Dakotan ''wichasha'' 'man'.

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, R. Rankin wrote:
> I have a note from Ives Goddard at the Smithsonian asking about the
> Dakota term for 'man, person', variously wichasha, wichashta; Stoney
> wiNcha.  He was looking at some of the earliest transcriptions of the
> word in accounts from the mid 19th century and found that 'wichasha' was
> analyzed as wicha 'man' + -sha 'red' = red-man or Indian.

I guess there's no reason why wic^ha-s^a 'man-red' wouldn't work
analytically, though I'd feel better if I could explain the variants
wic^hasta, etc., in the same breath.  However, the two variants, plus the
use of incorporated wic^ha- as the third person plural animate object
marker both suggest a compound wic^ha-s^a.  Wic^ha- as a pronominal here
seems to replace wa- INDEFINITE OBJECT, THIRD PERSON ANIMATE PLURAL OBJECT
in other Mississippi Valley groups.

In addition, there's precedent in the historical period for 'red man' as a
term for Native Americans in, e.g., Omaha-Ponca.  On the other hand, I
suspect wic^has^a/wic^hasta/etc. are a lot older than Contact, though I
don't know what the earliest attestation would be.  Native Americans would
probably not have any reason to consider themselves in terms of some
uniform labelling color-term before encountering other hues of men
(outside the aboriginal range), and the perception of their own varied
hues as red is fairly arbitrary.

One possibility that occurs to me is that wic^has^a is a punning
substitution for wic^hasta.  It's only in Teton, right?  This would have
to be one heck of a succcessful pun, however.  Can anyone think of any
similar successful pun?  Is there any evidence for a shift from wic^hasta
to wic^has^a in the historical period?

A suggestion I've offered in the past is that wic^haSta is from *wiyaS- 
-a (theme formant) or ta (no ideas).  I'd actually expect wic^haz^a in
this case, however.  The *wiyaS- root here resembles OP waz^az^e <
*wayas^-e 'Osage', though wi- < *wa-i- INDEF-MEANS differs from simple wa-
INDEF.  There is a root *yaS- 'name', cf., OP iz^az^e 'name', Da c^haz^e'
'name'.  I think I went over the details of this on the list once a while
back, and they could be found by searching in the list archive at
http://www.linguistlist.org.

> 3) Albert Bierstadt, Lakhota, 1863.  man = wicha
> Indians, people = We-shota

I haven't run into wis^ota.  I suppose the construction could be made into
wi-s^ota ???  smokey.  The *s^ot- root is perhaps related by fricative
grading to *xot- 'gray'(Da s^ota, xota, OP s^ude, xude).

If you look at Dhegiha forms, which as far as 'person' proper aren't
cognate, you'd expect second elements in 'person' compounds to be
something meaning 'little', cf., nikkas^iNga, s^iNgaz^iNga, etc.

As far as -sta, could this be a fricative-grading variant of -xta in the
sense 'real, true'?