Siouan evidentiality

[David Kaufman]

Thank you, everyone, for the feedback.  
 
Of course Biloxi also has the gender-specific declaratives na (male) and ni (female) - although their use was apparently not obligatory by the time of Dorsey's data gathering.  I hadn't thought of these as being 'evidential' per se, although I'm sure their use or lack thereof may have had some discourse significance.  Also, I should include the narrative-terminating 'etuxa' (meaning something like "they say it always") among the Biloxi evidentials - a way of saying the story has been passed down from prior generations and is not original to the current storyteller.
 
Dave

--- On Wed, 3/18/09, Rory M Larson <rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu> wrote:

From: Rory M Larson <rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu>
Subject: Re: Siouan evidentiality
To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
Date: Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 10:03 AM



Thanks for the addition, Justin!  So to pull Kaw and Omaha/Ponca together comparatively: 

OP tHe and Kaw c^He are presumably the same word, and are used similarly.  I suppose this means in the evidential sense, correct?  Any trace of perfective use? 

The Kaw declaratives ao and (y)e would surely correspond to OP ha-u and he.  In the 19th century, the u that frequently followed male ha in OP was still a separate particle.  It apparently functioned as a "Hey, you!" attention getter when calling to somebody.  Only males were rude enough to do this, so it stuck to the ha as a male emphatic.  If you already had someone's attention, you could just use plain ha.  In 20th century Omaha, ha-u, usually written as ho, is still used.  It's not an obligatory declarative ending, but conveys manly emphaticness and seems to be appreciated like a firm handshake.  /o/ => /u/ in OP, so the attention-getting particle is old in Dhegihan, and was originally o as in Kaw.  The original system would be: 

a - men's emphatic/declarative => OP ha 
e - women's emphatic/declarative => OP he, Kaw (y)e 
o - attention getting particle, used only by men, and often attached to male a as a-o => Kaw ao/o, OP hau/ho 

Do you ever have anything like i or bi before ao/o?  What about the circumstances for the sometimes-y in front of the female particle?  Is that conditioned by a preceding front vowel, or could it be a Kaw version of the OP i particle? 

I can't think of anything like skaN e in OP, but that seems to ring a bell for the 'hearsay' final in some other MVS language I've looked at in the past, either Dakotan or Winnebago-Chiwere or both.  I suspect that is the original, which has somehow been replaced by ama/biama in OP. 

Rory 



      
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