Siouan "have" verb

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 17 Oct 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> '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.

My apologies if I implied this.  I meant to say that it was found in
Missisippi Valley Siouan except Dakotan.  That is, it occurs in Dhegiha,
Ioway-Otoe, and Winnebago.  Some details of its morphology are strikingly
similar across this group, e.g.

OP adhiN' 'to have' (basic)  agdhadhiN 'to have one's own' (SUUS)
IO aniN' 'to have' (basic)   egra'niN 'to have one's own' (SUUS)
Ho haniN' 'to have' (basic)  ??? (SUUS)

The Dhegiha and IO suus looks like it was based on *a...kakriN.  The OP
verb is inflected a-dha-gdha-niN in the second person, and aNga'gdhadhiN=i
in the inclusive, suggesting an inflectional pattern:

    INC a PRO  SUUS  PRO ROOT
A1      a a'   gdha  b   dhiN (?) 'I have my own'
A2      a dha' gdha (s^) niN      'you have your own'
A3      a      gdha'     dhiN     'he has his own'
A12 aNg a'     gdha      dhiN     'we have our own'

I've spaced things out to line up comparable elements.  As always in OP
and Dakotan, the shift of the initial consonant (n in OP; l, etc. in
Dakotan) of the *r-stem ends up being the effective marker of the second
person with such stems.

This pattern connects Dhegiha with IO and Winnebago, but, of course,
Dakotan yuha is just as likely to be an innovation, so this isn't much use
in subdividing MVS, though it has some merit as an isogloss.

> 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.

If *ariN 'to have' is derived from *riN 'to be of a kind' there is a
certain parallel with locative pattern of 'have' in other language, e.g.,
Latin mihi est 'I have' = 'to me is', Russian u menya (yest') 'I have' =
'by me (is)'.  However, for an exact parallel we'd expect a stative or
dative inflection of *ariN, with the a-locative governing the pronominal
This is effectively what happens with the stative *riNk-e 'not to have',
though this lacks a locative.  (And isn't very productive outside of
Dhegiha and maybe IO.)

In fact, of course, we get active inflection, and the a-prefix is only
dubiously a locative.  In OP it doesn't take initial stress, for example,
which is typical of locative-a, cf. a'gdhiN 'to sit on'.  It acts more
like the a-prefix of Dhegiha motion verbs, which has something like
commitative force, since typically it only occurs with plurals.  In
Dhegiha this "naturally" also extends to the third singular proximate
forms!

The Dakotan element comparable to this "pluralizer" a-prefix in Dhegiha
motion verbs is described by Boas & Deloria (1941:94) in these terms:
"The verbs of going, coming, and arriving with the prefix ?a- express to
go, come, arrive carrying; also collective, to go, come, arrive in a
group, evidently with the same meaning of bringing others along; ..."

There's an interesting parallel here between the a-prefix in Dakotan
motion verbs and the unusual suus form of *ariN to have shown above, which
looked like it may have been PMVS *akrariN.  The a-forms of Dakotan motion
verbs have suus-froms in glo- or gloa-.  For example, au' 'to come
bringing something', but glou' to come bringing one's own'.  It looks like
Dhegiha goes one step further in adding a pleonastic a- to the front of
this element glo(a)- < *k-ro-a-, as well as contracting the *k-ro-a- to
*kra-.  IO seems to go one step further than that, by adding a pleonastic
suus *-ki- after *a-, to get egra- from *a-(k)i-k-ro-a-.

Incidentally, IO also has "tun'" 'to have, possess', which looks like it
would be thuN, corresponding to the OP taN 'to be provided with; to have'
that I mentoned last time.  This suggests ttaN rather than thaN, by the
way, as I suspected.

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

This causative with kin develops into the productive kinship possession
construction in Winnebago.

> 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).

I hope there's not a sister journal called Unsinn!  (Presumably the latter
would deal with semantics!)  [Sorry, it was a perfectly good pun and it
was just lying there unclaimed.]