Some proto-Siouan verbal auxiliary particles.

[Rankin, Robert L]

For those of you who are bored with the back and forth about Siouan syllable structure, I wanted to repeat here a portion of my latest reply to Rory.  It's on a different topic.  Any of you who have taken a look at the Comparative Siouan Dictionary may have noticed several recurring endings on reconstructed verbs.  Many aspects of these remain unidentified and there should be several nice paper topics in these data.  I will attach a version of the comments below to this posting.  It is a Word file with all the italics, etc. intact.  My current email program won't reproduce italics, bolding, different fonts, etc.

Here's the info:

... you bring up a genuinely interesting question, or actually set of questions.  There are several proto-Siouan verb suffixes that need a lot of work.  And they show that several of your “CVC” roots are actually CV.  The second C belongs to a proto suffix or enclitic when it’s an /r/ or /h/.

If you go through all the verbs in the CSD you find a lot with the suffixes *-re, *-he, and *-ų or –ą.  These occur with such frequency that they must have been morphemes.  In an OV language like Siouan they must have had some sort of auxiliary status.  Nobody has attempted to explain these, but someday it will surely be profitable to do so, and it could help explain some of the phonological structures we’re discussing.  Several of these crop up as verb suffixes in modern Siouan languages, often with very vague or indeterminate meaning.  In the proto language the meanings must have been much more specific.

-Re is one common proto-Siouan verb suffix.  (Dick Carter believes that there’s an element of epenthesis in *-re.  He wrote this up for Mandan at one of the Siouan Conferences.)  I believe it is definitely a morpheme related to one of the notions we translate as ‘be’.  It’s also commonly found in Catawba.  No one has tried to determine if it is ‘be of existence’, ‘be of class membership’, ‘locative be’, etc.  But it must have had a function.  

The suffix or enclitic *-he found at the end of many verb reconstructions may or may not be related to the auxiliary –he found with virtually all the Dhegiha positional auxiliaries:  k-hé, ðįk-hé, athą́-he, t-hé, aðį-he, etc.,( the defective verb conjugated only in the 2nd person).  It is certainly prominent in the CSD verb reconstructions.  In Dhegiha it’s meaning seems to be related to ‘locative be’.

The other apparent proto-Siouan auxiliary is apparently derived from *-ʔųˑ ‘be, do’.  There is clearly a conjugated auxiliary: m-ų́, ž-ų́, ʔų, seemingly ‘did’ or ‘was’, but there is also an invariant version with the shape –ų or an apparent reduced *-ą that is just the final phoneme of many verb stems.  There is also an invariant enclitic with the usual epenthetic –r- to separate vowels:  *rą = [ną] or [na].  It functions to mark ‘anterior mode’ in most languages and is post-verbal.  It’s found throughout Dhegiha, in Biloxi and, I think, in Mandan and Chiwere/Hochunk.

Many of you will have noticed by now that at least two of these affixes or enclitics, -re and –he also turn up prominently as demonstrative particles, ‘this’ or ‘that’.  This may be coincidence, but it may not be.  Somebody, sometime needs to attack these data and see what shakes out.  

Bob
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