OP dancing

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2006, Bryan Gordon wrote:
> I hope people don't mind if a barrage of questions exudes from my corner;
> I'm analysing so much text that I'm running into countless issues which no
> doubt many of you have encountered before.

Actually, it might be worth searchign the archives on some of these, as
they tend to come up once a year!

> The OP verb for dancing is "waci gaghe" (not sure if that c is aspirated
> or not). I had always assumed this was a noun plus the verb "to make."
> Makes sense. But Hahn (p. 54) lists this lexeme amid her explanation of
> conjugation of verbs with the ga- instrumental prefix. Of course,
> "gaghe" "to make" does NOT have this prefix! If it did, we would get
> *aaghe - thaaghe - gaghai - aNgaghai for the conjugations, but instead
> of course we get paghe - shkaghe - gaghai - aNgaghai.

I agree that Hahn is simply wrong on this once, though she might have
found a nonce form from someone.  Delightful information from Tom Leonard,
Carolyn Quintero, Jimm Good Tracks et al on the inflections and pitfalls
of this term.

The 'copulate' verb is cognate across MVS at least, with Dakota hu, OP
c^hi (presumably diminutive of thi), Winnebago j^u and so on suggesting
PMVS *thu.  I think that OP c^hi being diminutive involves some sort of
mitigation.  Of course, wac^hi is the indefinite object form and perhaps
more likely in conversation than plain c^hi.  Maybe c^hi avoids homophony
with thi 'to arrive', though the inflection of motion verbs is a bit
different from that of others, due to the "a-" locative in
plural/proximate forms.

OP wac^hi gaghe 'to dance' seems likely to involve some sort of avoidance
strategy.  I think gaghe here (gaaghe, I suppose) is not strictly
causative, but more like the use of gaghe as 'to behave as, to emulate, to
play the, to magically become', so something like 'to behave in a wac^hi
fashion'.

The 'dance' set in Siouan similar to OP wac^hi (gaghe) is highly irregular
in its correspondences - at least as irregular as the tobacco set - so I
suspect it of being a loan set.  I doubt the concept of dancing is recent,
but perhaps this set originally refers to particular steps or particular
social contexts for dancing that were new.  I seem to recall an expression
on the order of hedhu's^ka=ma wac^hi' gaghe 'they were hethuska dancing'.

To address a point raised by Bob Rankin, I don't think causative gaghe is
particularly common, except in the sense above, in Omaha-Ponca.  The
=dhe/=khidhe/=kkidhe/=gidhe causative seems to be the productive one.
Osage (and I gather Kaw) do regularly use gaghe in a more causative
fashion, judging from Carolyn's data.