FW: possessive constructions in siouan

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

Dear all,

Leon's query to me is quite interesting so it stirred up some reflective
thoughts on my side ;-)

 > My project concerns the expression of (alienable) predicative
possession in the languages of the world. To put it rather bluntly, I am
interested in the various ways in which a sentence of the type "The man
has a house/car/ horse" (or whatever things one may alienably possess in
the society at issue) is formally encoded. As is already known in the
literature (e.g. Heine 1998), there are a number of frequently recurring
patterns for such sentences, such as

a) the Have pattern, featuring a transitive verb, with the possessor as
the subject and the possessed item as the direct object; English is of
course an example;
b) the Locative Possessive, of the type "To/at/near the man, a/his horse
is/exists"
c) the Topic-possessive, of the type "The man, a/his horse exists"
d) With-Possessive, of the type "The man exists/is with a/his horse"
(...) <<


More generally speaking, there are two groups of language patterns,
namely "to have" languages and "to be" languages:

"To have" languages are mostly European languages such as English,
German and French. They use the verb "to have" to express an idea of
possession, as in "I have a car" or "He has a brother".

"To be" languages are presented by Russian, Japanese and others which
say about possession as quality or even location. For instance, Russians
normally use structures like ???-?? ? ????-?? ???? (there is smth. at
smb.) or ???-?? ???-?? ???? (there is smth. somewhere) to express
possession. A possessor is passive in the languages of a "to be" group.

E.g.
Russian: U menya yest koshka ? ???? ???? ????? (I have a cat)
U sestry yest koshka ? ?????? ???? ????? (the sister has a cat)
(to-me/the sister's exists - a - cat)

Hungarian: (Nekem) van házam/házam van. (I have a house)
Szomszédomnak háza van. (My neighbour has a house)
(Neki) van háza/háza van. (S/he has a house)
(I/neighbour-my/he-dative exists house-my/his)

Hebrew: Yesh li bait (I have a house)
Ein li kesef (I don't have money)
(exists/lacks to-me house/money)
Ein lanu zman (we don't have time)
(lacks to-us time)
Yesh la-ish sus (the man has a horse)
(exists to-the-man horse)
Ein la-student kesef (the student has no money)
(lacks to-the-student money)

Latin Mihi domus est (I have a house)
(I-dative is/exists house)


The "to-have" languages are well-known.


 > Another thing that is problematic for me is the fact that, in some
grammars of Siouan languages, a verb is featured which is constantly
glossed as a transitve 'have'- item; the Lakota verb 'yuka' and the
Biloxi verb ''ita' are cases in point. Now, as far as my sample goes,
North America is not really a place to have original transitive
HAVE-verbs; in fact, Lakota and Biloxi would stand alone on the
continent if they had this feature. Therefore my question is: is it
possible that these 'have'-items are in fact the products of reanalysis
from an erstwhile positional verb such as 'to stand, to lie' etc. ? (...) <<


I think it should be _yuha'_ (instead of _*yuka_ ).
As far as I can judge this, it actually seems to be a transitive
"to-have" verb like in most European languages!
I don't know the etymology of Dakotan _yuha'_ (i.e. where the root -ha
derives), but most strikingly the prefix yu- seems to be denoting
"hand"-action.

In Spanish, "to have" is expressed by "tener" (tengo etc.) Latin
_tenere_ (to hold - with the hand), and going into the etymology of
German "haben", interestingly also yields results pointing in this
direction: durativum to germanic *haf-ja- (German "heben"=to hold/grasp
with the hand). Interestingly, German "heben" is said to be related to
ig. (indoeuropean) *kap- -> Latin "capio" (I take/seize) -> e.g.
mancipatio (the legal act of "taking by/with the hand i.e. take
possession of [e.g. a slave]).

But modern Chinese (Putonghua) too is a "to-have" language!
E.g. _you3_ (to have/there is): "Wo you qian." (I have money). In this
use, it clearly is transitive! (although there are other functions too,
e.g. "you ren shuo..." - there are men saying -> men say/it is said...,
yet, this doesn't matter in this context).
Interestingly that the character's etymology also points into the
direction elaborated on above: the modern version depicts a hand (sic)
above the moon (or maybe also meat), whereas the ancient character just
displayed a hand as such. So, here again, (and far off the European
linguistic influence) the idea of "to have/possess" is expressed by "to
hold in the hand/grasp with the hand".

All this said, I am not at all surprized to find _yuha'_ in Dakotan.
Anyhow, on a continent like America there are so many very different
native tongues, why not also this type of "to-have" language.
(If you're interested, here's a maybe provocative opinion

http://members.tripod.com/~kajJ/images2/Dakota.html

that could make this matter still more plausible ;-) )

Alfred