Re: USAGE: Miapimoquitch directionals

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 03:43:26PM -0500, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > Have you ever taken a look at Algonkian languages? They're so
> > gratuitously morphological...
>
> Gratuitously morphological?  What does that mean?  Aren't all languages
> morphological? :)
>
> > they're great! Here's a sample from a story we were reading in Meskwaki
> > (aka Fox):
>
> [89 blank lines deleted]
>
> What was that?  Spoiler space? :)
I guess so.  When I got my own post, I was surprised to see that
myself.  I wonder if my mailclient is misbehaving...

> >                          e:hpa:hkisetawa:wa:ci
> >  e:h-[pa:hk-ise-t-aw]-a:-wa:-t-i
> >  AOR-[open-lay-INAN.OBJ-APP]-DIR-3pl-3-Aor.Conj
> >  "They laid it open."
That's actually an applicative;  it implies a second
object as well, which may or may not be overtly expressed.

> Hm.  Looks gratuitously agglutinative to me. :)
Meskwaki *is* very agglutinative, yes.  The weirdness in
its morphology is found mostly in selectional requirements,
which are often profoundly arbitrary. For example,

-- interrogative participles with locative obliques as head
have the proclitic preverb e:h- (normally only a marker of
aorist aspect) instead of initial change (a kind of ablaut
that changes the short vowels, /i/, /e/, and /a/ to /e:/,
/o/ to /we:/ and leaves all long vowels the same).

-- stems ending in /e:/ change that to /a:/ when inflected
as a participle where the head is coreferential to a third
person subject or possessor of a third person subject.

-- the suffix /wa:/, used to mark third person proximate
plural arguments (see above; not subjects or objects: this
language has a hiearchical system of grammatical relations) in the
conjunct order (basically subordination, except in narratives
where all clauses except direct quotes uses this) is deleted
if the head of the relative clause is third person proximate
plural.

> > (The bracketed bit there is the stem, the internal
> > structure of which is derivationally, not inflectionally,
> > determined.)
>
> Interesting.
>
> How do you pronounce it?
More or less as spelt:  [e:hpa:hkiseda:wa:wa:tSi_0].
(All final vowels are short and voiceless in Meskwaki.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637