More regarding "wa"

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004 bi1 at soas.ac.uk wrote:
> Another one like wamakhas^kan 'animal' is wamnitu 'whale' presumably
> 'thing being in the water', also wablus^ka 'insect', 'small thing'
> possibly and waglula 'worm' though I can't think of any derivation.

Wamnitu is a little different in structure (wa-NOUN-POSTPOSITION) compared
with wamakhaNs^kaN (wa-NOUN-V.ACTIVE), though we can view POSTPOSITIONS as
verbs of a sort.  In both cases the noun is essentially a location.

With wablus^ka and waglu=la we are dealing with a PS situation, though a
very complex one.  There is a family of stems that refer to "vermin" or
something of that ilk, and cover a range of arthropods, mollusks,
annelids, reptiles, and amphibians.  The general form is something like
wa-CrV(S), often extended with -ka.

In this range the CSD has:

*waapuS 'vermin 1', cf. Cr baapuxta 'insect', Os (z^aN)puska 'ant'

*wakruSka 'vermin 2', cf. Dhegiha forms like OP wagdhi's^ka 'insects,
lizzards, worms' and Mandan waakiruxka 'snake, worm, snail' <
*wa(a)kruxka.  Dakotan forms suggesting *waprus^ka, cf. Te wablus^ka are
considered blends of 'vermin 1' and 'vermin 2'.

*wakreSka 'vermin 3', cf. Dakotan forms in gles^ka, like thathiN'gles^ka
'intestinal worms', IO thagre'ske 'flea', Biloxi kudeska' 'flea', and so
on.

*wakraNs^ka 'vermin 4', cf. Te gnas^ka' 'frog', Wi wakanaN's^ke 'frog',
Biloxi kanac^ki' 'wood tick'.

*wakri ~ *wakru 'vermin 5 (and 6?)', cf. Te waglu'la 'worms, maggots', Sa
wamdu'la 'maggots', Wi wikiri 'insect, worm'

This is plainly a somewhat arbitrary division into forms, amounting to one
phonaestheme and somewhat specialized specializations of it ('frog',
'flea', etc.).

What's relevant in the context is that one of the things Bob Rankin
noticed about animal terms during the height of CSD work was that a good
many animal names have an outright *wa or some etymological trace of *w-
or *wa.  In Crow and Winnebago it's often *wi instead.  Even 'dog', once
you get out of Mississippi Valley seems to have been *wis^uNk(e) or
*was^uNke.  He was able to argue from this and various Catawban and Yuchi
parallels that PS probably (but rapidly lost) had a sort of
noun-classifier prefix system, in which *wi, maybe alternating under some
conditions with *wa, marked animals.

Anyway, we have to wonder if some cases of *wa- on terms for animates,
like wablus^ka or waglula, aren't relicts of this, especially when the
terms are (more or less)  reconstructable.  This term is plainly "less"
given the numerous irregularities in it and the doublets it leads to.

This is maybe then yet-another-wa, the wa of animate terminology.

Note that wablu's^ka, like wamakhas^kaN and ziNtka'=la, is probably one of
the basic category terms for lifeforms in Dakotan, though I don't know if
anyone has investigated this anthropological linguistics issue in Dakotan
or any other Siouan language.