Abstract
The ubiquitous and characteristic pair of Choctaw grammatical words hosh and ho appear to have evolved from an older form, the pair hocha and hona. There are very few if any modern instances of the latter pair. But the manuscript of the Choctaw council meetings from 1826–1828, whose author was Peter Perkins Pitchlynn, shows that the older pair was common if not dominant in that era. This article illustrates the parallel usage of those forms with modern speech and the phonological processes that account for modern forms. Pitchlynn’s Council Notes manuscript, which is one of the earliest significant Choctaw texts, contemporaneous legal documents from the mid-nineteenth century, and other writings of that era, specifically hymns, show the decreasing distribution of hocha and hona and their replacement with hosh/ho.
Abbreviations
- 1
first person
- 1sI
first person singular agent
- 1sII
first person singlular patient
- 1p.pt
first person plural patient
- 2
second person
- a
agent
- cont
continuous aspect
- dat
dative
- def
definite
- ds
different subject
- emph
emphatic
- indf
indefinite
- int
interrogative
- irr
irrealis
- neg
negative
- pl
plural
- prs
present
- ptcp
participle
- pst
past
- poss
possessive
- prev
previous mention
- pt
patient
- recp
reciprocal
- sbj
subject
- sg
singular
- ss
same subject
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to Jack Martin for relaying information about the appearance of these forms from his contacts with speaker Robert Ludlow.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The V-2 rule in Old English conjunct clauses
- The diachronic semantics of the Dissociative Past Completive construction in the Kikongo Language Cluster (Bantu)
- Some (critical) questions for diachronic construction grammar
- The evolution of Choctaw grammatical words hosh and ho: Evidence from the Pitchlynn manuscript
- Style-shifting and accommodative competence in Late Middle English written correspondence: Putting Audience Design to the test of time
- Evolution of the subjunctive in New Persian (10th–20th): From disappearance to reappearance
- Semantic bleaching of nu in Old Saxon
- This is not the same: the ambiguity of a Gothic adjective
- Book Reviews
- Eleanor Coghill: The rise and fall of ergativity in Aramaic. Cycles of Alignment Change
- Book Review
- Review
- IE4.com. Forays into Text Mining
- Book Review
- Pană Dindelegan, Gabriela: The syntax of Old Romanian