Siouan "have" verb

[R. Rankin]

"Have' and 'be' have never really been sorted out within Siouan from a
comparative and historical point of view.  'Be in a place' is usually expressed
with one of the positionals, although Dhegiha positional verbs derived
secondarily from the articles have a reflex of *he, which apparently was a
locative 'be', grafted onto the end of the verb.  Thus *riNk-he 'sitting',
*ariN-he 'moving', t-he 'standing inan.', k-he 'lying'.  This can't be
coincidence.  Other Siouan languages have a 'be' verb with the shape *he or *?e.
It it works out to be the latter, with the glottal stop, it would be a homophone
or near-homophone (except for V length) of *?e: 'demonstrative'.  The list has
discussed this before, so you should find it in the archive.

'Be' of class membership is *riN in Dhegiha languages, yiN in Kansa.  It is an
R-stem with conjugation b-liN, h-niN in Kansa, as in Kka:Nze bliN 'I'm a Kaw'.

'Have' is *ariN in Dhegiha languages = ayiN in Kansa.  John already discussed
this verb.  I'm not so sure that *ariN is found all across Siouan however.  It
is unclear at the moment whether there is a derivational relationship between
'be' of class membership and 'have' in Dhegiha languages; no one has taken these
questions up very much.

And, as John said, 'to have X as a kinsman' uses the causative suffix on the
kinterm.

BTW, the new and improved version of that 1977 paper of mine on the
grammaticalization of positionals in Siouan is in the new issue of STUF (Sprach
Typologie und Universalien Forschungen).

Bob


----- Original Message -----
From: "David Kaufman" <dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com>
To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 1:39 PM
Subject: Siouan "have" verb


> 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
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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