waiN

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

>> The meanings also seem close enough to be
>> variants of a single verb concept.  Just
>> out of curiosity, suppose we had an original
>> Proto-Siouan verb *?iN, meaning to bear
>> on the back.
>
>> . . . adding some sort of /ki-/ particle in
>> front to get *ki?iN' or some such, meaning
>> literally 'carry one's own',
>
>> . . . the /i/ in /ki-/ is eventually schwa-ed
>> and elided, leaving *k?iN, to pack something
>> on the back, vs. *?iN, meaning to wear on the
>> back, as two separate verb roots.  Does this
>> hypothesis sound at all plausible?

> We do know that the vowel of pronominal prefixes and
> certain other prefixes like ki- is lost in much of
> Siouan.  So, phonologically, it is plausible.  But I
> don't think there is any real evidence for it here.
> Some of the languages that don't seem to lose the
> requisite prefix vowel would have to retain evidence to
> convince me.  Otherwise it's a bit like trying to
> derive Romance vulpe 'fox' from vol- 'to fly' plus pes
> 'foot' because foxes are swift of foot. Something that
> was tried by Roman grammarians.  :-)
>
> Bob

If the situation in other MVS languages is
inconsistent with the hypothesis I proposed,
then that will shoot down the hypothesis;
that was what I was asking about.  But I
don't think what I suggested is anywhere
nearly as far-fetched as the flying fox feet
of our Roman grammarians.  This weekend I
browsed a few dictionaries of Old World
languages, looking for cases where the word
for 'wear' was the same as the word for 'carry'.

I already knew that these were the same in
German with the word 'tragen', which is also
cognate to our word 'drag'.  It turns out that
Dutch also uses 'dragen' for both 'carry' and
'wear'; Swedish uses 'baera'; French uses
'porter'; Spanish uses both 'llevar' and
'traer' in both senses; Czech, Serbo-Croatian
and Russian all use something like 'nosit';
and ancient Latin used 'gerere'.  Thus, it
seems that equivalence of the concepts 'carry'
and 'wear' is the norm in Germanic, Slavic and
Romance, the three most wide-spread European
language groups.  Our own word 'wear' comes
from Old English 'werian', which meant both
'wear' and 'carry' according to my little
American Heritage Dictionary.

Outside of these, equation of these two
concepts was less common.  I did not find it
in Basque, Irish, Latvian, Turkish, Japanese
or Swahili.  I did find it, however, in
Estonian and Kurdish.

Hence, it seems that the concept 'wear' very
commonly, but certainly not always, derives
from the concept 'carry'.  To have two roots
so similar in MVS, one meaning 'wear' and the
other meaning 'carry', where one may simply
be the reflexive version of the other, in the
absence of evidence to the contrary, is highly
suggestive of an earlier equivalence here.
This would not detract in any way from the
fact that these are distinct roots in the
daughter languages, as Bob pointed out earlier.

Rory