postural verbs, verbs of motion

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 Zylogy at aol.com wrote:
> Boas, in one of his papers on Dakota lists yuNka 'lie" and yaNka
> "sit". Now just from what I know about postural verbs in various
> languages these would seem to be constructs, with input from u- and a-
> locational affixes. Does this sound plausible? One would expect a
> further *yiNka "stand" if this were the case to at least be
> theoretically possible.

Sorry, Jess, these are primitive (meaning not morphologically complex)
roots.  Although cognates sometimes appear without the -k(V), I think the
ablauting status of the final vowel is usually considered to imply that
the last syllable is not the verb stem formant *ka, though it might be
some other formant.  In any event, there is no evident connection of the
first syllables with the locative prefixes, which are not nasalized.  The
locative u- occurs only in Omaha-Ponca, where *o- > u-.  There is no
*yiNka 'stand'. The standing stems are *the ~ *thaN in positionals, or
*naN=yiN as a full verb.

> One of the things I haven't been able to track down in the several grammars I
> own are terms for "other/another". In many American languages these are
> transparently similar to terms for 1 or 2, 1st or 2nd person, etc.

I'm not aware of such a pattern.  As far as I can recall OP 'other' is
aNma(N), which I think I have also seen used for both terms in 'the one' :
'the other' oppositions.  I suppose you can use 'this one' and 'that one'
forms, too. I also seem to recall a case where 'another person' in a free
translation was rendered 'a atranger' in the actual text.  I suppose this
reflects a cultural situation in which the only potential 'other' people
are those who are both (a) not actually related to the main characters and
(b) not yet formally or at least operationally co-opted into the kinship
system anyway.

As far as feeding relations among closed lexical sets, the examples are PS
*(w)uNk inclusive and Da wic^ha- 'them'.

Rankin has argued that the former reflects an old term for 'man' and that
the process here is somewhat analogous to Lat hominus > French on.  He has
a paper which I think can be obtained from him or John Boyle.

The wic^ha- form for 'them' (animate) is related to indendent forms
wic^has^a ~ wic^hasta 'man', depending on the dialect.  Wic^ha- is also
used a first term in bodypart compounds in the sense of human.  This noun
is unique to Dakotan, unless it's irregularly related to waz^az^e 'Osage',
say from *wi/ayas^-.  I'd guess the root there might be *yas^- 'name', but
this etymology has never pleased anyone but myself.  Other Mississippi
Valley Siouan languages use wa-, presumably from wa- 'indefinite object'
where Dakotan has wic^ha-.

As usual 'one' seems to be the source of indefinite articles.

Definite articles are either obscure in origin (ki(N)), possibly
inherited, or derived from positional verbs.  Positional verbs contribute
widely to progressive, future, and "suddenly" auxiliaries, not to mention
positional/postural "classifier" markers with things like demonstratives.

Numerals are sometimes derived from other numerals (of course), like
two-sixes = 'twelve' (in a decimal system).  Ordinals are sometimes
derived from non-numeric sources like 'head-leading' = 'first', e.g., in
Dhegiha.

There are various patterns of verbal derivation or auxiliary formation
that rely on serial use of helper verbs like 'give' or 'do' or 'be with'.