animate _wa-_

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

Hello Rory and John,

thanks for the welcome and taking the time to comment my post. I'll
still have to ponder on it for a while.


>>As it seems,
(b) tiowicakte [thi-o'wicha-kte] or [thi-owi'cha-kte ??] (*_wicu_  looks
like a typo, as there are quite some mistakes in the listing)<<<<

>This might be a typo, as you say, but it might also be a
case of an American English spelling convention sneaking
in.  Over here, the letter 'u' often represents a sound
about half way between schwa and [a] as in 'father' or
'Vater', as in 'cut' or 'butter'.  Some people call this
sound schwa; most language orthographies would class it
as a type of 'a' sound.  An unaccented -a at the end of
a word, as in Latin in'sula or puella usually seems to
be pronounced with this sound.  In American comic book
orthography, an open syllable of this sound is commonly
spelled "uh".  I think the IPA symbol is an inverted 'v'.
I suspect the Dakotan speaker didn't lower his jaw all
all the way to full [a], so the English-thinking recorder
may have heard this name as "Tee-oh-wee-chuck-tay", and
failed to get all the vowels converted to proper Dakotan.<<

Yes, you totally convinced me on that :-) (But there are real typos in
the list, too, which nevertheless is an important, interesting and even
somewhat touching historical document.)


>I'm not sure whether mni and ti qualify as topics here or
not.  They may; I'm just not sure.  In any case, they aren't
participants with the verb as either actors or objects; they
function more as qualifiers of the overall action.  Nouns
can modify other nouns in MVS just as they do in English and
German, with the modifying noun preceding the one modified;
e.g. rail-road, steam-boat, etc.  In MVS, they seem to be
able to modify verbs just as freely.  In English, this doesn't
seem to be so acceptable, except in gerunds like the ones you
listed: "house-killing", etc.  (I think it works freely in
German though, doesn't it?  "Er hat ihnen hausumgebringt" ??)<<

I'm not a linguist of German language either - rather than an aged
native 'speaker' ;-), yet, thinking it over, I can say that, not unlike
in Dakota, all this stuff is higly idiomatic also in German (and
especially with regard to verbal expressions!).  Rendering your nice
sentence to be grammatical (I remember Steven Pinker's examples like
'bringed'), as "er hat sie hausumgebracht", it still isn't possible to
say that! The only German equivalence in structure to Lakota _tikte_
etc.  coming to my mind is 'hausschlachten', more commonly used as
nominal '(die) Hausschlachtung' (lit. about: to home-slaughter). It's a
comparably old - hence familiar! - term for the butcher coming to the
farm to kill the cattle there instead of bringing it to the slaughter
house. So, the following utterances are possible:

- Heute ist bei uns Hausschlachtung.
- Unser Vieh wird nur hausgeschlachtet.
- Wir verkaufen hausgeschlachtete Ware.
- Morgen werden wir hausschlachten.

- Morgen schlachten wir haus (??? although grammatical, yet sounding
pretty unfamiliar!)

On the other hand, there are no problems with an expression comparable
from its structure:

Cf. _radfahren_ (new orthography: Rad fahren): to bicycle/cycle/bike
(lit.: to bicycle-drive):

- Ich liebe das Radfahren (I love cycling)
- Wollen wir heute radfahren? (Will we bicycle today?)
- Ich fahre heute nicht rad/Rad. (I don't bicycle today) - no problem!

Just one more example of how idiomatic all this can be:

fernsehen, das Fernsehen, der Fernseher (to watch TV or to teleview;
TV;   TV (set), lit.: 'to far-see', 'the far-seeing', 'the far-seer'):

- Ich will fernsehen (I want to watch TV)
- Ich fernsehe (I watch TV)
- Ich schaue Fernsehen (lit.: "I look/watch television"), and even,
pretty coll.
- Ich tu fernsehschauen (lit.: "I do far-see-look").

All this is possible because familiar through daily use!

Yet, this is different with a very similar calque - used
bureaucratically, but hardly accepted by the speakers:

'(der) Fernsprecher' and 'fernsprechen' (telephone/to phone, lit.:
'far-speaker', 'to far-speak'). One never will hear sentences like:

"Bitte sei ruhig, ich spreche gerade fern!" (Please be quiet, I'm just
doing a phone call!), but instead "... ich telefoniere gerade!"

Interestingly, this is similar also e.g. in Hungarian with a calque
exactly along this line: 'telephone' here is _távolbeszélö_, yet most
likely nobody would ever say "*(én) távolbeszélek..." but simply
"telefonálok majd veled" (I'll ring you up).

So, language gets coined, polished - and, hence, familiar(!) only
through daily use. I feel that's what makes it so hard to judge and
distinguish regular from idiomatic forms from outside a language
community. It's even more difficult with old tongues of oral tradition
like the Native American ones. But whom do I tell this! ;-)

I apologize for this little digression!

Best regards

Alfred