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

[BARudes at aol.com]

Paul Voorhis 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.

Catawbas today use the particle kate (with accent on the last vowel) both as
an adverb meaning <indeed> and as the word for <goodbye>.  The semantics of
relating this to -ktE or the related forms in other Siouan languages seem
difficult.

Paul Voorhis wrote:
>Catawba da: 'to go', usually held to be cognate with this verb,
>certainly fits more easily with yA or *rA than with *ree'hE.

I agree.  Incidentally, Catawba da: <go> is underllyingly <ra:>, with
automatic shift of morphophonemic /r/ to /d/ when word-initial.

Paul Voorhis wrote:

>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.

Although Siebert also analyzed wi as general pluralizer, all of the data I
have show it to be the non-first person, plural object proclitic on verbs
(i.e., it means <you plural object> or <them>).  It forms a set of object
proclitics with ni <me>, yi <you singular object>, and nu <us>.  Third person
singular objects are not marked by a proclitic.  There is also another object
proclitic, pa <some>, which is used for indefinite objects.  I think Catawba
pa may be a better candidate for being cognate with Siouan *-(a)pi than is wi.

Paul Voorhis wrote:
>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.

I assumed the same think, and I concur with John's usage (in a subsequent
email) of the term Proto-Siouan-Catawban for the ancestor of the Siouan and
Catawban languages.  My quibble is with how we use the term pre-Proto-Siouan.
 Since the only well documented Catawban language (at the moment, but see
below) is Catawba, in both its dialects, unless a feature is attested both in
the Siouan languages and Catawban languages, it cannot be ascribed to
Proto-Siouan-Catawban.  Since Catawba is the only language that we are sure
is distantly related to Siouan (although Yuchi may someday be proven to be in
the same boat), for something to be securely pre-Proto-Siouan, it must be
attested in Catawba, and therefore belong to Proto-Siouan-Catawban.  Anything
ascribed to a purported pre-Proto-Siouan that is not attested in Catawba is
presumably an internal reconstruction within Proto-Siouan. While internal
reconstruction within Proto-Siouan is fine, the results must be viewed with
great caution when they cannot be confirmed with data from Catawba.

Now for the possibility of data on other Catawban languages.  To make a long
story short, back in 1567, Juan Pardo left his chaplain, Father Montero,
behind in the Carolinas to set up a mission to the Wateree Indians in the
heart of Catawban-speaking territory.  After about 5 years, Montero left and
no knew what had become of his records.  Last fall, I met Claudia
Heinemann-Priest's mother, Professor Barbara Heinemann, who teachers in the
Modern and Classical Languages Department at Winthrop University.  She
mentioned that she was going to be chaperoning a group of students to Havana
this summer, and I asked her to look in the archives there to see if there
were any manuscripts from Spanish missions to the Southeast.  Barbara and I
have only spoken briefly since she got back, but she reports that she found
the records from a number of Spanish missions in the Southeast, including the
records of the mission to the Wateree by Father Montero.  The records are
currently being copied through support form Winthrop University, and it may
be some time before they are catalogued and available for research.  However,
since Father Montero was reportedly a Jesuit, and we know that he missionized
to not only the Wateree, but the surrounding villages as well, there is every
reason to believe that new data on Catawban languages (as well as data on
other little known languages of the Southeast such as Guale, Yamassee, Cusabo
and Calusa) will become available in the not too distant future.

Paul Voorhis wrote:
>There are no probable cognates in Catawba for putative articles or
>demonstratives *a or *e, as far as I know.  Blair has more extensive and
>accurate material to work with, though, and may be able to suggest
>something for these and the other Siouan forms discussed here.
>Likewise, I'll count on him to correct my transcriptions since the
>material I work with is rather unreliable, especially in the marking of
>vowel length.

Catawba has numerous demonstratives that differentiate fine degrees of
proximity, but Paul is correct that none of them bear any resemblance to *a
or *e.  (Paul, your transcriptions were fine.)

Blair