Dakotan T-words and their equivalents in Siouan

[Rory M Larson]

John wrote:
> > a'qtaN            How possible?
>
> I'm thinking that the reading for this one is more like "how on earth"
than "how can," but I'd be very interested to heat the contemporary take
on this!  I think the morphosyntax is a=xt(i)=aN, with aN being the aN
that appears more below.

Yes, I think we're trying to represent the same idea in English.  This
seems to be a rhetorical question word expressing astonished skepticism
about a previously mentioned idea.  It is usually found in combination with
the potential marker after the concept.  I had some trouble at first
getting our speakers to recognize it, but the elder one finally did in a
sentence that I think she partially volunteered:

  A'qtaN at?e' tte ?
  How is it that I should die?

expressed, perhaps, by an older person accused by their doctor of being
about ready to drop into their grave.  "I'm too tough to die!"


> Is there a variant eaxtaN, or am I crossing this up with something else?

If there is, I haven't run across it yet.


> > e?aN'-qti         what great (person)?          [023:12]
>
> In effect "who on earth"?

Or perhaps: "Who the heck do you think you are?"  This is Rabbit's response
to the giant after the latter's first sally of verbal abuse.


>> E'be              who?
>
> See if you can find a consistent difference between e'be and ebe'.
Dorsey
suggests there is one.  This could be right or wrong.

I asked our younger speaker about this.  She thought for a moment and
answered that she didn't think ebe was ever accented on the first syllable:
ebe', never e'be.  The word I pulled from Dorsey was marked as e'be.


> I gather than no one hears a difference between these today?  I think
that
there is one in the texts, along the lines of indefinite (no particular
answer imagined) vs. definite (some particular set of answers imagined,
i.e., more like which).

No, our speakers recognize the difference.  We (Mark and I) have had a
little trouble with the semantics, but I think your explanation comes close
to the mark.  Our younger speaker has tried to explain the difference to us
a couple of times, and she keeps coming back to the idea that eda'daN is
more exact or specific than iNda'daN.


> [...] except that there are those aNwa or awaN forms meaning 'other'.
(In which w is often m.)

There is an aN'ma, 'other', which seems to be rather rarely used.  I'm not
familiar with an aNwa variant.


> > atHaN'-qti        whenever; when (I next touch ground ...)
>
> Hmm.  I wonder if this is atH(e) + aN=xti 'when on earth', by analogy
with
(e)axtaN 'how on earth' and eaNxti 'who on earth'.

Perhaps etymologically, but I'm pretty sure that atHoN' is a question word
in its own right both today and in the 19th century.  In Dorsey it seems to
be used to ask about time, i.e., the word for 'when'.  For asking about
what time it is today, the answer seems to be mi'daNbe a'naN ?, "How many
hours?", or mi'daNbe atHoN' (a)?, "Hourwise, how long?"  Our younger
speaker told me that atHoN' by itself, unqualified by mi'daNbe, means "How
long", e.g., for the length of a board.  (I've checked and confirmed that
the t is aspirated.)


> [...]  For 'why' it's (e)attaN.  (I've nver been quite
sure if it was =ttaN or tHaN here.)

It's =ttaN.  I checked with the speakers on this, and it is definitely
tense.  Also, they deny that attaN can ever be used alone; it must be
ea'ttaN.  The plain attaN version is from Dorsey.


> Since the inspiration came to me that -e in
various contexts is a "cleft" or "focus" marker, I've tended to see the
intial e-'s in question forms in that light, but fused proclitically to
the following element rather than enclitically to the preceding.

I've generally understood the initial e- in forms like edi, egaN, etc. to
be a generic 3rd person pronoun that is used to wrap up the preceding
complex noun phrase into a singularity that can then be dealt with
grammatically in a standard way.  It would be about like certain dialects
of English that allow:

  The guy that was here to paint the house and got Mom's cat out of the
tree, he got into an accident on the way home.

with e- in Omaha used like he in the above English sentence.  Is this what
you mean by a "cleft" or "focus marker"?


Rory