Dakota 'orphan'

[REGINA PUSTET]

> The structure of waxpanica 'poor' is apparently analogous to > that of wablenica 'orphan'.   I
 agree that re-analyses if often a factor in shifting the affixation 
spot and that it could be the case in wablenica, just as it obviously is
 in waxpanicA. But
 note that waxpanicA has ablaut, unlike wablenica. This is why I am 
still a little reserved to the theory that the “nica” component of 
wablenica comes from the verb “nicA” ‘to lack sth’. Why would it retain 
ablaut in one compound and not in another. 

Given that the waxpa-component of waxpanica 'poor' is etymologically transparent, while the wable-component of wablenica 'orphan' apparently isn't, we can hypothesize that wablenica is a whole lot older than waxpanica. I don't know when the ablaut rule was created in Lakota, but isn't it possible that that happened *after* wablenica became fossilized as a lexical item, and *before* waxpanica entered the vocabulary? At the point at which the nica 'lack' component was not recognized as a separate lexical item any more by Lakota speakers, there was no motivation for applying the ablaut rule. waxpanica, on the other hand, might be recent enough to contain that version of nica that has ablaut.
there are lots of ka suffixes (ca when palatilized) that 
are potential candidates for the wablenica etymology.


  
That would leave us with a component 
-ni- that needs explanation. I can't come up with really convincing 
solutions for this new problem. I do not assume that we're 
dealing with ni 'to live' here. An obsolete negator -ni (could be something else though, cf. Buechel), as in tuwe-ni(-shni) 'nobody', looks like a possibility, but still, the nica 'lack' analysis is more appealing to me for semantic and other reasons.
Regina









            
            From: 
            "Jan Ullrich" <jfu at lakhota.org>
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 > The structure of waxpanica 'poor' is apparently analogous to > that of wablenica 'orphan'.   
 there are lots of ka suffixes (ca when palatilized) that 
are potential candidates for the wablenica etymology.
That would leave us with a component -ni- that needs explanation. I can't come up with really convincing solutions for this new problem though. I do not assume that we're dealing with ni 'to live' here. An obsolete negator (?) -ni (as in tuwe-ni(-shni) 'nobody') looks like a possibility, but still, the nica 'lack' analysis is more appealing to me on semantic grounds.
Regina
 



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