andative

[Wallace Chafe]

Dear Siouanists and David Costa,

I found this discussion of the term andative very interesting. The Northern
Iroquoian languages have a not uncommon suffix that means to go somewhere
and do something, quite parallel to the meaning we get in English with go
fishing, go bowling, etc. In my 1967 Seneca Morphology and Dictionary I
called it the transient suffix, but wasn't happy with that. Later some of
us called it the dislocative, but I didn't like that much either. Then, I
believe at SSILA meetings, I heard other people using the term andative for
quite the same meaning in other languages. I seem to remember Catherine
Callaghan, among others, doing that, although I could be wrong. I started
telling other Iroquoianists that we ought to be using that term because it
was what everybody else was doing. Now I'm very surprised to hear that it
isn't so familiar to others after all. Does that mean that Siouanists and
Algonquianists are out of touch, or that I am? I'm wondering if I should
apologize to other Iroquoianists for telling them this had become a
standard term for this kind of meaning, which I believe is very common
among the languages of the world. It's certainly a meaning that needs a
name, I thought it had one, but should we all go back to start???

Wally Chafe