Aho! (IO -ka in Imperatives)

Fri Apr 11 13:11:59 UTC 2014

I just remembered that I needed to respond to this email so I apologize for the delay!  Outlook says I replied but I don't remember doing so...perhaps I started it but had to stop.

For Dorsey, the ' character that I used actually looks like a ʾ (not sure if you can see that...think of a superscripted reversed "c").  Does that help?

Last week I had someone come to my office and they were knowledgeable enough to have me bring this up to them.  They looked at it and recognized it but couldn't immediately remember the details on it.  They said they'd think on it and I expect to follow up with them soon.

Your mention of kare/gare perhaps being a male imperative is interesting.  I mentioned in another email how this time period (1830-40s) seems to show a shift away from some of the Ponca/Omaha morphemes to today's versions.  Perhaps, as you suggested, this could be another.

Sky

From: Siouan Linguistics [mailto:SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] On Behalf Of John Koontz
Sent: Thursday, March 6, 2014 4:16 AM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: Aho! (IO -ka in Imperatives)

In k'a what is '?  If it is aspiration (opening quote) this sounds a little like the ubiquitous the (th = aspirate) in OP.  It actually alternates with the inanimate articles (the ~ khe ~ dhaN ~ ge) and is associated with something like pastness.   The alternants indicate something about the "shape" of the action, as they indicate the shape of the noun when they are inanimate articles.  (And khe 'long, lying' occurs with animate things like snakes.)  

I am pretty sure that the sense of these forms in OP is not pastness per se but 'deducibility'.  As a set they indicate that the action is deduced to have occurred (in the shape indicated).  This contrasts with the ama particle that occurs with reported things (and conditions any preceding plural-proximate marker to be bi instead of I).   

The "proximate" term is one I have borrowed from Algonquian usage and is not very suitable.  The general idea is that the action can be observed to occur and takes place under the independent volition of the third person singular subject.  And this is (for some reason) marked with a plural marker on the third person subject.  Only Dhegiha has this pattern.  But it keeps coming up because I need to explain that a=i is 'he (proximate) said' in most places, even though it looks like 'they said'.  There is a non-proximate, or obviative e 'he said', but it is vanishingly rare in texts.   The a=i is also 'they said', of course.   (The IO analogs of e and a=i are e and a=wi.)

We have to be a little careful with associating ga's.   Siouan languages are full of forms that look the same and mean something different.   In OP ga is the masculine imperative, the "yonder" demonstrative, and the "by striking" instrumental besides the places where it turns up superficially because gi has contracted with a following a.   There's also places where aN 'we' is followed by the locative prefix a- 'on' producing aNga-.   From your examples I think you are safe in associating the cases of kare where there is an imperative meaning.   

If you have kare alternating indeterminately with re and in more modern examples completely replaced by re, maybe you just have a case of a historical change in usage observed in progress?   I can think of all kinds of things that are somewhat irregular in OP and Da because they are changing and are controlled by the formulas the speaker has heard various others use, by their sense of style as it applies in a specific utterance, and so on.  

Because there is an male imperative particle ga in OP it is worth wondering if =ka=re originally marked male imperatives in IO.   If it works at all like OP (where the female imperative is =a), I would expect re alone to be the female imperative and to condition the a-grade of preceding ablauting e.  In other words, the female imperative would be =a=re, and that initial a would replace any preceding e.  It might occasionally show up as an extra element if the preceding vowel wasn't e.  So in OP =a=di 'in'  changes preceding e to a, ppahe ~ ppahadi, and sometimes the a appears in forms like ppamu ~ ppamuadi, tti ~ ttiadi, or sometimes you just get =di and sometimes a preceding e doesn't change either.  These last, simpler patterns are, of course, the modern ones.  

It looks like Whitman says the imperative does condition e > a.   So, for what it's worth, that pattern is consistent.   Conceivably the IO imperative in the early 1800 was something like the OP one, but with the additional element =re following it.   The OP imperative can be extended (for male speakers anyway) by =hau, which is essentially the declarative.   Sort of like "yep!" at the end of a sentence, maybe.   And sort of like the =re in IO, except that the =re is always there are ends up surviving as the only element visible.   

As far as female speech forms replacing male speech forms, this is actually something that can happen.  Or the reverse.   And apart from apparently straight up changes like that, it is also possible that the difference between the two forms was actually something like a strong suggestion (=ka=re) vs. a milder, politer one (=a=re) and men are more culturally enabled to make strong suggestions.   However, fashions in these things change continually.   In general the sentence final particles are highly unstable in Siouan languages, and even closely related languages (or the same language at different periods) have different systems.   

It was suggested that ka might be 'yon'.   We could even guess that ka (or ga) in an imperative might actually be historically the ga demonstrative, used as an imperative particle.  Sort of "eat, that, do it!"   I'm kind of reminded of the use of ese in Chicano Spanish, though I think that is more of a male declarative.   I've never really figured it out!    

