animate wa-

[Koontz John E]

On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Wablenica wrote:
> I would like you to explain me one thing: Buechel has about 60
> derivatives with wicha'- prefixed, and 30 entries with wicha- infixed,
> almost _all_ of them are nouns. At the same time there are 2600 words
> starting with wa-, 1600 of them are verbs. So how can we talk about
> wicha- being productive with animate verbs, if we have only a couple
> or two of them, thiwichakte and wichak'u?

As I understand it, the anomaly arises from the bulk of the productive
instances being essentially verbal in nature, and predictable from the
stem.  Wa and wic^ha forms that are fixed nominal expressions or seem
idiomatic in use are listed in the dictionaries, but those that are
predictable "detransitivized" forms derived from transitive verbs are not
listed.

So, we have to ask ourselves, when faced with a transitive verb - does the
detransitivized or non-spcific object form of this verb take wa, wic^ha,
or perhaps both?  My understanding hitherto has been that it would take wa
and that would be the end of it, but Regina and at least to some extent
Linda are telling us that if the non-specific reference is animate and
especially if it is human the actual form of the affix is wic^ha, not wa.

Thus thi'wic^hakte is both a nominal reference 'murderer', which does get
listed in the dictionaries, and the predictable non-specific object form
'to commit murder; to murder people' corresponding to thikte' 'to murder
someone; to murder a particular person', which the knowledgeable
dictionary user is to deduce from the listing of thikte' only.

I'm still not quite clear if it's only occasional benighted students of
Omaha-Ponca who were under the impression that the correct form there was
thiwa'kte, with all of the Dakotanists, at least, in the know all along,
or if there has been some historical confusion among Dakotanists about
this, too.

Unfortunately, Siouanists in general are pretty unsure what forms to list
in Siouan dictionaries, as we are in general quite vague on what forms are
predictable.  I think the usual approach has been to eliminate anything
that seemed inflectional in some fairly imprecise sense, and to include
anything that was (a) unpredictable in meaning, or (b) the translationof
something we would include in an English dictionary, while (c) hoping that
all these criteria were consistant and useful.  I think this is why the
best dictionaries are made by teams of native speakers who are also
highly-educated workoholic geniuses, though a single workoholic of any
kind at all is the normal substitute.

Apart from this, the different nature of the morphology and/or syntax of
transitivity in Siouan and European languages makes the glossing of verb
forms something of a difficult art.  The usual practices of the more
thoughtful students of the languages are sometimes quite stilted and
clearly bother native speakers who expect something straightforward and
idiomatic in the English.  This is general problem, of course, not only
with respect to other issues in Siouan-English translation - think of the
issue of glossing motion verbs - but in bilingual dictionaries generally.
In essence, a good, clarifying gloss is anything but a good idiomatic
translation.  You have to be adept at converting the glosses into working
English.  All this without addressing the issue of actual definitions at
all!  It has never really occurred to me before that gloss, translation,
and definition could be different.

> 1. Wicha- prefixed.

These might be argued to be or include body-part possessives.

> wicha'chepa     Human fatness, obesity
> wicha'chepahala a certain high but not wide mountain
> wicha'hooyu'spa a voice or sound record; a sound recorder
> wicha'phehiNkag^api     False hair, a wig

These might be argued to be kinterm possessives.

> wicha'atkuku    a father, their father
> wicha'chiNca    Children, posterity, offspring,
> wicha'huNkake   Ancestors
> wicha'huNku     a mother, mothers wica'h^aNh^aN

I think these might be some sort of noun-noun compound.

> wicha'thoka     a male captive
> wicha'thokeca   Differences; things different

Maybe this is, too?

> wicha'gnas^ka   gooseberries

But 'person-frogs'?  There has to be a story there!

The rest look like arguably good cases of lexicalized non-specific
reference wic^ha nominalizations.

> --It would be interesting, of course, to learn the difference between
> wawiyuNg^api,
> wiwichayuNg^api,
> wi'yuNg^api, and
> wo'(w)iyuNg^e

Yes indeed!