Complementation of i'e

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> My half-baked idea was that if ie was i-e, INST-say, "say by means of
> (Omaha)", as I favor synchronically at least, and if ukkie was u-kki-e,
> in-RECIPROCAL-say, "talk to one another", "converse", then it should be
> possible to combine the two forms as i-u-kki-e, INST-in-RECIPROCAL-say,
> => udhu'kkie, which should be able to take UmoN'hoN as a complement in
> the same way as ie.  Thus:
>
>   UmoN'hoN udhu'kkie  ==  'speak to someone in Omaha'
>
> After a couple of tries, she did accept udhu'kkie as a word.
> ...
> Then I shifted to ukkie.  I think I started out asking
> her: "How would I say, 'Speak to me in Omaha'?", and
> immediately got:
>
>   UmoN'hoN i'e oNwoN'kkia ga!  (i.e. u-oN'-kki-e)
>
> This seemed clear enough to leave it alone, though
> there was no thE in this one.
>
> Finally I tried my acid test phrase for "Speak to
> (somebody) in Omaha!":
>
>   UmoN'hoN udhu'kkia ga!
>
> She said you could also say
>
>   UmoN'hoN i'e ukki'a ga!
>
> When I pressed for which of the latter two phrases
> sounded better, she said they meant the same thing,
> and that both worked.
>
> This doesn't prove my hypothesis about i-e, of course,
> since instrumental i- can be added to ukkie with no
> implication that it is the same i- as in ie.  But it
> does raise a few more issues.

In the Dorsey texts there is an udhukkie, sure enough.  Ukki'e seems to
work out to 'speak to'.  Though the kki does look like it might be an
etymological reciprocal, there's no real trace of it in the glossing that
I've ever noted.  I'm tempted to adopt Bob's argument that not everything
that looks like morpheme X is necessarily morpheme X.  Maybe this u +
kk(V) + ie.  I have no idea what the kkV would be.

Simple ukki'e

90:614.13

u'wakkia=bi=ama, ukki'abi iNs^?age=akha
he spoke to them U.       old man
"Old Man Ukki'abi spoke to them."

u'wakki(e) (undoing the ablaut) is wa + ukki'e => u'kkie with a pleonastic
inserted Obj3p wa, this being one of the verbs that does that.

Old Man Ukki'abi is a wizard in a series of Ponca stories.  Note that his
name is basicly a nominalization of Ukkie.

There is also a reflexive possessive stem ugi'kkie 'to speak to one's
own', which tends to add some luster to the possibility that kk(i) here is
not the reciprocal, or at least not synchronically, since normally you
can't combine the reflexive possessive with a reciprocal/reflexive.

90:601.12

iga'xdhaN=dhiNkhe ugi'kkia=bi=egaN
his wife          having spoken to her
"Having spoken to his wife, ..."

And, we also have udhu'kkie (wa form wi'ukkie) from i + ukki'e, though
this example shows the i- apparently governing "the thing spoken of."

90:99.3

u's^kaN wiN ebdhe'=gaN e'=de udhu'wikkie=tta=miNkhe
deed    a   I think    but   I will speak to you about it
something   I think    a
"Let me tell you something that I am thinking."

The "deed a I think but" (or actually "deed one I think but") is Dorsey's
interlinear glossing.  The second version "something I think a" is my
attempt.

I believe u's^kaN "wherein there is motion" is essentially an indefinite
reference to action.  It appears a lot in somewhat mysterious ways that
this analysis seems to make sense of.  One more lexical use that I recall
is u's^k u'daN, 'deed good' to use Dorsey's rendition, which was used once
by Mr Clifford Wolfe to refer to a party, "a doings," to celebrate his
return from WWII.  In essence this is an analog of the probably
morphosyntactically and morphophonemically impossible "wa-udaN" 'something
that's good'.

The e'de that Dorsey translates generally as "but" seems to me to be the
analog of Dakota c^ha used to indicate an indefinite relative.

In this case Coyote is about to make a proposition to his dupe, Cougar.

===

Note:

I keep running across forms in OP that I'd like to write with the
apostrophe of contraction.  Unfortunately, I'm using apostrophe
expediently for accent, but if I omit it in that sense to avoid confusion,
just now I'd like to have written u's^k u'daN as us^k' udaN.  Similarly,
forms like ed' es^e 'you said something; what did you say' or naNb'
udhixdha 'ring', and on and on.

Lasciate ogni esperanza voi ch'entrate.

(Pardon my very weak Italian.)