Dakota 'orphan'

[shokooh Ingham]

Me too
Bruce

--- On Fri, 12/8/11, Jimm GoodTracks <jgoodtracks at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Jimm GoodTracks <jgoodtracks at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Dakota 'orphan'
To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
Date: Friday, 12 August, 2011, 14:27



 
 

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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