Information

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, David Kaufman wrote:
> Also, the sentence "(the) man is tall" seems to be rendered wace
> wahkuc, which literally seems to mean "(the) man talls"! ... I'm
> wondering if other Siouan languages and even non-Siouan languages
> might have similar grammatical constructs where an English noun or
> adjective actually becomes a verb form in the Native American
> language.

Is this a stative verb in Hidatsa?  I wonder about the wa- in light of
some past discussions of experiencer verbs.  For example, one normally
thinks of wakhega 'sick' or was^us^e 'brave, generous' as statives in OP<
and they do inflect objectively, but, in effect, the wa- seems to refer to
a de-emphasized patient, the thing in which the sickness is felt, or the
process by which the courage is exhibited (giving away things one might
well need oneself).

Interestingly, the OP verb snede 'long, tall' is avoided in favor of a
postpositional form maNs^iadi 'in the sky/clouds' with intrusive -a-
again.

JEK