> I recently finished reading Leslie Marmon Silko's novel _Ceremony_. I was
> intrigued by her use of language as much as by her references to it and to
> the Laguna language in particular. She says at one point that one of the
> characters speaks "using the old dialect full of sentences that were
> involuted with explanations of their own origins...." (34).
> Nils R. Bull Young
> Freelance Philosopher & Agent Provocateur
I suspect that this is a somewhat incomprehensible reference to evidential
marking. I don't know how or whether this is done in Keresan, but in, e.g.,
Omaha-Ponca, a typical Siouan language, sentences take one of a set of final
particles ha (male speaker) ~ he (female speaker) `assertion of the
speaker', ama `traditional mythopoeic information', the `deduced from
context', plus some others more exotic, e.g., ana (male speaker) ~ ena
(female speaker) used, e.g., by the old village criers making announcements
for the chiefs, and still favored by powwow announcers. The ha ~ he, ana ~
ena markers are obsolete, and have been replaced by hau ("ho") and (a)nau
((a)no) for male speakers. I'm not sure of the current female forms.
Ama, the marker marker of traditional material, sometimes called a hearsay
marker and usually translated "they say," may occur in almost every narrative
line of a traditional story, and conditions the conservative form of the
proximate-plural marker i, which is bi, resulting in the form bi=ama, as in
`"Ga ephe= ha!" a=bi=ama' or `"I said that" he said (they say).' (Example
made up by a non-native speaker (me), but typical of older usage, and, I
think, correct.)
In contrast, the marker `the' (with aspirated t, not English th) is common
in narratives of personal experience, e.g., `"Ga ephe=ha!" a=i=the.' `"I
said that!" he said (apparently).' In this case the information that he
said "I said that!" is deduced from context, or heard from others.
If it had been heard in person and could be vouched for, it would probably
be `"Ga ephe ha!" a=i=ha." But I'm less sure of when ha ~ he (hau) is used.
For one thing, fashions in usage of ha ~ he (hau) seem to have changed with
time, which is consistent with the implication of the comment on Laguna.
A humorous consequence of the change of ha ~ he to hau has been that the
male characters in the old animal stories whose songs are preserved intact
with old-style ha now seem to be singing in `women's speech'.
John Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)