Dhegiha -akhe.

[Rankin, Robert L]

>Although the evidential or narrative the (narrative is Dorsey's gloss)
probably does have a separate origin from the article the, I've also
demonstrated that in OP at least it clearly now alternates with khe,
dhaN and even ge in its evidential capacity.  On the other hand, this is a
rather special use of the and may not parallel uses of the animate
articles as imperfective (progressive?) auxiliaries.

Of course not. That's my whole point.

> 2. "non-ablauting -e stem verb"  There are no
> non-ablauting -e stems in Dhegiha as far as I know.

>Actually, I've just demonstrated that neither e (demonstrative) nor tte
'buffalo' ablaut in Omaha-Ponca.

Huh?? But those aren't verbs!! Of course they don't "ablaut".

>Akhe doesn't, either, though I'd argue that this was because it
incorporates e.  If it doesn't incorporate e, it's a third example.

No, it's the only example if it's a verb.

> 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.

>Agreed about Dorsey and understanding and normalization.  However, I
believe there is nothing chance about the alternation of a=i and a=bi....

If you mean they're different morphemes, I'd have to see minimal pairs come
out of elicitation with different meanings to believe that.  Synchronically
in OP I can't tell, but historically it's pretty clear that /-i/ here is a
variant pronunciation of /-bi/, as there are languages like Kaw and Quapaw
that haven't lost the labial element and therefore don't have /-i/.

>On the other hand, There are tons of places where it ai > e could occur
with =i, and it never, ever does,.... In fact the normal development of
final ...a=i## is not e, but a, which occurs with most Omaha speakers -
including all those I have ever heard personally.

If we're talking about the 'plural' and '3sg' forms (and I admit I've lost
track) and you want to look at it strictly synchronically, this is because
there is an underlying -b- in the sequences that blocks monophthongization.
Historically, it's clear that these cases underwent different relative
chronologies from older a+i sequences.

I think we're getting too permissive in what we allow as evidence in these
discussions. There is an *7e: 'demonstrative', a *he 'locative be', an *-e
or *-he 'female speech', an 7e 'food', a *he 'horn', a *he 'louse', an
*7e:-he ~ *7e: 'say the preceding', and perhaps others. We have begun
playing fast and loose with glottal stops, H's, vowel length and sundry
other phonological and morphological processes (monophthongization, C-loss,
compounding, etc.) and once you do that with a monosyllabic form such as
(7/h)e(:), you can interpret it any way you want.

Bob