waiN

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

> There are two distinct roots under discussion here.

> Proto-Siouan *?iN   'to wear' (&homophone 'think') and

> Proto-Siouan *k?iN 'to pack on the back, carry'

> In Omaha, these two should come out /iN/ and /?iN/.
> Someone with a bent toward instrumental phonetics might
> want to make some recordings and see what they look
> like.

> bob

Thanks, Bob.  That clarifies things a lot.  I was
obviously confusing these two, which must be pronounced
identically in Omaha in the third person.

The meanings also seem close enough to be variants of a
single verb concept.  Just out of curiosity, suppose we
had an original Proto-Siouan verb *?iN, meaning to bear
on the back.  This verb then becomes used for robes and
other clothing that people generally bear on their backs,
so that it takes on the primary sense of 'wear'.  Then
when speakers want to refer to the original sense of
carrying things on the back in the sense of laboring
rather than wearing, they try to clarify their reference
by adding some sort of /ki-/ particle in front to get
*ki?iN' or some such, meaning literally 'carry one's own',
but in practice meaning 'carry a pack or a child', as
distinct from 'wear a robe'.  The accent is on the verb
root, and the /i/ in /ki-/ is eventually schwa-ed and
elided, leaving *k?iN, to pack something on the back,
vs. *?iN, meaning to wear on the back, as two separate
verb roots.  Does this hypothesis sound at all
plausible?

Rory

(Still slightly confused, but getting better!)