Locatives and wa- problems.

[Anthony Grant]

Dear all:

Some random stuff mostly about loans.

Iren and Bob are quite right – there is still so much more to learn about loans even in areas (such as the Plains) where we think loans are infrequent.  This is one reason why dictionaries are so important.  I recall John Koontz mentioning some other forms to me – items for ‘cucumber’ from French concombre, and also ttapuska ‘student, teacher’ which is shared by Dhegiha and Pawnee.  But mostly Plains languages seem to go in for what I call iron rations borrowing – loans are taken over sparingly and are put hard to work in compounds etc.

There are some loans between Native lgs in the Southwest (Zuni is usually the recipient from Piman, Keresan etc) but that field needs to be explored too.

Bob’s list of ‘suspect clusters’ is the kind of information we need so much when looking for possible loans.

Mirror glass, btw, is the glass one uses to make mirrors with – in earlier days glass with a coating of mercury so that reflection would work.

I don’t know about ‘hau’ but Comanche ‘aho’ (hello) is supposed to come from Kiowa.

Shankka also has reflexes in Western Muskogean (Choctaw and Chickasaw)

Anthony.

From: Siouan Linguistics [mailto:SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] On Behalf Of Iren Hartmann
Sent: 09 September 2013 17:44
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: Locatives and wa- problems.

Hi all,

sorry, I was away for a couple of days and am having now trouble following the different discussions, but I'm trying my best to catch up :-)

As for loans, I think there were a handful of loans from Algonquian that Miner already marked in his field lexicon of Hoocąk as such. I remember haramįhe (or haramehi) ’week, (Christian) cross’ was one such case.. here is another good reason to get all the dictionaries into good digital shape (also the Algonquian ones), so we can search more efficiently for potential loan words, I think that would be an interesting project..

As for what was written about nį- being first person actor inflection, this is not entirely true, it is first person A acting on 2nd person U, described in the past as a portmanteau of ha- and nį-. (In the past this has been described as being long nįį-, but this I have not found to be true, it is always short just as the 2nd Undergoer pronominal affix.) Doesn’t Lakotha have something like this? Also, we saw something similar for Chiwere at this year’s conference in the presentation about causatives, only there it was theorized that the nį- just expressed the 2nd U and the 1st A remained unexpressed.. Or am I missing something here?

Also there was the question of the pluralization of the different person forms, the Hoocąk paradigm (for class 1 conjugations) looks like this:
S/A (subjects, actor)

1 excl SG / PL: ha- / ha- ... -wi
du / 1 incl: hį- / hį-... -wi
2 SG/ PL: ra- /ra- ...-wi
3 SG / PL:  [zero] / -ire

I hope this helps.
Best,
Iren

> This is the first I've heard that Hochunk ní for first person is from Algonquian -- what would the word be expected to be in Hochunk, based on Chiwere and Proto-Siouan?

Proto-Siouan for 1st sg.agentive was probably *wa-.  It has allomorphs *b-, p-, m-.  and in Chiwere-Winnebago evolved into *ha-.  In Dhegiha *a-.  There is no trace of any 1st person  ni- in Siouan anywhere except in Hochunk (Winnebago).

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