Dhegiha Plurals and Proximates

[rankin]

> I'm pretty sure I've never seen a sentence ending in
> "bi ha", "bi tHe", "i ama'" or "i tHe ama'",

Lots of {-abe che} sequences in Kansa though.

I leave it to the Omaha specialists to figure out if
there is a difference between OM/PN -ai and -abi, but
there isn't any discernable one so far in QU, OS or KS,
and, in fact, the *-ai version just doesn't occur as
far as I can tell.  It's pretty clear that Quapaw split
off first, and it also lacks any such distinction.

There is a strong tendency for people to try very hard
to assign different meanings to allomorphs when
questioned explicitly about them.  If you "say 'em
different" they should mean something different.  And,
often enough, such allomorphs really develop a semantic
distinction.  I suspect that if there is a distinction
in OM, that's how it happened.  English 'brothers' and
'bretheren' were once just variants, but they now have
different meanings, even though their singulars are the
same.

Bob