a few details about ablaut

ROOD DAVID S David.Rood at COLORADO.EDU
Sun Sep 4 17:48:30 UTC 2011


Hi, Bob et al,
 	Thanks very much for all the discussion of ablaut.  I have 
always liked Pat Shaw's analysis of consonant-final stems because it 
explains the stress so neatly, and if I remember right, it also 
correlates with some of the reduplication patterns.
 	I'm away from my resources right now, but I think I recall that 
when I did that paper on ablaut for the second or third Siouan conference 
eons ago (published in Anpa'o), I found some /i/ vowels in one of the 
Southeastern languages.  Needs to be verified.
 	Second, I proposed then that the ablaut vowel might have been  a 
re-syllabification of a vowel from a following morpheme.  I probably 
treated all three Lakota ablaut vowels alike, but it would work equally 
well to have /e/ on the verbs replaced by /a/ or /iN/ if the clitic began 
with one of those vowels.
 	Third, Bob says the negative morpheme is *-as^, but in Lakota and 
Dakota the negative takes the -e form of the ablaut vowel.
 	Fourth, Randy's Crow grammar describes some stem ablaut that looks 
like a really distorted version of what we have in the Central Siouan 
languages, viz. some stems ablaut and some don't, and those that do use 
/-a/ before plurals and imperatives (again, this is from memory -- the 
book is not handy right now).
 	Best,
 	David


David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu



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