Dhegiha Plurals and Proximates

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003, Rory M Larson wrote:
> This is what we're finding with our speakers too.  They
> don't have much patience with me trying to stick an =i
> in after the final vowel.  Needless to say, I've been
> very frustrated in my attempts to get them to illuminate
> the finer grammatical points of =i and =bi!

I think, however, that, knowing that final -a in an ablauting verb
represents original -a=i, you can just convert your enterprise to
investigating zero vs. =bi.  The functionality is the same.

I'm not sure I see =bi per se as marking anything.  It is just the variant
of =i (and now =0) that occurs in "quoting contexts" when =i would
otherwise be required.  In fact, since =i still occurs before certain
following morphemes, what's happened is that =i ~ =bi is now =0 ~ =i ~
=bi.

> I certainly wasn't calling Carolyn's or your understanding
> of modern Osage into question.  My suggestion was that the
> language may have changed in the past century between
> LaFlesche's time and our own, with some of the less common
> and more subtle grammatical usages simply falling out.

What I'm saying, however, is that there is no evidence that I'm aware of
that Osage has ever had the =i alternative, except maybe in that
=tta=i=the context you pointed out (in Osage that should be =tta=i=che,
I'd think, with che representing aspirated c, i.e, ts).  On that I'd have
to check to be certain that the example in question was an unmodified
extract of the Osage document I saw once in Carolyn's collection.  It was
some kind of a missionary publication, I think, that she'd gotten a copy
of from a local museum, and was plainly the source of most of the
sentences included at the end of the LaFlesche Osage dictionary.

Anyway, apart from that both old and modern examples of Osage simply have
=pi where OP has =i ~ =bi.  This =pi does lose the final i when a
declarative or negative follows, yielding =p=e, =p=a, and =p=az^i, as I
recall it.  In Caroline's materials the =p=e variant is much the most
common, and most of the speakers she worked with were women.

I'm not sure we ever positively determined that =e was the feminine
declarative and =a the masculine, though that seems reasonable, as the
comparable OP forms were (in the 1880s) he and ha.  (That, too, has
changed in modern OP.) A factor that complicates the picture in Osage is
that the Osage version of OP ama - the motion/plural progressive
auxiliary/article - is apa, all *W becoming p in Osage instead of m as in
OP.  So, of coruse, female speakers have apa in progressives and =p[=]e in
non-progressives, and male speakers have apa vs. =p[=]a.  Of course, as
Bob has pointed out, =p=e and =p[=]a follow a in ablauting verbs.  OP ama
vs.  ...a=(b)i is a bit of a blessing.

In any event, though pe and pa occur plentifully, =i does not.

> What I'm suggesting is that the =i and =bi particles
> go back separately at least to proto-Dhegiha, if not
> to MVS.

But there's really no evidence for =i outside of OP, except for that
=tta=i=the, and, more importantly, Osage has pi/pe/pa where OP has i, not
just where it has bi.

I think there actually are some Osage texts from the 1880s, just not many,
and unpublished.  They might be included in the Swetland microfilm copies
of the Dorsey files.  There are also Dorsey's lexical slips.