akhe

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

>> Rory:
>> 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.

> Bob:
>
> 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.

I didn't mean to imply that there were other non-ablauting -e stem verbs.
In general, the word dhiN means "to be", but "s/he is" cannot be expressed
as e' dhiN.  In Dorsey, there seem to be two ways of saying this:  e'-e;
and X akhe'.  The latter is probably existential or identity; for set
membership I assume you would say X dhiN.  In modern Omaha, our speakers
do not recognize e'-e, but they do accept akhe'.  Functionally, akhe' is
a non-ablauting -e stem verb, though it may be the only one in all of
Dhegiha.


>> 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.

That's right.  Sorry I was blanking on that when I wrote the above.


> 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.

I agree; this is something we need to watch out for.  In Dorsey, though,
the -bi is pretty certainly a distinct morpheme from the -i, and there
are apparently at least two different versions of -i as well.

Rory