Omaha athe, etc.

[Rankin, Robert L]

Rory,

Thanks very much for checking this.  It's good news!

I agree with John's comment also, that people shy away from flat 2nd person
attribution, so it will be really interesting to see if you can get oN-the
or just the or tha-i for 'we must have' and 's/he must have' respectively.

>I submitted your sentences to Emmaline Sanchez, one of our two Omaha
speakers, in class today.  She had no trouble at all accepting the
two sentences from Dorsey as valid:

On your other question, John has a very nice paper on the topic of
evidential use of the articles.  All I can add is that there is an
etymologically distinct particle, /the/ that exists in all Dhegiha dialects
with a cognate, /rahe/ in Hidatsa.  In Dhegiha, the older writers tended to
gloss it 'narrative', a usage I followed for awhile myself.  It is a homonym
of the 'standing inanimate' /the/, but i think the syntax is different.
Speakers may even confuse it with the positional, but it comes from a
different source ('to say that').

My analysis is that numbers of speakers DID in fact confuse it with the
positional and then, by analogy, introduced the other positionals that John
has found good evidence of into the same syntactic slot over time.

Bob