Causative with P12 in Osage (RE: WA- once more.)

[Koontz John E]

On Sat, 17 Jan 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> > The 'aci' form might be a locative, with =cu (~ =ci?) 'in'.  In any event
> > it seems that the gloss LaFlesche offers is far from literal here.
>
> You mean it might be the "at/in location" postposition?
> I.e. it might transcribe into OP as:
>
>   ni'adi wakhi'dha   ?
>
> If so, that ought to translate as "cause us/them to (be) in water".

Exactly what I thought.  Or perhaps 'cause us to be at (or arrive at) the
water'.  The other idea I had was that he might have misheard something
like

    niN achi=wakhidha

'Cause to arrive here at the water.'

> In another note, John points out that the -awa- form for P12
> seems to occur in conjunction with an incorporated prefix.

Again, this is what I meant, though I might phrase it that the context for
awa is when there is an incorporation, or, phonologically, when the
inflected component is enclitic to to its grammatical complement.

The main examples of a-wa- outside causatives so far are the "pseudo"
Osage or, better, the "crypto" Omaha-Ponca forms in the LaFlesche
Dictionary.  From Dorsey's OP texts

90:61.15 s^e(')n(a)=a'wadhe 'destroying us'

Here I think the accent marking essentially reveals length and thus the
two-vowel sequence, cf. 90:256.12 s^e'na=wa'dhe 'destroying them', where
no a- would be expected.  I have changed the symbols and added =, but the
accent, if not parenthesized, is the original.

90:197.6 e=a'wagaN=hnaN=i 'we are always so'
90:502.2 e=a'wagaN=i 'we are so'
90:438.14 e=a'wakkigaN=i 'they are like us' (reciprocal of preceding)
90:502.13 e=a'wawaN=i 'he caused it for us'
90:679.19 aNgu'=s^ti a'wagaN=i 'we, too, we are so'
90:420.2 z^u=a'wagdhe 'he with us'
90:442.20 sni=a'watta=i 'we are cold'

This isn't exhaustive, and I;ve ignored duplicates.

> Perhaps it is not causative per se that does it, but only the
> "tightness" of the preceding element, which in the case of a
> postpositional phrase is too loosely bound to force/preserve -awa-, even
> if the following verb is a causative.

The difficulty here is that we have only LaFlesche's dictionary to suggest
that the awa variant ever occurred.  We know that he's not always entirely
accurate in representing inflections, and Caroline doesn't find awa in
contemporary speech.  It is possible that this is a recent development,
but it is also possible that it is old, and that LaFlesche's a-wa- forms
tell us more about Omaha-Ponca than Osage.  I wish we had better
exemplification of late 19th Century usage, but we have what we have.  I
tend to think that rather than suppose a complex conditioning for
non-occurrence of a-wa- it is easier to assume that LaFlesche's dictionary
should be overruled by modern Osage patterns, especially if his texts
support modern usage in any way.