  _____  

Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2014 22:30:11 -0600
From: sky at LEGENDREADERS.COM
Subject: Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: Aho!
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu

Yes, "naha" is an article going along the lines of "the", "that which", "the one who", etc.

You've given me a lot to think about and a lot of terminology that I'll have to wrap my head around since I'm not familiar with it.

My assistants and I spent over 3 hours today tracking down all the instances of Merrill and Hamilton's use of this -ga/-ka and mapped them to a grid on a large dry-erase board in an effort to try to find some kind of common element among all of them.  Unfortunately we had no luck.  We tried to think of everything we could think of when it came to those verbs.  Were they transitive or intransitive?  Animate or inanimate objects?  Singular or plural?  Was the object "known" to the speaker (meaning was the speaker referring to something specific...sort of along the lines of the idea of "that" I mentioned earlier)?  Of course we know that we aren't looking for every possible criteria since there are many we don't know about (like some of the ideas you mentioned).

I've mentioned several of our theories such as "that", "now", "in like manner", etc.  But while we were plugging away I was perusing Dorsey's vocabulary slips and found this:

k'a (masc) (adverb) - of action in past time, not continuing into the present

And the example he gives is:

Swagaxe k'a - you did write then (but you do not write now)

So in this context, I wonder if perhaps it could be along the lines of (to use an example from before) "Look at the snake" perhaps with the idea that you were looking at the snake before but aren't now and I want you to do so again.  This may not be correct though since Dorsey mentions "see also" and has the endings "ke", "ki", etc. so this may represent the end of a statement and not simply an adverb that can be used where needed.

Dorsey also has a rather enigmatic term "kare" (or perhaps "k'are") where he mentions "It seems to imply that the thought or desire was not gratified" but he doesn't just list this term with that explanation but rather just uses it with examples such as:

Ji kare hįrawi - we thought that he would have come hither (but he did not come)

I'm noting that this is after the verb that they want to attach this to which matches the placement of the enigmatic -ga/-ka.  So along these lines, perhaps it could be "Look at the snake" with the idea of I wanted you to look at the snake but you didn't so I am requesting/commanding again since you didn't do it before.

Yet another couple theories to add to this :).

Sky

From: Siouan Linguistics [mailto:SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] On Behalf Of John Koontz
Sent: Wednesday, March 5, 2014 9:00 PM
To: SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu
Subject: Re: [Possible SPAM] Re: Aho!

I would guess this pair contrasts something analogous to Omaha-Ponca 'to say' vs. 'to say to'.   The 'say' stems are highly irregular in Omaha-Ponca like most Siouan, but underlyingly they are something like e=...he vs. e=gi=...he.   So the first persons are ehe 'I said it' (from something like Proto-Dhegiha *e=phe) vs. egiphe 'I said (it) to him'.  The third persons are a=i 'they said' vs. ega=i 'they said to him'.   I've reconstructed the  plural from memory of the logic of the system.  What I remember is the unpluralized from ege (e=g(i)...(h)e).   The gi element is the dative marker of course and the weird thing about (OP) 'say' is that that comes *before* the pronoun.   When gi is followed by the root (h)e it contracts with it.   I'm not sure the root is really -he in the third person.   The first and second persons are clearly built on e=(gi)=...he, but the inclusive is usually from another verb entirely, and the third person behaves like e by itself in the simple stem and e=g(i)=...e in the dative.   The initial e= is presumably an incorporated e 'the aforesaid'.   And, of course, this is the quoting verb that follows a quotation.   There's a form with initial ga 'yonder' that is used preceding a quotation.   The third person is  essentially always seen as a=(nothing) or a=i or a=bi with the plural-proximate marker following e and conditioning the a-grade of the stem.  (So you almost never get a singular looking form, and if you did it would be just e, and so hard to know from a demonstrative e.)   The =(nothing) form of the plural-proximate  is current now when no other particle follows.  Dorsey always has a=i or a=bi (the latter when the quotation is itself quoted in some way).   

Anyway, making allowances, I hope, for my poor grasp of IO, I make these

e=wa-a naha 'the one who says something'
vs. e=wa-g(i)-a naha  'the one who says (something) to someone'

I hope I correctly remember naha as an article of some sort.  If not ...

When you add a dative to something then the object is the dative object and the "direct object" sort of falls out of the agreement pattern.  Sometimes it hangs around in the sentence as a noun (or quotation) without governing anything in the verb.   What the relationalists called a chomeur.  

  _____  

I may have found a clue for "ka."  Dorsey has the term:

e-wa-na-ha - the speaker; the one speaking

Then he has the term:

e wa-ka-na-ha - the one who is meant; the person addressed

I'm not sure how (or even if) this is related to the "ka" I am asking about but I'm trying to look at it in different ways to see if it fits somehow.

Sky Campbell, B. A.

Language Director

Otoe-Missouria Tribe

580-723-4466 ext. 111

sky at omtribe.org

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