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

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 3 Sep 2001 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote:
> In Crow, noun stems ending in i and a have an e-grade that occurs as the
> citation form and when the the noun occurs with no further suffixation.
> E.g., bili' 'water' (stem), bile' (citation form).  When the definite article
> is added to a noun, it is always added to the e-grade, eg, bile'e-sh 'the
> water'.  This would support some kind of connection between e-grade and
> definiteness.

It occurs to me to mention that Mandan has a kind of noun-marker e that is
omitted in some contexts, e.g., in compounding, but also some independent
contexts.  Hollow treats it as an epenthetic vowel, if I remember, but
Kennard thought it was morphological.  Nouns often display a final -r- or
-h- or -?- when the e is added, e.g., ko ~ kore.  The -r- could be
something of a default, as -r- is the usual separator of two vowels, one
of them high in Plains languages where y ands r have merged or for some
other reason there is no y.  This would be my assumption.  However, is is
also not inconceivable that some Proto-Siouan nouns ended in -r (*-r or
(*-y) and some Siouanists have favored this analysis at least at time.

I don't think anyone would claim that e is an article.  In fact, Mandan
has an enclitic or suffix -s (matches Crow s^) that is the definite
article.  The Mandan e is somewhat reminsicent of the Winnebago -ra,
though I don't know that anyone has looked at their functions in any
detail.