"WOUND"

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 1 May 2006, Justin McBride wrote:
> u, v. to wound
>
> awá e aú, I have wounded it (=á-u-á-ye aú ?)
> yúa e aú, hiN, have you wounded it?

This really is weird!  You've hit all the nails on the head nicely.   I
wonder what the OP and OS slips say!

> Furthermore, the verb is made all the trickier by the fact that some
> of the salient details of its construction, i.e., the o root and the y
> element of the causative ye, bear striking resemblances to the usual
> epenthetic glides w and y that emerge in certain casual speech environments
> and that may be omitted generally as non-phonemic.  Here, though, they're
> not epenthetic at all.

Pursuing your logic, which starts with Dorsey's and takes it a step or two
further, the forms here are something like

A1      a-o   a e au
A2   y(a)-o   a e au
A3        o-be    au

I take it that hiN is a question particle?  Kind of reminds me of
French "hien?"

The a e is problematic as a causative, as you point out.

One thing to ask about is the -e in =be.  I think the Osage
plural-proximate has variants pi ~ pa ~ pe, in which a and e are perhaps
male and female declarative particles, a bit like OP ha and he in the
older texts (replaced for males by hau today).

If the -e in =be is at all amenable to this, then perhaps the A3 form is:

A1      a-o   a e au
A2   y(a)-o   a e au
A3        o-b   e au    (actually plural, of course)

I'm not bothered by the stacked declaratives.  That's a frequent Siouan
pattern.  But the e ought to be the feminine declarative, while I assume
au is masculine.  And this still doesn't account for the a in the A1 and
A2 forms.

Perhaps the a or ae reflect a reduced version of a "suddenly" or "aorist"
modal.  You find sequences like dheadhe and dhedhadhe (yeaye 'I cause to
go' and yeyaye 'you cause to go')  attached to OP verbs, along with other
such inflected forms, with the reading 'suddenly' or 'began to', and they
are inflected in parallel with the main verb.  They are also (in speech)
highly reduced and hard to hear properly.  In short, the context where you
expect to hear yaye as 'a'e (using ' in the English sense), thoygh maybe
not yeyaye as 'a'e.

A1      a-o     a (y)e au
A2   y(a)-o  (y)a (y)e au

It occurs to me also that the third person we are using here is from an
example, not the paradigm.  Maybe it is in a different aspectual context
and lacks the auxiliary.

> taciyaNmaká é= dji    ú=    be   aú,  Cayáni    abá:
  [the knee]  it LOC A3 wound PLUR DECL Cheyennes the

  the Cheyennes wounded him on his knee

I'm not trying to parse out taciyaNmaká, though it looks like it has
either ak[h]a or kh[a] 'the'.

Notice that 'to wound' takes the place wounded as a locative complement.
The person wounded is the (here implicit) object.

Are there any other unexpected a e sequences at the end of verbs before
au?