aspirated and unaspirated caga

[Koontz John E]

What about that kic*aga 'to freeze again'?  Should that be kic`aga?
With an aspirate?  I expect this is an outright error, in other words, or
a very interesting sound change otherwise.

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, Constantine Xmelnitski wrote:
> Talking about c- / ch- pairs I'd add to the discussion
> a quote from Boas & Deloria's "Dakota Grammar":
>
> Page 101
>
> § 131. kuN'za to decree, ka'g^a to make
>
> ka'g^a to make, lacks the series waki- and has instead
> we'cag^a I make for him, chi'cag^a I make it for you
> (without your sanction), miye'cag^a you make it for
> me, etc.; and chi'cicag^a I make yours or I make it
> for you with your sanction (etc.). The possessive
> forms are irregular insofar as they aspirate the c,
> we'chaga I make my own.
>
> wakuN'za to decree something, also lacks the series
> waki- and has instead wawe'cuNza I decree something
> for him without his sanction and wawe'cicuNza with his
> sanction, or in place of another one. The other forms
> follow the same pattern. As in ka'g^a the possessive
> has aspirate ch, we'chuNza I decree something my own,
> mic?i'chuNza for myself.

I thought that was what I remembered. In other words, the regular and
dative stems of ka'gha and kuN'za are unaspirated (and affricate to c^
after ki in the dative), and the possessive or suus forms are aspirated
-khagha and -khuNza, but also affricate after ki, so that you get
(actually) -c^hagha and -c^huN'za?

Since the discussion here carefully gives the inflected forms but assumes
the user is familiar enough with Dakota to know the third person stem
forms, may I also verify that those forms are:

Transitive      Dative      Possesive
ka'gha          ki'c^agha   kic^ha'gha
kuN'za          ki'c^uNza   kic^huN'za

For comparison's sake, the OP forms are:

g(a)a'ghe       giaghe      gikkaghe
g(aN)aN'ze      giaNze      gikkaNze

The middle forms have the loss of the stem initial *k that David
mentioned, which is also exhibited with the ga- instrumental.  My
understanding is that Osage has something like ks^i'ghe and ks^iaNze here,
or just what LaFlesche reports, wildly improbable though it seems to the
uninitiated!

Note:  Though David is also prefectly correct in saying that it is
unnecessary to write gh for gamma in Dakotan, since gamma only occurs
before vowels and that's all a g before a vowel could be, I tend to write
it anyway, under what I might call an internationalist impulse, because in
Omaha-Ponca all unaspirated k's are voiced before vowels as before dh
(comparable to l, etc.), so there is a contrast between g and gh before
vowels, as in gaghe or gage (ga=ge), the former being 'to make', of
course, and the latter being 'those scattered things', which I think
Clifford Wolf once used in referring to the bits of shrapnel in his body,
courtesy of the Germany army.  The one place *ptc^k are not voiced is
after fricatives ss^x, and there, perhaps in defiance of consistency
all speakers of and students of Omaha seem to agree on writing ptc^k (or
whatever they write for c^).  So it's gaghe, but s^kaghe (second person).
There's a phonetic contrast between g and k, but no phonemic one.

In the same way I try to always write c^ and j^, because there are Siouan
languages where c and j are ts and dz.  A particular language can cut
orthographic corners that a family can't.