44: on learning Lakota
Published by Linden Alexander Pentecost on this website www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk on the 2nd of September 2024. This article is a more or less continuously interconnected text, going from notes on my other publications, to introductory notes, Lakota words which I find particularly beautiful, pronouns, and a similarity to a pronoun in Mandarin Chinese, followed by comments pertaining to the oral traditions of the Lakota people, my own curiosity about this and its relationship to a word for a kind of sacred power in the Lakota language. This article contains 969 words.
Note: this week I will likely have an article published only in Silly Linguistics, titled An ancient temple, languages in the Bock sa-ga, and some similarities between Finnish and Quechua (with temple photo): part one of: “The mystical nature of Finnish & of language in Finland”; also today I published another article on this website (www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk) about Rathlin Irish here: https://www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk/website-articles-30-45/43-the-irish-dialects-of-rathlin-island, , and yesterday (the 1st of September 2024) I published an article about learning Quechua, titled: 42: On discovering Cusco Quechua (not about cognates/etymology), here: https://www.bookofdunbarra.co.uk/website-articles-30-45/42-on-discovering-cusco-quechua-not-about-cognates-etymology, which has content unrelated to the article which will be published in Silly Linguistics, despite that some Quechua words are discussed in that article (the Silly Linguistics one). Anyway.
I have published about the Lakota and Dakota languages before, both in terms of cognates and a little in terms of what the languages are like. In this article (the one in front of you) I want instead to discuss the grammar of these languages and some of the features I have personally found beautiful and interesting. In doing so (as with my article on Cusco Quechua which I published yesterday), I will also share information about these languages.
Something I first found interesting about Lakota is the use of expressing gender identity in everyday statements. For example to say that something is good, as a male, to correctly use this language I think I should say wašté yelo. The word wašté means “good”. From what I understand though, if I identified as a woman, I would say wašté kšto. The way in which the verb is expressed is different for speakers of the two genders. This is not the same as the concept of gender in Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic languages for example, where nouns are given specific genders, although this does occur to some degree in for example Salishan languages.
I have discussed the Lakota vocabulary before in terms of possible cognates, but here will give some of my favourite words mostly outside of the context of possible cognates. They are waglúla – worm (which I have discussed before in terms of cognates), pté – buffalo, mní – water, ȟé- mountain. Two words I did not learn until just today are kéya – turtle, and pahá – hill, both of which I like a lot. Some of these words help to demonstrate the beauty of the language, and I am personally very keen on the initial consonant clusters and the way in which they connect with the following vowels. I do not know that many Lakota words, and I have never learned a large number. Some of the others I learned I have written about in other publications. I still had to check the spellings of those in this article in the modern orthography, although somehow I guessed most of them correctly. One thing I had not picked up on before in terms of possible etymological connections but which I will mention here, is the similarity of Lakota wa- “I”, to Mandarin Chinese wǒ – “I” (one of the few Mandarin words I can remember off the top of my head). The similarity is interesting, but this is not to suggest in any way that Siouxan languages came from outside of the Americas.
Continuing with pronouns, or rather, prefixes and suffixes, I remembered that the second person singular pronoun in Lakota is ya-. Lakota has no pronouns as such except for when attached to another word. The plural pronouns are formed with a prefix and suffix, so a verb where “we” is the subject, will take the prefix uŋ-, and the verb will take the suffix -pi, whilst verbs for the second person plural will have the prefix ya- like the second person singular, but will also take the suffix pi-.
I really like the spirituality of the Sioux peoples. I do find the heyoka archetype extremely fascinating (albeit, not the “heyoka empath” idea which has spread across the Internet, and which, I think often is a misunderstanding of the Sioux idea (not that I could claim to understand it myself)). The thunderbirds (known as a Wakíŋyaŋ) are also very interesting to me, and I feel that as an archetype and concept I have come across implications of in some ways similar divine beings in many other cultures, including in my own. The initial syllables in this word relate to a Lakota word for a spiritual or divine power (I hope I am describing that correctly), which I have discussed before in relation to other words, including in relation to the Finnish word väki and Quechua waka, in this article which will be published this week in Silly Linguistics: An ancient temple, languages in the Bock sa-ga, and some similarities between Finnish and Quechua (with temple photo): part one of: “The mystical nature of Finnish & of language in Finland”; and in other publications previously.
The White Buffalo Calf Woman history is extremely interesting, and I like it, for it leaves me with a feeling that some day, the planet will return to harmony once again, and the hope that Indigenous peoples, their lands, traditions and languages, will be more thoroughly recognised and respected across the world. May the Great Mystery bless the Lakota people.
I hope that this article was an interesting read.