oy ás’iŋ and iyúha

[Rory Larson]

Jan, we have about two or three ‘all’ words in Omaha, but none seem to be cognate to either of your two words.  They seem interesting enough to mention though.

                bruga – ‘all’, or ‘round’, like a circle.  This seems to suggest ‘the whole (round) camp of people’.  Distributive ‘all’, for animate or inanimate.

                gruba – ‘all’, or ‘all of it’.  This is one of about three Omaha word pairs we have found in which the consonants br-g- are reshuffled to gr-b- to give a different shade of meaning.  Collective ‘all’, for inanimate only.  Arguably, the other two such pairs also distinguish distributive br-g- from collective gr-b- the same way, though that’s a little less certain.

                wôⁿgire – ‘everybody’.  I think this is only for people, and it is very often used to suggest ‘we’, though it can be used for third person as well.  Impressionistically, I have the feeling that it became more popular in the 20th century, while bruga was used more commonly in the 19th.

Best,
Rory


From: Siouan Linguistics [mailto:SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] On Behalf Of Jan Ullrich
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2014 9:14 AM
To: SIOUAN at LISTSERV.UNL.EDU
Subject: Re: oyás’iŋ and iyúha


> Jonathan Holmes wrote:
> As I understand it, "iyuha" is used only when refering to humans, whereas "oyasin" means all of creation.

Thank you Jonathan. Yes, this is one of the existing definitions that I am aware of, but it is contradicted by data from texts. In the text corpus neither iyúha nor oyás’iŋ are restricted the way suggested above. Both words can be found with human, non-human, animate and inanimate topics, and they both occur with collective and distributive plurals. This is consistent in texts recorded between 1830’s and 2013.

So I was wondering if cognates from other Siouan languages may shed some new light on the two words.

Jan


From: Siouan Linguistics [mailto:SIOUAN at listserv.unl.edu] On Behalf Of Jan Ullrich
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2014 1:59 AM
To: SIOUAN at LISTSERV.UNL.EDU<mailto:SIOUAN at LISTSERV.UNL.EDU>
Subject: oyás’iŋ and iyúha

Dear colleagues,

For one of my current projects I am working on the description of Lakota quantifiers, among other things, and was wondering if any of you may be able to offer some comparative data on the Siouan terms corresponding to the English quantifier “all”.


Lakota has two quantifiers corresponding to “all”, they are oyás’iŋ and iyúha. Some of the existing descriptions of these two words suggest that they are not interchangeable, usually stating that one is used with collective and the other with the distributive plural, or that there is a human vs. non-human restriction. However, the existing descriptions actually contradict each other.

My analyses of data from available texts doesn’t support the idea that the two words are different in meaning, at least they don’t seem to be in texts recorded between 1850s and 2013.

I would like to know if there are known cognates of either one of the two words in other Siouan languages, and if so, whether or not they can shed any light on a difference in meaning that perhaps once existed. I did check the CSD but didn’t find a mention either one of the words.

Jan


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