Ablaut et al

[Rory M Larson]

>> It is there at least in the orthographic renditions that linguists have 
built for these languages, and quite possibly in the heads of their 
speakers as well.

> No, not “orthographic”, phonological.  I think this is maybe where our 
greatest disagreement lies.

Yes, I think we have ended up with this sort of disagreement before.  From 
my point of view, you tend to confuse phonology with orthography.  Your 
approach is more letter-oriented, which leads to EITHER...OR dichotomies 
like the one that started this discussion.  I am more inclined to 
pronounce the words to myself, paying attention to the mechanics of how 
they are made and how these mechanics would evolve from one stage to 
another.  This leads me to consider intermediate possibilities between the 
EITHER and the OR.  We both are interested in the evolution of these 
languages, but it seems to me that your view of phonological evolution is 
somewhat more punctuational than mine.


>> I am looking for active verb roots of CVCv type where v is something 
other than -e.  I don't think I've found any yet.  That leaves -e 
predominating statistically at somewhere close to 100%. Certainly there 
are many nouns, and five out of ten of the basic numbers in Omaha, that 
have unaccented final vowels with phonemic values that contrast with -e. 
Many stative verbs have unaccented final -a, at least in attributive 
usage.  Among active verbs, I can think offhand of ttaNriN, 'run', with 
accent on the first syllable, but this is surely a compound of ttaN 
'ground' + riN 'move', i.e. CV+CV, not CVCv.  We also have bexiN, 'sweep', 
with accent on the first syllable, but I suspect this is underlyingly 
ba-i-xiN, with three separate morphemes. 

> So you started with the entire vocabulary but quickly found that 
virtually any vowel can occur in final position unaccented.  So you 
restricted your search to verbs.  But there were so many pesky stative 
verbs ending in –ka/-ga, which seems to be a morpheme.  The stative roots 
include lots like žį ‘little’, htą ‘big’, etc.  So now it’s just active 
verbs?  Add gą́ąða ‘want’, another bimorphemic stem.

Yes, I believe it is active verbs of CVCv type that we have been 
discussing here, as a tangent from your post on ablaut that raised the 
question of possible CVC roots in that context.  In a previous message, I 
forgot to include "active verb" in the specification list, and was kicking 
myself shortly after pressing the "Send" button.  I apologize for 
confusing the issue.  My question is: Do we have monomorphemic active verb 
roots of CVCv type in Proto-Siouan where v is a vowel other than -e?  If 
so, is there a significant number of them, and what are some examples?

As you point out, the stative verbs *žį-ka and *htą-ka and the active verb 
*gą́ą-ða would not count because they are not monomorphemic.


> We’re talking about phonology primarily, not morphology.  The syllable 
structure ought to be uniform.  And, in fact, it demonstrably is.  You’re 
just ignoring that fact, assigning “morpheme boundaries” wherever you 
encounter problems.

I'm not entirely following what you're saying in these sentences.  If your 
comments about syllable structure are in advocacy of Siouan being syllabic 
and requiring every syllable to end in a vowel, I'm perfectly happy to 
accept that.  That would be a very good reason to require any word that is 
underlyingly CVC to add a non-contrastive vocalization at the end of it if 
it is not followed by a suffix that starts with a vowel.

Alternatively, perhaps all the CVCe verbs were originally CVCv, where v 
varied equitably over all the vowels.  Then the final v was schwa'ed out, 
with consequent collapses in distinctiveness, and Siouan was left with 
CVCe in place of them all.  In that case, there was always a vowel there, 
but at the end of the process the CVC was the sole part that specified 
semantic value.  In this case too, starting from the other direction, the 
exact pronunciation of the final vowel becomes unimportant, and the CVCe 
verbs are phonemically, if not phonetically, CVC.


>  You believe (or hope) that ttąąðį is bimorphemic.  OK, let’s say it’s 
possible -- if it is conjugated 1s ttąblį, 2s ttąšnį (or ttąhnį, 
whatever), but in Kansa it’s a unit: attąyį, yattąyį, and there’s no 
reason to believe that ttą is ‘ground’.  Some people used to think that 
mąąðį ‘walk’ was ‘earth-move’ until we discovered mą ‘go’ in Catawba. 
That’s the kind of comical etymologizing philosophers used to do in the 
Middle Ages:  vulpe ‘fox’ must be vol-ere ‘to fly’ plus pe-dem- ‘foot’, 
because the fox is fleet of foot. 

So if the idea that mąąðį means 'earth-move' is comical, exactly how do 
you relate it to Catawba mą ‘go’?  Was the original Siouan-Catawban word 
for 'go' mąąrį, and Catawban lost the second syllable?  In that case, how 
do you know that the original etymology was not, in fact, 'earth-move', 
which was used for 'walk' or 'go' in both languages?  It is a bimorphemic 
word, after all, because the second part of it conjugates separately.  Or 
was the original Siouan-Catawban word for 'go' mąą?  In that case the 
Siouan word apparently works out to 'go-move' instead of 'earth-move'. 
(Reading your commentary in the CSD, I gather you take the latter view.)

In Omaha, ttąąðį conjugates as a unit as it does in Kaw.  In the CSD, you 
reconstruct the Proto-Siouan form as *wa-htą́he, and suggest that the 
Dhegihan form reanalyzed the final -he as ðį, 'be in motion', by analogy 
with mąąðį.  So this word too, though an active CVCv form (unless -he is a 
separate morpheme), turns out to end in -e in Proto-Siouan.

At this point, we still have no Proto-Siouan monomorphemic active verb 
roots of CVCv form, where v is other than -e, on the table to serve as 
evidence that the -e at the end of CVC(e) active verb roots was 
contrastive, and therefore phonemic.


> A parallel example:  In Spanish all the verbs end in –r.  That may make 
it a morpheme, but it doesn’t make it epenthetic, does it?

I think you would know Latin-Romance history better than I would, but my 
assumption is that the final -r for Spanish infinitives comes from the -re 
that seems to end most or all active infinitives in Latin.  I agree that 
it is almost certainly a morpheme, and that if it is a morpheme then it is 
not purely epenthetic.  (I.e., possibly in proto-Latin, the r in -(r)e was 
epenthetic, and the conditioning -e was later lost in Spanish.)  But in 
any case, I don't think we consider that final -re/-r to be part of the 
verb root.


> As we discussed last time, the –e in Siouan active verbs might even be a 
morpheme, but if it is, it would be the end of the epenthesis hypothesis.

Yes, it would be the end of the epenthesis hypothesis, but it would not be 
the end of the CVC hypothesis.  In that case, we have CVC as the root 
morpheme, and -e as a separate morpheme that might have meant something 
like the Latin -re, i.e. a particle marking perhaps an infinitive or 
stative mode.

And I am as open to this hypothesis as to the epenthesis model.  If the -e 
endings are morphemes, then it is a little more realistic to view them as 
having phonemic value through much or all of Siouan history in the same 
manner as the Spanish -r.  At the same time, it would easily explain why 
we have so many CVCe active verbs, and few to no active verbs of form CVCv 
where v is other than -e.  We could assume that ablauting particles simply 
replace the -e particle because the two are modally inconsistent.  We 
would have the problem, though, of explaining where the -e morpheme goes 
when the verb root is CV, which the epenthesis model nicely avoids. 
(Neither model avoids the problem of why CV verbs with V = e also ablaut!)


Rory

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