Siouan evidentiality

[Rankin, Robert L]

Justin is traveling to Boston with his family this week, so let me add a couple of notes.

> 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? 
They are direct cognates.  In STUF I ventured that this Dhegiha particle is etymologically *re 'this' + *he 'say'.  The compound *rehe' loses the initial-syllable unaccented vowel (like pronouns and ki- do) leaving *rhe.  This regularly gives [the] (tHe) in Dhegiha, which affricates in Kansa and Osage to che.  So etymologically the particle would have been the typical DEMON+say construction still widely used in Siouan quotatives today ('to say the aforementioned' or 'to say the following', where "aforementioned/following" are signaled by demonstrative particles).
 
Interestingly, John Koontz discovered that, since /the/ is homophonous with one of the definite articles, the OTHER definite articles had acquired an evidential function in certain contexts in certain of the published Dorsey Omaha texts.  I didn't find this in other Dhegiha languages, but I think I cited a couple of his examples in my STUF paper:  The History and Development of Siouan Positionals.  Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 57:202-227 (special issue on nominal classification ed. by Alexandra Aikhenvald), 2004.
 
I tend to think that the perfective meaning of /the/ comes from the fact that that it marks 'hearsay' in traditional texts all of which are treated as past events, but maybe it's just that I don't have examples of it in "modern" Kaw discourse or texts that I recall.

 

Bob


> 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