This one word means ´Somehow they had already caught sight of him.´I love the fact Arapaho can cram that many ideas into one single word. Here´s the breakdown:
hé'ih'iis-
indefinite past perfect tense indicating that the event happened once and was completed at some point in the distant past, and that the order of the word´s parts will be reversed from how the same idea would be said in common speech; this corresponds to ´had already´in the translation
-íis-
how; combined with the last part of the word, this makes it mean ´somehow´
-íico'óóton-
for something alive to discover something alive; this limits the options for the ending that can come next
-éí-
the more important living thing(s) is or are doing something to the less important living thing(s)
-3i
they; refers to the more important living thing(s), whether they are acting or acted upon; in this case they are acting, which you know because the morpheme before was -éí-
-the last two parts together, éí3i, means it is an ´iterative´tense, which combined with the ´how´gives the connotation of the unknown in the word ´somehow´
Had this same sentence been in a conversation instead of a narrative, the order of the parts would be reversed, and there would be no special marker to indicate that the people acting were more important than the person they were acting upon, although all the other information would still be there -- the person (which means I, you, or he) and number (we, you all, or they) of actors and acted upon, as well as whether they´re alive and whether they´re involved in the conversation. If you change any one of those things, the word changes too, and some things will change differently according to whether or not you changed something else too.
Since the pronunciation is dictated by the sequence of sounds, the parts would sound different in conversational speech too. This means the same idea would be communicated using what would sound like an entirely different word according to whether it is a story or a conversation. Pretty much everything is like that; a single part of a word (a morpheme) may always mean something like past tense, but where it comes in the word and how it sounds changes according to whether the sentence is in a story or a normal conversation and whether it´s a postive statement, a negative statement, a command, a question, something you aren´t sure of, and on and on.
Because Arapaho has very few sounds, a lot of morphemes sound identical to boot. English does that too -- you can blow an exam, a boxer may land a blow on his opponent, you can blow on soup, in speech at least something can be blow the table, which sounds almost identical when said naturally. Just like Arapaho, English speakers also know which blow we mean according to the other words around it. The big difference is that we have 26 letters -- 5 of which, the vowels, have 12 different pronunciation options that differentiate meaning, like telling the difference between cot and caught, which gives us a total of about 33 sounds to use to make our words distinct. Arapaho has half that many sounds to work with, with an extra difference being the high or normal pitch in which the vowel is said -- and the result is that tons of words sound exactly the same and can only be understood once you know what the stuff around it means in the specific order it´s in.
My point: learning this language is like learning Martian. If only a European linguist had documented the complexity of Native American languages before it was decided that natives had the minds of children, that linguist would have been utterly convinced that only a very complex mind could decode such a sophisticated system -- and our fathers´fathers´fathers would have been amazed by their intelligence and wisdom. Then Thanksgiving would have been remembered as the feast to thank the wise natives for smartening up the stupid Europeans who´d kept dying until they were taught everything they needed to know, instead of becoming a celebration of excess, laziness, and America´s self-proclaimed right to God´s Blessing.
My less preachy point: this is why I won´t be finishing the translated conversational database by the end of this semester like I promised to. I can´t remember the multiplicity of rules well enough to even identify what I should look up to find the translation (in the same way if you wanted to know what ´bought´meant you´d need to already know that the dictionary listing is under ´buy´). So this is my excuse for not getting an A in my PhD class this semester.
And given all that -- Yay that the linguistically gifted Native Americans were willing to help the linguistically far more simple-minded visitors survive, and Yay that Americans have managed carving out paid holidays that consecrate excessive eating and watching football.
Dahnsin -- Ghanaian for dancing -- but the kind that requires (or exhales) continuous innovation, that seems more near abandonment of self than choreography. The last two hours I spent dahnsin to Zimbabwean music complements of Zivanai Masango, a very talented and bright-smiled singer and musician who lives in Boulder, a very good friend of a very good friend of mine (Banana, the also-brightly-smiling woman in the picture). It was the sort of music which can be resisted for only a finite period of time. It was in a coffeeshop on Pearl Street and the sweater that made perfect sense given the freezing temperatures around here became embarassingly drenched with sweat by the end of the night -- but I feel so alive, so entirely refreshed, that strangers thinking me on the verge of cardiac arrest seems but a small price to pay. Since it was at a coffeeshop I was not expecting to be swept up in such an exhilerating wave of energy and joyousness, not at 9pm on a Thursday night, but such is the magic of Zevenai's gift -- and Boulder's culture, in which giving oneself up to near-spiritual joy in complete public is not only acceptable, it's contageously encouraged.
