Nominal Ablaut in Crow

[Rgraczyk at aol.com]

It's about time to add some Crow data to the discussion, lest the Siouan list
become the Dhegiha list!

Crow does have some traces of nominal ablaut, although I am not sure how
significant they are from a diachronic standpoint, except to emphasize the
fact that ablaut is a persistent pattern in Siouan languages.

1) Stems ending in short a or i ablaut to e in the citation form, the form
that occurs as an independent word, e.g.

bili' 'water' (stem)
bile' (citation form)
bili-shpi'te 'coffee' (+ shipi'te 'black')
bili-chiku'a 'pop' (+ chiku'a 'sweet')

Wes Jones claims in his article on the Hidatsa approximative that short e is
raised to i in Hidatsa.  This may have been the case also in Crow, although
it is no longer a synchronic rule.  Actually the reverse is true in Crow: i --
> ee word-finally.  I write ee, because there is evidence that short e and o
have been lost in Crow, so that even words like bile' that we write with a
short e actually have phonemic ee.  Perhaps all the short e's went to i.

Because all stems ending in i and a have citation forms in e, it can actually
be difficult at times to find out what the stem-final vowel is.  When you ask
a Crow speaker for a word, you invariably get the citation form.  The
simplest way to discover the stem vowel is to ask for the word with a
sentence-final declarative marker -k, i.e., 'it's an X'.  However speakers
tend to rebel at saying things like 'it's a pancreas', so I don't actually
have stem forms for some of the body parts.  (Note that many of the stem
forms for body parts cannot be found in the Dictionary of Everyday Crow.)

2) Generally, word-formation processes involve the nominal stem rather than
the citation form: compounding, derivational affixation, etc.  However there
are four suffixes that are added to the citation form rather than to the
stem: -sh (definite article), -m (indefinite non-specific article), -taa
(path postposition), and -n (locative postposition), e.g.

bile'e-sh 'the water'
bile'e-m 'some water'

a'aka 'top, roof' (stem)
a'ake (citation form)
a'aka-ss 'to the top' (+ goal postposition; no ablaut)
a'akee-n 'on top' (+ locative pp; ablaut)
a'akee-taa 'along the top' (+ path pp; ablaut)

I consider these true examples of ablaut, since the change is conditioned
only by certain suffixes.  There are also a handful of stems in Crow that end
in short u: these ablaut to oo, e.g.

baalu' 'bead' (stem)
baalo' (citation form)
baalu-sho'oshuwatchi 'medium blue' (no ablaut)
baalo'o-sh 'the beads (+ definite article; ablaut)

The first solution for this pattern that leaps to mind is that the four
suffixes are actually --eesh, -eem, -eetaa and -een.  However then we have
the difficulty of explaining what happens with the u-stems, where the vowel
is oo rather than ee.

3) In addition to these, there are some nouns that ablaut before plural -u
and before other suffixes beginning with -a:

b'itchii 'knife' (stem)
bi'tchiia (citation form)
bi'ttaa-u 'knives' (+ plural; ablaut)

iskoochi'i 'enemy' (stem)
iskoochi'ia (citation form)
iskoota'a-u (+plural; ablaut)

This variety of ablaut is lexically conditioned; there are many more nouns
ending in -ii that do not ablaut.  This same ablaut pattern is found in a
number of verbs ending in -ii:

du'ushii 'set down, put down, bury' (stem)
du'usaa-u (+ plural; ablaut)
du'usaa-(a)k (+ SS marker; ablaut)
du'usaa-h (+ imperative; ablaut)

I have a paper on Crow ablaut which goes into these matters in considerably
more detail.  I'll bring it along to Boulder to add to the collection.

Randy
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