Dakota 'orphan'

[Jimm GoodTracks]

Bob:
I would be interested in your paper, in order to better understand "Ablaut."  jimm
 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rankin, Robert L" <rankin at ku.edu>
To: <siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, August 11, 2011 11:30 PM
Subject: RE: Dakota 'orphan'


*ni is one of three 'negative' morphemes commonly found in Siouan languages.  The other two are *š (with ž allomorphs in Dhegiha) and *ku (often found as a prefix).  Dakotan compounds *š and *ni.  Chiwere and Winnebago combine all three into škųni.  It seems to me that *ni-ke 'not to be/have, be none' is obviously one of these negative morphemes with the ordinary stative formative -ka, applied when ni stands as an independent verb.  But I don't think this bears on the problem of wablenica 'orphan'.  

"Ablaut" in Dakotan postdates the split between Dakotan and the other Mississippi Valley languages; the other languages have far more transparent vowel coalescence rules and lack anything you could really call ablaut.  It predates the split up of Dakotan dialects however, so it must be several centuries old.  I tend to stick by my feeling that wablenica has simply been reanalyzed as a unit, as Regina says.  I have a paper on comparative ablaut in Mississippi Valley Siouan if anyone is interested.  

Bob


> 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.
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