Non-wa Nominalizations

[Koontz John E]

In conneciton with the preceding on 'story' and some other activities I
noticed two non-wa nominalizations in OP.

i'...e 'speak; speech, unit of speech, e.g., word'
hi'...gaN 'tell traditional story; traditional story'

I don't believe you can prefix wa to these forms, which are active
intransitives and taken no patient.  On the other hand, though Omaha-Ponca
seems to lack a nominalization of udha' 'tell', this verb does take a
patient, the thing told, and that can be replaced with wa.  Forms for
'story' based on it have this wa, e.g., IO worage or Os (LaF) u'dhake.

Note that IO and Wi do have wa-derivatives of 'story', but these seem to
be dative, and perhaps the wa there refers to the indefinite recipient of
the story.

I also noticed Os wi'...kie 'orison, prayer, to pray', which is the
wa-form for a dative i'...kie from i'...e.  The OP verb i'...gie is
glossed once 'to talk against him', but I think the form is generally 'to
talk to or with respect to someone', so Os wi'kie may be historically 'to
speak to or with respect to someone unspecified', with wa filling the
dative slot.

I present this perhaps somewhat tortuous argument in support of wa- as an
indefinite patient present in nominalizations only when inherited from the
verb in that capacity, and not as a general marker of nominalization or as
an obligatory head marker in nominalizations.

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz