animate wa-

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> What I was trying to suggest here that probably didn't come through in
> what I actually wrote is that WICHA is now "productive" with animate
> verbs like 'kill' and WA is non-productive and fossilized in the derived
> nominals.  Sorry if I didn't quite make that clear.  Bob

That pretty well sums up my feelings, but with the caveat that wic^ha
looks like it has been productive since at least the middle 1800s with
kte.  I picked out kte as a sample stem for simplicity's sake; things
might look different with a wider variety of verbs.  It looks like wa is
not productive in animate references today, but it seems reasonable to
suppose that there may have been a time when both wic^ha and wa were
productive, with some difference in meaning, or some difference in social
or geographic distribution.