ie 'speak' again.

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> > . . . but I don't know of any verbs that start with vowels that don't
> > get handled as locatives or preverbs.
>
> Right.  Nor do I.  But I don't think we can say that this means that every such
> verb actually has/had a locative (or instrumental) prefix.  It's just that
> there's been massive analogical leveling and concomitant extension of the
> infixing patterns.  This eliminates infixation as evidence for the presence of
> locatives/instrumentals, and we'll have to rely on other criteria.

Well, unless we have large groups of verbs in which the "locatives" seem
functionless and the apparent underlying stem can't be plausibly
etymologized, my inclination would be to leave it a mental note to be
alert for such cases and go on treating locative-like vowels as locatives
as the working hypothesis.

Actually, i'e 'to speak' and uhaN' 'to cook, to boil' are the two main
examples that some immediately to mind.  I tend to think that the final -e
of i'e is the final -(h)e of 'to say', though this is only in the nature,
again, of a working hypothesis.

Other possible examples:

- *rut(e) ~ *(r)ut(e) ~ t(e) 'to eat'

Another monosyllable:

- *(?)o 'to shoot, to wound'

The glottal stop stems all behave more like vowel-initial stems in most
contexts than glottal-stop initials.  It's hard to know if they are
V-initial sems with occasional analogically extended epenthetic ? or
?-initial stems with frequent loss of ?.

> > The verb 'to say' seems to be just e(e)' in the third person, but
> > this is suspect of being contracted from *e...he.

> Right.  It is underlying e:he since it is conjugated e:phe, e:$e, etc.
> (where Omaha/Ponca eliminates the p).

I've noticed that the quotative verbs *???...he 'to say' and *???...ye 'to
think' have initial *e (or other demonstratives) right across Siouan, but
in IO they have i and in Winnebago hi, presumably from *i.  With 'say'
they have just ee in the third person.  (I remember hihe and his^e in
Winnebago for first and second persons.)  Quapaw seems to have done
something similar with 'say'.

I think that this suggests that *i'...(h)e 'to speak' and *e'...(h)e 'to
say' are probably etymologically parallel as well as semantically similar,
and that *i is a distinct morpheme, though it isn't clear that it is the
instrumental locative.  It could also be the *i that appears in third
person marking, especially possessives.