Siouan "have" verb

[David Kaufman]

Hi,

Still awaiting my Biloxi dictionary to arrive, but I was reading through some other general Siouan papers I had received awhile back, including Bob Rankin's paper "From Verb to Auxiliary to Noun Classifier and Definite Article: Grammaticalization of the Siouan Verbs 'Sit,' 'Stand,' 'Lie.'"  According to your paper, Bob, on page 277, Biloxi has no verb "to have" as in the other Siouan languages, and they had to resort to something like "my father moves" or "my mother sits" (which actually seems to be an alternative way of saying "be" as well.)  Since I'm still new to Siouan studies, just wondering what the other Siouan languages do, as far as having an actual verb "have" or even "be" for that matter!

Also, as concerns "have," if other Siouan languages do have this verb, is it simply one verb form regardless of what is possessed (as in English)?  I ask this, because I know in some other Amerindian languages of other families, such as Cherokee and Navajo, different forms of the verb "have" are used depending on things like size, shape, and texture of the item possessed.  To give a Cherokee example: a-gi-ha "I have (something weighty of indefinite shape)" vs. a-quv-ya "I have (something long, narrow, inflexible)."  How does Siouan handle this?

Dave

		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/siouan/attachments/20041017/51fa58a3/attachment.htm>