"WOUND"

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 7 May 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote:
> That's interesting.  So the Crow rule(s) should actually be:
> *?V > *V?  > VV' with the usual pitch-raising phonetic characteristics
> of [?] showing up in place of the [?] itself.  Makes perfect sense to
> me.

One thing that's being left out of this is that Crow has a theme vowel
with the 'wound' stem, so the verb is actually something like

uua'

in citation form, though the reduced stem uu' occurs in more contexts.
Conceivably the -a is a support for a final ?.

Hidatsa has u? ~ u?u.

Since the CSD citation fails to mention the Crow theme vowel, I suppose
it's possible that the Hidatsa form may omit something like that, too? On
the other hand, I don't think I've ever had the impression that Hidatsa
had anything like that in its morphology and I believe that pluralization
is a bit different in Hidatsa.  GH Matthews just has u to wound' and shows
plurals of first and second persons (but not third) with added -ha.  I
seem to remember something like a?a in Wes Jones' description.

Actually, I think the Crow theme vowels like this occur with all final ii
and uu stems, but not those in ee and oo, and not with short vowel-final
stems (discounting those that end in ua and ia in both stem and citation
form).  Most stems have citation forms that involve no change at all (ee,
oo), lowering of the final vowel, e.g., from u to o, or i to e, or
substituting e for a.  Citation forms are used to answer the question
"what is the word for X?"  They are also the base used with -sh 'definite
article', -m, 'indefinite, non-specific article', -n 'locative', -taa
'path', and -ta 'seem, resemble'.

These last are also cases where -a to -e or extra -a- occurs in
Mississippi Valley, which is one reason I am unwilling to simply discard
the phenomenon here, writing it off as a Crow oddity.  For example, Teton
a=>e ablaut before -la 'diminutive', laka 'consider as' (for 'seem,
resemble'), or Teton thiyata 'to/at the dwelling', mniyata 'at the water,
or Omaha-Ponca ttiadi 'in(to) the dwelling', ttiatta '(up) to the
dwelling', not to mention the OP animate articles a-kha (singular) and
a-ma (plural).

I don't know what typical examples, of -uu and -ii stems in Crow are,
other than Randy's example of uu' 'wound', awuu' 'inside', kuluu' 'piled
up', aashu'u 'his head', and pa'apii 'stir', and bi'tchii 'knife'