Ablaut

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 2 Sep 2001 voorhis at westman.wave.ca wrote:

> The future marker in Catawba is part of the clause-final marking system
> (like Dakota do, ye, he, wo, 7, or Winnebago -(Sa)na, -re, -gi.).  Maybe
> ka:te7 'indeed' or even ka:te(:)se 'the next time', the latter attested
> only once, are cognates with *ktE.  No sign of *iNktE though.

I'm pretty certain that iNktE is a compound of two morphemes, one the more
or less widely attested *kte irrealis or future, which takes the e-grade
in Dakotan (where it doesn't take the iN grade) and Dhegiha, the other the
*iN that leads to the iN grade and which I suspect provides the iN in OP
(e)=iN=the 'perhaps'.  I have a notion that the iN may also show up with
the future in Ioway-Otoe and/or Winnebago.  I'll try to look that up.

> > .... Some stems clearly have accented ablauting vowels, like yA' 'go',
> >
> > .... It's true that at least 'go' may come from something
> > like (?) *ree'hE which might explain the exceptional pattern away as
> > secondary.
>
> Catawba da: 'to go', usually held to be cognate with this verb,
> certainly fits more easily with yA or *rA than with *ree'hE.

My idea of the h final comes from the form in Crow-Hidatsa, but I am weak
on verbs of motion outside of Mississippi Valley and maybe instead of
trying to look them all up I'll wait for comments from the CH contigent
(Randy Graczyk and John Boyle) or maybe Bob Rankin.  Giulia Oliverio,
who's had some things to say on the subject for Southeastern is in Mexico
and off the list for the time being.  There's certainly no trace of -hV in
Mississippi Valley.

> The future marker was discussed above.  As for the plural, there is a
> noun modifier (=adjective or stative verb?), apparently meaning 'more
> than one', found in the published texts, whose pronunciation is probably
> wi: or wi.  That seems to be a possible cognate with the pluralizer
> *-pi, but there is no good evidence that it had an initial vowel.

How interesting and somewhat awkward!  So, like the iN in the iNkte
future, the a in the api plural would have to have a secondary origin.  I
believe it is true that all Siouan plurals or whatever formation take the
a-grade where ablaut enters into their formation.

> > To sum things up, I think verbal ablaut originated in Proto-Siouan,
>
> I think John is using the term Proto-Siouan to mean the ancestor of all
> the Siouan languages after the separation of the Catawban group.  I know
> that is also what I was thinking of when I first used the term, but of
> course there's also an ancestor of Catawban and the rest of Siouan
> further back in time that I think we all, or just I (?), usually also
> refer to as Proto-Siouan.

Yes, I meant Proto-Siouan as the source of Crow-Hidatsa, Mandan,
Mississippi Valley and Southeastern.  I use the expression
Proto-Siouan-Catawban for the larger entity, following the underlying
practice of referring to Siouan and Siouan-Catawban in place of earlier
(Western) Siouan and Eastern Siouan.  This is something of an innovation,
but I think it's sound and fairly deeply embedded in the thinking of the
CSD group, though perhaps I should be careful not to put words in their
mouth!  In one sense it is nothing new at all, since only recently has
much been known about Catawba(n), and information on it has had
essentially no impact on the development of the concept of Proto-Siouan in
the sense of Proto-Siouan-Catawban.  As a matter of fact, Proto-Siouan as
reconstructed tends to be even more restricted.  It is largely
Proto-Mississippi Valley Siouan, though CH, Mandan and SE have had some
influence on our conception of it.

> There are no probable cognates in Catawba for putative articles or
> demonstratives *a or *e, as far as I know.  ...

The *e is pretty universal in Siouan (as opposed to Catawban), but I'm
less sure of *(h)a.

I should say frankly that as far as deriving nominal ablaut from
demonstratives or articles, that I have never received any particular
encouragement in that regard from other Siouanists so nobody else needs to
take it very seriously.  In fact, I should admit that there is a strong
precedent for not taking it very seriously.  Everybody has their views on
the awkward final vowels of nouns across Siouan, of course. When the
typical vowel development rule in Siouan is V[alpha features] => V[alpha
features], with only the occasional raising of e and o to i and u, you
know something is up, and students have not failed to notice the problem.
I have noticed different approaches or attempts at summarization by Ken
Miner, Dick Carter, and Bob Rankin in the past.  I have to confess that
I'm not sure at the moment what the views of Wolff and Matthews and
Kaufman have been, but I'm sure they puzzled over it, too.

Incidentally, to give credit where it's due, the whole conception of
deriving thematic (and thus often gender markers) on nouns from absorbed
articles (in the larger sense) derives from a paper by Greenberg. This may
tend to make Americanists bridle, influenced by his ideas on
classification, but I think in this instance his conclusions are sound.