a few details about ablaut

[Rankin, Robert L]

> 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.

Having CVC stems in Dakota is a side effect of the loss of vowel length in that language.  To the extent that accent is predictable, it is predictable on initial syllable long vowels.  These are precisely the vowels in our “CVC” roots.  Thus Pat was using a secondary development from long Vs as an environment for accent.  The two developments are closely related, but the long Vs were primary, and CVC roots were a consequence in Dakota right along with initial syll. accent.

>  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.
 
I think the normal reflex of final short *-e in Biloxi is /i/, but there are some problems, and, as usual, they relate to Dorsey’s (and Gatschet’s) transcription abilities.  These two (who did all the early research on Biloxi) wrote both final –i and final –e.  But Mary Haas, in her “Last Words of Biloxi” article, points out that there are three phonetic front vowels in Biloxi:  [i], [e] and [ɛ].  The mid one, [e] is an allophone of /i/ word-finally (as it is in nearby Muskogean languages).  The real Biloxi phoneme /e/ is phonetically [ɛ], not [e].  But unfortunately Dorsey and, earlier, Gatschet, didn’t always distinguish the phoneme /e/ from the [e] allophone of /i/.  So reflexes get lumped in the 19th century transcriptions.  But there is no separate, ablauting, *-i.  

> Bob says the negative morpheme is *-as^, but in Lakota and 
Dakota the negative takes the -e form of the ablaut vowel.

Actually, there are three Proto-Siouan negative morphemes, one usually prefixed, the other two suffixed or enclitic.  Dakota –šni is a compound of two of them.  The sets are:

	neg. I         neg. II		neg. III	
PSi  	*ku		   *aši		*rį	
CR						
HI						
MA		         -(a)xi		-rį-x	
DA			     -šį	      š-ni	
CH	š-gu-ñį	      š-		-ñį	
WI	š-gų́-nį	      š-		-nį	
OP			   -aži			
KS			   -aži			
OS			   -aži			
QU			   -aži			
BI	  ku...ni	    ači		 -ni	
OF	  ki…ni 				 -ni	
TU	  ku...ne			         -ne	

The prefix *ku- is normally found in conjunction with the suffix *-rį  [-ni].  Jiwere and Winnebago conveniently combine all three in one enclitic.  The Biloxi lexeme ači is translated ‘Oh no!’.  The Dakota cognate for my Neg II, above, is probably the dubitative –šį, but I can’t account for nasalization there.  I do not know whether Dakotan dialects are unanimous in the forms of these (as one would expect in the case of Sound Change) or whether they disagree a bit as we might expect if they had been subject to borrowing or analogical (Labovian) change.  

> 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).

The ordinary sound change for final short *-e in Crow seems to be –i, but I can’t say much more.  If I make room for Crow in my head, I’ll have to forget something else that’s already there.  

I should add that there are one or two kinds of “ablaut” that defy explanation in terms of vowel cluster (V1+V2) collapse.  These are the use of –a in reduplicanda and the use of –a preceding positional continuative auxiliaries (i.e., the use of –ta ‘potential’ replacing –te in Dhegiha).  There are no errant *a vowels to provide environments in these cases; they are simply morphological reanalyses, i.e., true Ablaut.  

Bob

________________________________________
From: Siouan Linguistics [SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] on behalf of ROOD DAVID S [David.Rood at COLORADO.EDU]
Sent: Sunday, September 04, 2011 12:48 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: a few details about ablaut

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