Information / nouns vs. verbs

[Linda Cumberland]

>How would one distinguish in Dakotan languages between 'he went back
to
>his mother's lodge' and 'he went back toward where his mother lives
(or lived)'?

	My first reaction is to observe that the apparent mis-match in number
agreement would be evidence:  ‘huNku’ (singular), thipi (plural):

	huNku thipi ekta khi   'he went back toward his mother's lodge'

If you analyze =pi as a nominalizer, there’s no mis-match.  On the
other hand, we have an example from the same text where a character
says, “ina owiNchakiciyaga” where the literal translations of ina
‘mother’ and wiNcha ‘them’ don’t agree - it’s
untranslatable unless you read “ina” as meaning “my mother’s
people”: ‘tell(-them) my mother’s people for me’ (female
speaking: Assiniboine lacks a female imperative enclitic).

So, back to “huNku thipi ekta” - if this refers to ‘the lodge of
his mother’s people’ then you could consider thipi as a plural,
and the phrase would mean “the lodge where his mother’s people
live” (although you would then expect the locative o-).  But I think
this is an unnecessary complication. +pi as a nominalizing morpheme
clearly derives from the 3rd plural enclitic =pi, but it is so
consistently used in NPs that it seems acrobatic to have to analyze it
as a plural in those positions.  (I recall David’s having argued
this somewhere, too, but I can’t remember where, offhand.)

Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but the whole non-verb question, at least
in Assiniboine and its close relatives, seems to me to be handled in
the syntax - the position determines the grammatical class within the
clause, and the position in the clause determines whether the lexical
item may be inflected or not.  English does this, too: “He  tabled
the proposal for later consideration” (verb), “The tabled proposal
will be reconsidered on Monday” (adjective), “He put his proposal
on the table” (noun).  How do *we* distinguish the grammatical class
of “table” in these cases?

Sometimes I get the impression that when we look at other languages we
make things seem more exotic than they really are - or we fail to
notice that our own language is (oxymoronically) equally exotic. There
is a fine line between this view and the ancient ethnocentric practice
of analyzing an unfamiliar grammar in terms of familiar categories,
but I don’t think I’m falling into that bad habit here. (nor into
Mary Haas's dictum that Bob just shared.)

> And an example with Bob's suggested locative o-:
>
> "maz'othi, maz'othi" eya. HiN! zhechen maz'othi cha eyash knihe
> huNshta '"Iron lodge, iron lodge!" he said. Oh! then an iron lodge
> (like that) dropped down, it is said.'

>With rather a thud, I imagine!

Indeed! This is from a story in which Inktomi magically calls down a
lodge made of iron to protect a group from the onslaught of a charging
buffalo monster that butts against the iron lodge and mashes it.

>This could be interpreted as maza + othi 'iron' + 'lodge', but what
about
>'iron' + 'they live in (it)', i.e., something like 'iron that they
live
>in' or nore nominally 'iron for living in'?  I take it that othi
doesn't
>occur alone in the sense of lodge?

I think it in this case it does - no one in the story ever lived in
(or would contemplate living in) the iron lodge - it was invoked as a
temporary protection in a temporary dangerous situation.  (Imagine
trying to take an iron tipi down and moving it anywhere!)  It seems to
me to be pretty clear example of ‘lodge’ rather than ‘they lived
there’

>I can say how nice it is to see Assiniboine examples!  The zhe
>demonstrative is very homelike to a Dhegiha student.

Assiniboine lacks a definite article, so the demonstratives “stand
in” when definiteness is required, and also as the relative clause
marker.

Linda