akhe

[Rankin, Robert L]

I don't know how you guys find the time to keep this correspondence up and
get any work done. :-) It's late morning and I still haven't done anything
but email....

>Examples that tend to show that akhe isn't a female speech form.  I'm
using Dorsey's glosses.  I've retranscribed but kept his word divisions,
though I've inserted = in them.

I ran across a number of the forms you list below when I was in Melbourne
researching positionals. I'll have to check, but in some instances it looked
like akhe was simply a verb.

>Here I'm using Dorsey's glosses.

90:63.11
Is^ti'niNkhe akh=e akha,    a'=bi=ama
I.           is    the one  said they they say

>Here the akhe isn't final.  The repeated akha is a pattern that does
occur with 'there is' sentences.

I agree both these are akha, but I certainly wouldn't segment it this way.
To me, this is [[[ishtiniNkhe akha] [e akha]] abiama] the /e/ brackets with
the second akha.

>90:143.14
wiga'xdhaN ga'=akh=e             a'=bi=ama
my wife    that one lying is she said he, they say

>This is definitely a masculine speaker.

I'm not saying that ALL the sequences of /akhe/ are female speakers. To me
this is simply mis-segmented. the /khe/ is your 'lying' article or AUX. /ga/
is the part that means 'that one'.  You figure out what the extra -a- is
between ga and khe, but where are you going to get 'lying' from if not from
khe?

>90:311.4
wadhaxu'xughe naN'ba t?e  akh=e         a'dha  u
racoon        two    dead the two (lie) indeed halloo

>Here Dorsey seems to be considering that akhe might be 'the two', but I
doubt this is correct per se, though he is no doubt noticing that there
are two racoons, but the article form is what he considers singular.

Again, this is not akh+e but rather a+khe. Khe is where you get your 'lying'
semantics from. Where else?  Khe is both singular and plural for lying
(unless a-khe is somehow plural). this is just a perverse segmentation to
me.

You have several other instances of /khe/ 'the lying' that you've broken up
into /akh/ (which you think is what? Akha?) and /-e/, which you seem to feel
is demonstrative 7e.  But the translation refers to horizontal (lying,
reclining) beings or objects. Semantics plays a role in these puzzles too!
Why not start off by segmenting the obvious (!) /khe/ and they try to
analyze the remainder.

Bob