*ki and -i(N)##

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 24 May 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> > ga 'that (yonder, not near you, maybe out of sight)'.
>
> I think we might want to double check that interpretation of ga. I
> believe it was a year ago last spring that I was teaching these to our
> class with this interpretation when the speakers corrected me at one of
> our evening meetings.  According to them, the term for 'yonder' is
> actually s^ehi'.

Very interesting.  I believe that's the gloss Dorsey uses, too!  I'd
always wondered why (duh).  Of course, it's an interesting question what
yonder means, too.  It isn't really part of my colloquial vocabulary.
For me it's entirely learned.  I dojn't know how it works in Nebraska.  I
was using it informally for 'yon'.  I usually think of 'yonder' as 'toward
yon' in formal terms, but, of course, most people who use it seem to make
it part of the series here/there/yonder and/or this/that/yonder.  I
take it might mean (opposite of ga) 'at a vague distant location'?

I remember that the first Omaha man I worked with came up with ga to for
the prompt 'this', something that had always puzzled me.

I think Dorsey explains the -hi element in demonstratives as meaning
something like "a bit more than X."  It's in a footnote early on in the
texts.  I assume it's from hi 'arrive there'.

> The ga demonstrative, they say, actually means 'right there, at that
> exact spot'.  How close it is to speaker or listener doesn't matter.
> ...
>
> I think this interpretation may make better sense with the Dorsey texts
> too.  There is a section in Two Face and the Twin Brothers in which the
> elder brother has climbed a tree to capture a nest full of Thunderbird
> chicks.  Before he seizes each one he addresses it to ask its name: "And
> ga'niNkHe's^e, what is YOUR name?"  The ga'niNkHe's^e means 'YOU there,
> the one sitting right there'.  It certainly doesn't mean 'yonder' in
> this context.

Good example!

> > Anyway, paralleling dhe, s^e, ga are du, s^u, gu.
>
> That's interesting!  I hadn't fully made this connection!

Well, at least it's a morphological parallel.  I'm not so sure it's a
semantic one, now.  Gu- does seem to mean 'further away'.  Gu'=di ga=hau
(the imperative of gu'=di) means something like 'Go away!'.

The initials of dhe and du are not comparable, suggesting *re and *to, but
notice that Winnebago and IO j^ee suggest *te and Dakotan le, etc.,
suggest *Re, so *re ~ *Re ~ *te is a very irregular set to begin with.  I
assume it's a valid comparison in spite of this, and that the irregularity
has to do with occurring syntactically in a mix of strong and weak
phonological positions.

> > I think the OP 'where' form agudi is essentially a- INTERROGATIVE + gu
> > YONDER + di LOC, so there's another -gu.  I call this the "Where Away?"
> > hypothesis.
>
> This is also an interesting idea!  I had always wondered about that
> gu in a'gudi.  But if gu parallels ga, and if ga actually has the
> sense of 'right there', then it is more transparent than "Where away?".
> Another form of 'Where?' is awa'ta, which is generally used with verbs
> of motion in the sense of 'what direction is someone going'.  A'gudi is
> used for asking about a precise location.  So perhaps a-gu-di parses as
> INTERROGATIVE + PRECISE_SPOT + LOC, which is exactly what it means.

I understand archaic naval "where away" to mean "in which direction away
from where we are now," but my understanding of the etymology of a'gudi is
merely generically similar to that, along the lines of "at what spot that
I am pretty sure isn't the spot right here where we are now."  In other
words, without any notion of directionality, a notion which seems to be
associated secondarily in demonstratives with a notion of vagueness.

So, in regard to your hypothesis, it might mean 'at what precise spot',
with gu conveying the notion of precision, but I'm not sure gu- fits into
the precise spot demonstrative category.

The awa- demonstrative root seems to be used in interrogatives having to
do with choices among several logical possibilities.