akhe

[Rankin, Robert L]

> Another argument against it is that akha', as a
positional, ought to come *after* the (-i | -bi) particle if it occurs at
the end of the sentence, as "the" does in the fairly frequent form
[Sentence] bi=the'=ama. I think the examples you cite above indicate that
akhe' functions as a non-ablauting -e stem verb, however it was derived.

1. "as 'the' does in ... frequent form"  Actually, this is the "the" that is
not historically a positional I think. It's the one that some linguists have
translated 'narrative' and which has the cognate in Hidatsa "rahe"
'rumored'.  John's 2000 Siouan Conf. paper was on synchronic aspects of this
particle and my ICHL paper last month was on diachronic aspects of it.

2. "non-ablauting -e stem verb"  There are no non-ablauting -e stems in
Dhegiha as far as I know. Only Dakotan, which has totally restructured the
system, has "non-ablauting -a stems". If you're going to be at the syntax
meeting, I'll distribute my paper on this there.

> The variation of akha' / akhe' and ama' / ame' is not our standard verbal
ablaut.  These words, as you say, need to be analysed separately.  Unless
someone else cares to argue for them, I think we can reject hypothesis 1
(ablaut) and hypothesis 3 (X akha=i ==> X akhe). This leaves hypothesis 2 (X
akha e ==> X akhe) and hypothesis 4 (X akha, e akha ==> X akhe).  Bob, did
you have another one?

3. In those instances where 'lying/horizontal' persons/objects are involved
I think the identity of the /khe/ part of akhe is clearly the reclining
positional, not a derivation from akha. In dealing with form and meaning,
meaning is of equal or greater importance.

Other than those 3 points, I don't have anything to add to the discussion
because the languages I've worked on just don't have /akhe/ apparently.

Oh yeah, there was one other thing.  The fact that e ~ ai ~ abi all occur in
the texts (or even the same text) does not mean that they are semantically
or morphologically distinct forms. They may be individual or simply
fast-speech variants of one another much like some of the plural allomorphs
Connie listed for Dakotan -- "contractions" if you will. This is why
additional field investigation is so important. Dorsey may have tried to
normalize his notation in publications, but he didn't always understand
everything.

Bob