Come and Suddenly (RE: i- in Dhegiha i-POSITIONAL=...CAUSE)

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> As far as I know, there are just four basic verbs of
> motion available:

                                  PS      Da
>   MVS *re, OP dhe, 'go'         *rE(h)  yA
>       *u,     i,   'come'       *(h)u   u
>       *i, (?) hi,  'get there'  *hi     i
>       *thi,   thi, 'get here'   *thi    hi

Dakota loses initial *h and and then reduces *th to h, so you do end up
with one h-form - but a diffferent form from OP, Winnebago, etc.

The initial of *(h)u is a bit odd - another anomalous h.  Most Dhegiha has
hu, but OP has just i < *u.  The Dh first and second persons, in OP, too,
suggest hu, as you get phu/s^u (or phi/s^i in OP).  We could put this down
to loss of h in the third person in OP, but there are two other oddities
with this stem that support *u.

1) The vertitive is *ku (e.g., OP gi, Os ku), *not* *khu.
2) That Dakota compound hiyu, conservatively inflected hibu/hinu/hiyu, has
bu, not phu, in the first person.

I'm inclined to think that the stem is *u, but that the first and second
person stem, maybe the third person stem, too, became *hu even in PMV by
analogy with *hi 'to arrive there'.  In short, bu/s^u/u (an oral glottal
stop stem) was a bit too odd of a paradigm even for PMV.

> So what other options do we have, if not the 'come' form?

A mysterious fifth motion verb - a sort of generic covering both coming
and going.  Or a locative, of course.  Or I guess we could opt for
irregular raising of *u to i across Dhegiha and IO.  I like that last
least.

You can find these forms in (OP) text by looking for the appropriate
shapes (some with a- on the motion stems), or by searching on glosses like
start, begin, suddenly, or repeatedly.  You also run into them
periodically in elicitation, e.g., try 'to push' or maybe 'to shove' or
'to throw'.  Think of things that have to be done suddenly to be done
well, and make sure the context doesn't suggest a continuative or present.
That is, 'I pushed him', not 'I am pushing a grocery cart'.

Or, you can find them under the suggested glosses in dictionaries, and, if
you look far enough, you find them appended to other verbs in dictionaries
of Dhegiha, IO, or Winnebago, generally with no gloss or explanation
offered.

I haven't seen this latter pattern in Dakota, where they seem to be more
or less moribund (or not as productive).

I haven't studied texts outside of OP, so I don't know how common
textually they are in other languages.  In OP they are less common than
progressives, but there's maybe one example per page or so, on average.
I think you'd want to teach them at about the same point where Russian
courses start looking at perfective/imperfective in detail.  Second year?

Certain forms are more common, e.g., thidhe(dhe) (j^ire(hi) in IO or Wi),
dhedhe, idhe, idhaN(dhaN), but if you look in a large set of examples,
e.g., a whole dictionary or the OP texts, you find sporadic instances of
most of the combinatorial possibilities.

If you ponder the semantics of given examples the motion verbs and
positional seem to make sense in terms of the path followed by the action,
or the shape of the object, etc., but I don't think I would be able to
predict forms for a particular verb confidently.

It seems that you generally get one particular form with a given main
verb, not a variety of forms with different shades of meaning.  In effect,
verbs have a sort of shape gender in the languages where these forms
prevalent.  I've never done elicitation on this, so I really don't know if
all verbs have a particular "inceptive/instantive/frequentive" auxiliary
or not.  Maybe some do vary the verb with intent or randomly, and maybe
some verbs can't take such auxiliaries.  I didn't really notice the whole
thing until after my fieldwork, I'm afraid.

The same sort of gender like consideration seems to govern whether you get
the, khe, or dhaN (or even ge) as an evidential particle with a given
verb.  By the way, there was a nice khe evidential example in the
discussion of prairies, lowlands, and hollows - I think I let it go
without comment, figuring folks might get tire of my little obsessions.

If desired I can supply some examples of "aorist" auxiliaries in context,
though I believe I may have done this already (check the archives).