Winnebago -ga in Kinterms

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2002 Violet (napsha51 at aol.com) wrote:
> My Hochunk teacher, Zena Reeves taught me to say, washcinga for
> rabbit, It is one of the languages I teach here.

Greetings, Violet!

That's an interesting variation in the form.  My reference was the form as
given in Ken Miner's Winnebago Field Lexicon.  He lists was^c^iNk'
'rabbit' (I think I put in a spurious long vowel before), also
was^c^iNgra' 'Wisconsin Rapids (mispronounced as "rabbits")' (literally,
'the rabbit(s)'), was^c^iNkxe'te 'jackrabbit' (literally, 'big rabbit'),
and was^c^iNge'ga 'Hare'.  Since this last is capitalized, I assume it's a
reference to the character called 'the Rabbit' in Omaha folktales.

Given the variation you were taught, I've gone back and also checked
Marino's dissertation A Dictionary of Winnebago:  an analysis and
reference grammar of the Radin Lexical File.  It gives wacdjiNk 'hare',
and wacdjiNge 'hare', and also wacdjiNk puntc 'wintergreen (hare's nose)'.
The cdj is just Radin's version of s^c^ (or shc).

It would be very interesting to know if Zeena Reeves had any other nouns
with -ka, corresponding to other cases of -k or otherwise!

Given the Radin citation was^c^iNge, I wonder if it has had -ga removed by
analysis (a tendency in Radin's materials, I think), or if it's based on
an occurrence of wacdjiNge in isolation.  If it does occur in isolation,
then we'd have attestations of was^c^iNk ~ was^c^iNge ~ was^c^iNga.

The form for 'storekeeper' (glossed 'merchant') in Miner is wooru'wiNga'.
Compare 'store', which is wooru'wiNc^i'.  The basic stem here is ruwiN'
'to buy' (like Omaha-Ponca dhiwiN').  There's also waaru'wiNga' 'Trader
(name used for whoever was the trader at the time)'.

Lipkind's discussion of possession with kinterms (p. 31) says that all
kinterms with the prefix hi (fossilizd Px3 *i-) have first person
posssesives in following hara, and the few terms without it take ga for
the first person.

His examples are naNniN'=ga 'my mother', c^uwiN'=ga 'my father's sister',
but hisuNk'=hara 'my younger brother', hinuN'=hara 'my elder sister',
hiaN'jiN=hiwi'ra 'our (inclusive) father'.  I've spelled these in
something like modern standard linguist's spelling, but I haven't tried to
fix vowel length.

Apart from the first persons, it appears that the second persons are
always raga singular, and rawi'ga plural, and there is a variation of hira
with ra in the third person.  The first part of hara, haga, hira, etc., is
the inflected causative.  Winnebago generalizes the causative possessive
construction with kin terms.

Possession of living forms also uses the causative, but with niN 'living'
inserted, e.g, s^uNg(a)=niN=ha'ra 'my dog'.  The parenthesized (a) is a
schwa in the original, and I'm not sure it isn't actually just a
non-vocalic transition between s^uNuNk 'dog' and niN.

The second person of this paradigm is niN=r~a'ra ~ niN=r~a'ga singular and
niN=r~awira ~ niN=r~a(w)iga plural.  The conditioning for ra vs. ga in
these cases is not given, and no examples with ga are given.  It appears,
though, that -ra is OK with 'duck', as in wiNg(a)=niN=r~awira 'you(r)
(all's) duck'.

The r~ here is the n' (Lipkind) or n^ (Miner) that represents the
nasalized r (almost n) that occurs for r after a nasal vowel.

To get the paradigm for 'uncle' (actually, of course, 'mother's brother')
I had to go to Lesser's dissertaiton, which gives:

hidek'hara 'my uncle', hidek'raga 'your uncle', hidek'ra 'his uncle'

These forms were taken from Frank Beaver at Winnebago City (= Winnebago),
NE, in 1928, and match Radin's forms (which I haven't seen).  Beaver also
offered dega'ga 'my uncle', with a vocative dega'.

JEK