person indexing

[Heike Bödeker]

At 19:57 18.12.02 +0000, David Kaufman wrote:
>It sounds like you've confirmed this with what you say about verbs of
>natural phenomena having no actor or subject prefix.

I must say I took it (the post "Hopi correction" actually) more as
indicating that the criterion was not applicable to Hopi because verbs
generally didn't receive personal desinences.

>  I wonder how Siouan and other Native American languages compare in this
> regard dealing with weather or otherwise.

Cree, which may be regarded as illustrative for Algonquian at large, has
inaminate intransitive verb forms for environmental stuff such as kimiwan
"it is raining", kišitêw "it is hot", tahkâyâw "it is cold", kîšikaw "it is
day", otâkošin "it is evening", tipiskâw "it is dark/night" (inanimate
singular is -w, which drops after n). So it's not formally different from
say kicimân milwâšin "your canoe is fine", just that no syntactically
ouvert subject is appearing. An impersonal form is not available in this
paradigm, a depersonal (to pick up a term once suggested for Blackfoot by
Regina Pustet for something like being stripped off any inherent
relationality) form is not available in the whole language. Otherwise the
noun-verb-distinction is well developed on the lexical, morphological and
syntactic planes. Actually I used to scare people by telling them Cree and
Blackfoot had still more morphosyntactic différence than Sanskrit and Greek ;-)

On the other hand, I do agree that it's probably not all the same. I can't
remember native speakers of NAN lgs. having talked about "thought
processes", but the means provided to express things, and with this I only
can agree. Interestingly, a guy who was from a subarctic Athapaskan
community and also knew French and Latin said English was really the
language he liked least... so much on SAE <g>.

All the best,

Heike