OP dancing

[Bryan Gordon]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bryan Gordon <egonxti at gmail.com>
Date: Jul 6, 2006 4:59 PM
Subject: Re: OP dancing
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu



On 7/6/06, Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu> wrote:
>
>
> 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'.


That does make perfect sense somehow. This would be the same "gaghe" that we
see whenever IshtinikHe (INshtiNthiNkhe??) pretends to be a turkey or
something. I also ran into a particularly confounding usage in analysing the
legend of Ukiabi (Dorsey 1890 609-613):
GaN maNshiata iNbeziga-ma wiN maNghe ibisaNdexti gawiNghe maNthiN
gaghai-tHe-ha, izhiNga-akHa.
I thought at first that the three verbs "gawiNghe-maNthiN-gaghai" formed a
serial construction, but could not figure out what the heck it would be,
until it occurred to me that this was just a very opaque relative
construction! Basically, the son pretended to be a yellow-tailed hawk flying
up high right against the sky, so everything up to "maNthiN" is actually a
relative clause headed by "iNbeziga-ma wiN." Then I suppose that
"iNbeziga-ma wiN" itself means something like "one of the yellow-tailed
hawks," as in "a member of that class."


> 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.


That does seem to fit with my impressions as well, but I'd be interested to
hear if gaghe is gaining currency among modern speakers at the expence of
-the.
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