FW: possessive constructions in siouan

[ROOD DAVID S]

I have joined this discussion without reading all that has preceded it, so
maybe this is redundant, but let me add my two cents anyway.

	Lakhota has several verbs for showing possession.  "Yuha" is used
most commonly today, but apparently its more subtle meaning has to do with
temporary possession, sort of like "hold".  So you can't use it with
kinship terms or body parts, i.e. the things that are inalienably
possessed.  This is very much parallel in structure to European transitive
verbs for 'to have'.  Note also its derivatives, like "wayuha" 'to have
stuff', 'to be rich', and the fact that you can use it for 'I have a
cold', too --- clearly a calque from English.
	For inalienable posessions you must use "yukhaN"  (is this
Alfred's "yuka"??), which means something more literally like 'exist for'
-- 'two arms exist for me" -- not a very good translation, but perhaps you
see the point.  The absence of posession is the ordinary negative for
yuha, but the negative of yukhaN is "nica" or "wanica" 'to fail to exist,
to be absent'.  I have never been sure I understood the difference between
those two, but it sometimes looks as if one of them refers to the absence
of something that you have to have, like fathers, as opposed to something
that you might have, like brothers.  I don't know which is which.  To
complicate matters more, the range of possible objects for "nica" is
larger than that for "yukhaN", since you (routinely, for many of us) say
"mazaska manice" for 'I don't have any money", lit. 'money is non-existent
for me'.  Note, too, that these (i.e. both yukhaN and nica) have weird
argument structure: they take stative affixes for the possessor, but there
is always a second argument in the construction.
	Note that "yuha" is also used for children -- 'I have two
children" uses "wichabluha", and that holds if you list them separately as
sons and daughters, too, at least with the words "wakhaNyezha" 'child',
"hoks^ila" 'boy', and "wiciNcala" 'girl'.  I'm not sure what you do with
the actual kin terms "chiNks^i" 'son' and "chuNks^i" 'daughter'.
	The other posessessive verb is "thawa", meaning 'belongs to', e.g.
"He mithawa" 'that's mine' (note the irregular "i" vowel in the first
person prefix; it recurs in the plural uNkithawapi 'our'; its source is a
mystery, but there are other instances of mi- as a possessive prefix).
It is used preferentially for objects that are not normally possessed,
like a rock that you have in your hand at the moment, rather than the
prefixed possessive forms.  The latter are preferred otherwise, e.g.
manape 'my hand' (maybe it's minape, though I don't think so right now)
(nape 'hand'), and "mitha'iyechiNkiyaNke" 'my car' (iyechiNkiyaNke 'car'),
but wowapi mithawa ki 'my book' (wowapi 'book', ki 'the').  (In the
prefixes, -tha- is required for inalienably possessed items.)You can use
"thawa" either attributively or predicatively -- "He wowaypi mithawa"
'that book is mine;  that's my book.'
	And finally, kin terms have yet another system, in addition to
yukhaN and nica: the causative verb -ya can be sufffixed to any of them
to show possession.  E.g. "ate" 'father' "atewaye" 'my father; he is my
father'.  Note that now the possessor is marked with ACTIVE prefixes;
"inamaye" means 'I am his/her mother'.  We gloss these as 'to have as...',
though the style level is wrong for that (I have him as father = atewaye),
since these are apparently fairly high frequency in Lakhota -- but it gets
the arguments in the right places.

	Now isn't that a lot more than you wanted to know about possession
marking in Lakhota?  I don't think you can call this a "have" language or
a "be" language.

	David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Sat, 5 Feb 2005, [ISO-8859-1] "Alfred W. Tüting" wrote:

> 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
>
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