Siouan ki- 'become (again)', 'return to'

[Bryan Gordon]

Regina and Jan's thoughts (possessive~vertitive), as Jan points out,
are not necessarily in contradiction with David's and Willem's. We
have to extricate the diachronic from the synchronic.

Postulate first that the two /ki/ are indeed historically identical.
1) We don't *know* for sure what the original meaning of /ki/ was. The
fact that it has similarities of meaning in all or most Siouan
languages does not mean that this meaning itself wasn't historically
derived from an earlier one, for instance.
2) Given (1), we don't have to stipulate that "vertitive came from
possessive", only that "both vertitive and possessive came from the
same source, whatever that may be".
3) If we *do* stipulate "vertitive came from possessive", there is
independent support for this in the fact that vertitivity is more
"naturally" semantically related to verbs of motion than possession
is. There is reason to think disparate languages, let alone
genetically related languages, could independently follow the path
from possessive to vertitive in motion verbs while not following this
path in other verbs. Grammaticisation, baby! In other words,
possessive /ki/ may well have initially attached to verbs of motion as
well as non-motion verbs in some common ancestor, and then in daughter
languages followed separate but independent trajectories towards
vertitivity in motion verbs alone. These trajectories would have
occurred after /ki/ had lost its initial productivity, thus explaining
why vertitive /ki/ has never been productive.