Predicative (?)e (was RE: Nominal Ablaut, ...)

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

> Bob:

>>> Ama' / ame' would be the plural/moving counterpart of akha' / akhe'.

>> Yes, but really it's just akha and ama with or without a following e.

> I'm sure someone in this exchange has said it already somewhere, but let
me
> reiterate: Sentence-final /V/ and /Ve/ or just /e/ variants are most
often
> the women's speech forms. And in more recent times one gets /-e/ variants
in
> male speech too because of learning contexts.  This used to cause great
> mirth among the elderly Osage women I worked with back about 1980.

> In Quapaw the /-e/ variant simply substituted for the -V in women's
speech.

Some things I have said in class with sentence-final -e have
caused great mirth among our Omaha ladies as well.

I'm confused by your symbolism above.  Doesn't /V/ just mean any vowel?
If so, aren't you saying that any sentence that ends in a vowel is a
women's speech form?  In that case, why mention /e/ separately?

In the Dorsey texts, akha' is regularly used as an article, while
akhe' is placed after a nominal to indicate that that nominal is what
the foregoing is.  It has seemed to me to function as a third-person
copula of identity, though John views it as the contraction of a normal
akha' article with the third-person demonstrative 7e.  (He may be right;
I need to think about this.)  Though akhe' is generally sentence-final,
I don't see any indication that the speaker in these cases is apt to be
female. The difference here seems to be grammatical, not a gender marker.

Rory