The answer about Hopi

Concerning the question that came up about the Hopi examples, I went back and tracked down the paper in which the examples were published. The full citation is:

Hale, Ken (1997). Some observations on the contribution of local languages to linguistic science. Lingua 100:71–89.

I put the paper on the readings page, and if you are on the BU campus, this link should take you to the text of the article.

(Incidentally, I discovered in the process that I’d also put this on last year’s course blog.)

The relevant part is around pages 73–74. What Hale writes is the following:

(1) Singular
wùuti
taaqa
Dual
wùuti-t
taaqa-t
Plural
momoya-m
tàataq-t
‘woman’
‘man
(3) (a) Pam
that
wari.
run:PERF
‘He/she ran.’
(b) Puma
those
wari.
run:PERF
‘They (two) ran.’
(c) Puma
those
yùutu.
run:PERF
‘They (plural) ran.’

So—Adger’s examples are a little bit of an embellishment on this source, adding in the word for ‘man’ and ‘men’, and making more explicit the fact that “wari” is the plural form of the verb. Also, Adger has glottal stops in general where Hale had grave accents. But the structure of the examples still makes Adger’s (and, likewise, Hale’s) point.

By the way, I am not certain that this particular paper is where Adger got his examples from—there may well have been an earlier and more technical paper that first brought these facts to the literature, and he may have reproduced the examples faithfully as they were written, but at the very least, the Hale (1997) paper should be trustworthy.