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Re: USAGE: Miapimoquitch directionals

From:Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Monday, June 16, 2003, 23:18
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