Siouan-Catawban reduplication - a bunch of questions...

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 cstelfer at ucalgary.ca wrote:
> One language that does not seem to have any type of reduplication is
> Blackfoot.  This is probably due to the fact that Blackfoot has a small
> phoneme inventory and fairly long morphemes.  Reduplication would just
> create confusion.

But I think reduplication is fairly common in Algonquian as a whole,
right?  Maybe not quite as pervasive as in Dakotan or, say, Indonesian!

> This subject does have a small connection to Siouan reduplication. Shaw
> (1980) includes the word siksika 'the Blackfoot people' in her section on
> Dakota reduplication, but she could not find a root word sika.  As far as
> I can tell, this is because siksika is a borrowed word, and is not a
> result of reduplication, even though it looks identical to reduplicated
> forms.  Siksika is the term that the Blackfoot people use to refer to
> themselves.  Here is a gloss of this word in Blackfoot (as I recall it):
>
> siksi   +  ka
> 'black' +  'foot'
>
> Just some thoughts,

Well, send in some more!  This was pretty interesting.  I was just musing
on how seeing even a Siouan language in purely Siouan terms is sort of one
dimensional, and here's a nice case in point.

Last night I saw a note on the Web suggesting that Gothic reduplication
might be a "recent" (post Proto-Germanic) innovation, a case of analogy
with a few always reduplicated Germanic preterites run wild.