning, and maybe adding a helper or two, such as 'iye'
'speech' or something to that effect.  I came up with the curious phrase
'iye wayayawa.'  Is it just me?  ...This seems
> kinda silly.   I'm wondering if it is even possible to use instrumental
'ya' to refer to speech.  Does it generally invoke the sense of physical
mouth mechanics, such as blowing or chewing?

Yes, you can definitely use ya- with speech-related verbs.  It can be either
physical or metaphorical use of the mouth.  Check out all the ya- entries in
the dictionary and you'll see a bunch.

> ...some interesting Kansa examples of redundancy in 1st & 2nd persons in
which two different sets of prefixes are used at the same time.

> Do such constructions more often involve combinations of A-Active Regular
Conjugation and (Y-) R-Stem Conjugation?  Does this ever occur with any of
the less productive conjugations?

Yes.  I've heard yashkaaxe 'you make/do' where both ya- and sh- are
pronominals.  Probably lots of others.  The duplicate pronominal always
precedes and is the "regular" one though.

Bob