Omaha athe, etc.

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

Bob, John, Catherine and Mark,

Thank you all for your constructive comments and good advice!
I concur that second person is a little dicey.  We've had
trouble with this, too.

> 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.

So we have (pre-)historically two different words that come
out as /the/ in OP.  One is the positional, 'standing inanimate',
(or 'plural, bundled').  The other is a cognate of Hidatsa /rahe/,
which means 'to say that'.  The former modifies nouns.  The
latter works with verbs to convey the sense that evidently the
verb took place.  By analogy, other positionals have also been
introduced into the post-verbal slot with the same EVIDENTIAL
meaning.  So any time we find a positional after a verb in OP,
the implication is that the verb 'evidently' happened.  Is this
a valid re-statement of what you're saying?

For /athe'/, it looks like we have two hypotheses:

     1)  It is the 1st-person inflected form of /the/.

     2)  It is a separate, uninflected particle.

I think I'll start by trying Catherine's excellent suggestion of

     aNzhaN' aNthe'

          vs.

     aNzhaN' athe'

If one of those forms is preferred, that should just about
decide it.  After that, I should try

     Seth zhaN the

          vs.

     Seth zhaN athe'

If the former of these two sentences is accepted, and
neither of the first two were, then I should try Bob's
suggested

     aNzhaN' the

          and

     aNzhaN' tha-i

On the other hand, if it is rejected as
ungrammatical, then I will want to try

     Seth zhaN i the

          and

     Seth zhaN the pi'azhi

If these are accepted, then I will try to elicit their
English translation, which I would predict to be

     Seth slept

          and

     It is bad that Seth has slept

We'll see what we can find out next week!


Rory