Predicative (?)e

[Rankin, Robert L]

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

John is probably right that, classically, the fem. particle was -he, with an
/h/, but I think those h's are gone in speech for the most part. I never
heard a single one in Kaw, Quapaw or Osage. They are a possible source of
ANY sentence-final [e], even with male speakers.

>I'm confused by your symbolism above.  Doesn't /V/ just mean any vowel?

yes, sorry about that. My fingers get ahead of my brain.

>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?

No, that's just my little way of trying to confuse everybody. I think what I
was probably trying to say here badly was that, whatever V ends the last
word in the sentence, it can be completely replaced by /-e/ in female
declaratives.

>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.

Hmmm, somehow I don't see these as different analyses. I think you're both
right. EXCEPT that if the 'reclining' article, khe, is a semantic part of
the discourse, then [akhe] is a+khe, not akh(a)+e. That is the topic of the
other thread that John and I have been carrying on.

>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.

That may well be. I think my point is that there are SEVERAL potential
ambiguities possible in such cases.  That's why they all really need to be
checked with fluent speakers.

Bob