akhe

[Rankin, Robert L]

>> 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".

>In general, the word dhiN means "to be", but "s/he is" cannot be
expressed as e' dhiN.

Wow. That's interesting. It would be a homophone with 'be moving' in the 3rd
person and perhaps others.

>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.

I'm not sure what your last sentence means. If you mean "predicate" in the
larger sense, then I can't argue with it, since nouns can be predicates and
don't "ablaut" like verbs. But if you feel it really is a verb, then I'd be
curious to know what happens with (1) the plural (-a{b}i), (2) the negative
(-azhi) and the imperative (-a). That would be the test of whether it
ablauts or not. If it doesn't occur with any of these, then at least
formally, I'd be willing just to say it isn't a verb.

I'm also curious to know if the -akhe/-ame constructions are found in Osage,
or, even more interestingly, in Oklahoma Ponca. This would give us a handle
on whether we're dealing with an otherwise-unattested older development or
whether it's a recent Omaha grammaticalization. Same for the -abi ~ -ai
alternations (vs. possibly separate morphemes).

Bob