"irregular" muN, nuN (fwd)

Tue Jun 13 18:44:50 UTC 2006

I've just checked on my Lakota grammar files and found that the rule “m- ‘1SG’/n- ‘2SG’ with vowel- or y-initial verbs with subsequent nasalized vowel” holds up, all in all. But we should say that the vowel or the y do not have to be verb-initial, they just have to be where the affixation slot for m-/n- is, cf. iyuNg°A 'ask', a verb that you quoted. I’d remove chaNnuNpA ‘to smoke’ which has reduplicated forms for 1 and 2 SG from the list, this is an idiosyncratic pattern. The real exception to the rule I found is waNyaNkA ‘to see’ which satisfies the rule but has bl-/l- for 1./2. SG. Plus lack of nasalization of the second A.

  On the irregularity issue in general I would say that irregularity is a matter of degree, of course, when the number of class members which inflect a certain way is the defining criterion. The extreme case would be limiting 'irregularity' to a class that has one member, as in the case of Lakota eyA 'to say'. Fine with me. But then, the most widespread usage of the term 'irregular inflection' in traditional grammar writing seems to refer simply to a class that is smaller than the largest competing class. Example: past tense in English. -ed forms constitute the major class, compared to which stuff like bring-brought, teach-taught, fight-fought forms a phonemically uniform minor class. And such forms are normally called 'irregular' in the literature, to my knowledge. Of course there are additional 'minor' ways of forming 'strong' past tenses in English, as in see-saw, which is phonemically divergent from the -ought/-aught pattern above. Its a matter of taste if we posit many
 minor or 'irregular' classes here or one big one, on the basis of whether we have -ed or something else, soemthing that's less predictable.
  In a synchronic description of a language, establishing inflectional classes on the basis of historical criteria, like possible epenthetic y´s in Lakota, may be problematic. And this is particulalry true of indigenous languages where historical and/or reconstructed data might be hard to come by. In my Lakota grammar draft I didn't even try to do that because I don't get enough descriptive mileage out of it. The main thing, to me, is providing a more or less complete classification of inflectional verb types, no matter what the exact arrangement of these types/classes in the script may be.

  Anyway, I never fight over terminology. :-)

  Regina

ROOD DAVID S <rood at spot.Colorado.EDU> wrote:  
I object to calling the conjugation pattern here "irregular". It is
consistent and regular within Lakota for vowel or y-initial verbs when the
pronoun precedes a nasalized vowel (with or without an intervening "y");
it's rare because there just aren't very many roots that fit the criteria,
but it's not irregular. echiN (echami) 'think', make 'I sit' muke "I
lie", chanumupa 'I smoke", imuge 'I asked her a question' and the various
derivations of uN 'to use' which were just cited. The alternative, mn-,
n- in e.g. wa'i_mn_ake 'I run" is a secondarily nasalized version of the
"bl" "l" set. I grant you that I can't predict which "-yVN" stems will
take m- and which take mn-, but I suspect it has to do with whether the
"y" is historically epenthetic or not.
I would like to advocate distinguishing between a minor paradigm
(minor because the required environment for the rule is rare) and an
irregular one (which would mix elements from more than one pattern,
perhaps, or which is unique to a single verb, like ephe 'I say').

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

On Tue, 13 Jun 2006, REGINA PUSTET wrote:

> Thanks much, Bob -- this will be absorbed into the paper soon.
>
> > (a) how noNpa 'two' has developed into a comitative marker; what I'd need is a complete clause that shows the syntactic structures involved. A numeral as the source of an adposition is quite sensational to document since this represents a very infrequent grammaticalization channel for adpositions.
>
> There may be some Muskogean influence here. Choctaw has a construction that, although basically a DUAL is often translated with a comitative. They use the expression /itta-toklo/, approximately 'the two (of us) together' with verbs to signal dual participants. Toklo is 'two'.
>
> Is this pattern common in Muskogean? If it isn't, it is possible that Siouan or at least Biloxi has influenced Choctaw in this respect.
>
> There is a pan-Siouan verb /i-?uN/ transparently meaning 'to do with' (?uN 'do', i- 'with', right?) Among Siouan languages Dakota is the only one, as far as I know, that has dropped the instrumentive prefix i- but kept the meaning 'use' ( = do with).
>
> Does the apparently basic 'do' meaning of uN surface in Lakota echuN
> 'to do'? The etymology might then be echa 'thus, like that, such' plus
> uN 'to do', and we'd be in a good position to account for the irregular
> first and second person of echuN (echamuN, echanuN), which correspond
> nicely with the equally irregular and extremely rare first and second
> person pattern for uN 'to use' (muN, nuN).
>
> Regina
>
>
> "Rankin, Robert L" wrote:
> May I add one or two comments too?
>
> > (a) how noNpa 'two' has developed into a comitative marker; what I'd need is a complete clause that shows the syntactic structures involved. A numeral as the source of an adposition is quite sensational to document since this represents a very infrequent grammaticalization channel for adpositions.
>
> There may be some Muskogean influence here. Choctaw has a construction that, although basically a DUAL is often translated with a comitative. They use the expression /itta-toklo/, approximately 'the two (of us) together' with verbs to signal dual participants. Toklo is 'two'. At the moment I can't be more specific than that. Pam probably has a better handle on this than I do. All my Muskog. reference materials are in boxes in my garage at the moment.
>
> (b) how oN(ha) developed into an instrumental marker. The very same process is indeed going on with Lakota uN 'to use'. again, I'd appreciate clauses showing the usage of the marker. Do you have any idea what the -ha is doing here?
>
> There is a pan-Siouan verb /i-?uN/ transparently meaning 'to do with' (?uN 'do', i- 'with', right?) Among Siouan languages Dakota is the only one, as far as I know, that has dropped the instrumentive prefix i- but kept the meaning 'use' ( = do with). That's all I can add, but it's at least suggestive of a trajectory for the grammaticalization.
>
> (c) if saNhiN is a noun -- this is what your translation seems to imply. Could this element function as an adverb as well? And again, if you happen to have examples of the usage of saNhiN that illustrate its development into a case marker, that would be great.
>
> Reminds me of the uses of Turkish /taraf/ 'side', borrowed from Arabic.
>
> Bob
>
>
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