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

[voorhis at westman.wave.ca]

Koontz John E wrote:
> I perhaps should have said that my suggestion was that nominal ablaut and
> related cross-language patterns were to be explained by postulating two
> "articles" *e 'specific' and *a 'generic' that acted as enclitics to nouns
> in, say, Proto-Mississippi Valley Siouan and were widely preserved with
> what had been CVC-stem nouns as well as with some CV nouns (+> CV-r- with
> epenthetic r), as well as with verb citation forms in Dakotan and in the
> various fossils like the Winnebago =ra article and =re relativizer, in
> those intrusive -a- linkers with postpositions in Dakotan and Omaha-Ponca,
> and so on.

A question:  What time relative to Proto-Siouan are we talking about
here? The ablaut patterns in Dakota/Lakota, Winnebago, and Omaha-Ponca
seem to be similar enough in most details to warrant simply
reconstructing ablaut in the ancestor of these languages, at least.  (I
went to check on Biloxi and Tutelo but I find I have left those grammars
about a mile away from the computer and decided not to delay this query
while going out into the growing twilight to fetch them.)

Of course, morpheme alternants presumably always arise from phonemic or
morphemic changes, and it is appropriate historical inquiry to try to
discover those changes -- I'm not questioning the inquiry.  But do you
think those changes occurred in post-Proto-Siouan times or in
pre-Proto-Siouan?

A parallel from ablaut in Germanic: It is thought to arise, at least in
part, in reaction to the shifting place of accent in
Proto-Indo-European. But as far as Proto-Germanic is concerned, I think
the accent is already fixed on the first syllable except for a few
prefixes, and ablaut as a device for indicating tense, etc., is simply
reconstructed for the proto-language much as it is found in the daughter
languages to this day.

Paul