A tiny drop of wormwood in our nice and straight forward topic and comment pattern

It appears that - alas - not all those 'non-verbal' parts of speech up to now treated as topics are de facto of this kind! Sorry for this oversimplification!
Although there of course are adverbial phrases like aġuyapi un - with/from bread, iyecinkiyanke un - by/with an automobile or maybe even anpetu kin le - today (lit.: this day - short for: on this day) etc., words called adverbs are quite special! Just take our little word líla - really, very for an example:

Topic	Comment
líla	ċantemaṡice
very/really	I-was/am-sad-hearted

I was/am very sad.

 

Adverbs in reality 'belong' to the comment side, i.e. to the verb, i.e. the Lakota one-word sentence (Latin: ad-verb - "at the verb").

Topic	Comment
0	líla ċantemaṡice
0	very/really I-was/am-sad-hearted

 

So, you see that our sample sentence above actually doesn't have a topic at all. So let us go a bit deeper into this issue.

 

'Adverbs': word order reversed

As we have seen, Lakota syntax generally is "right branching" with topic left and comment right (or in other words: SOV = subject - object - verb). If we name the subject unit by 'head', the verb (commenting on it) could be named 'tail'.
On the comment side, the verb can be part of a verb phrase, consisting of the verb and one or more 'adverbs' (commenting on the verb's performance). Here again, we could regard the verb as being the head (or main part of the phrase) and the 'adverb(s)' being the tail of this unit. Now, as it seems, the head is on the right-hand side whereas the adverbial tail is left, i.e. before the verb. Although adverbial phrases can be placed quite freely within the sentence, adverbs are most often positoned immediately before the verb. The verbal phrase can be called left-branching, so we actually do have two directions in the Lakota syntax (which doesn't seem something very special compared to many other languages, cf. English, German etc.).
This bidirectional issue, though, is in fact something for us to nibble since quite some time already, and we will revert to it later.

 

 

Lakota syntax as exemplified by the "L-rd's Prayer" - Iṫaŋċaŋ wóċeḱiye
- Syntactical use of adverb in comparison to syntactical use of verb -

(Excerpt fr. 1928 BCP[6])(...

(...) Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (...)
(...) And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. (...)

In the Lakota text, the little words "as ..." (each one connecting two sentences) are translated into two "just slightly different" words - nevertheless each one belonging to a quite different type according to their syntactical function respective!

(...) Maḣpiya ekta niṫawaċiŋ eċuŋ pi kiŋ he iyecel maḱa akaŋl eċuŋ pi nuŋwe. (...)
(...) Na wauŋḣtani pi kiŋ uŋkiċicażużu pi ye, uŋkiṡ tóna ṡicaya eċauŋkiċuŋ pi wiċuŋkiċicażużu pi kiŋ iyeċeca. (...)

Let us have a look at the first part of sentence # 1:

Quote: Maḣpiya ekta niṫawaċiŋ eċuŋ pi kiŋ (he) ...
Gloss: Heaven there-in your-will they-do-it [topic marker] (that)
Literal: In heaven your will is done... or - with respect to kiŋ he : "That in heaven your will is done..." or even: "The performance of your will in heaven..."

Nota bene & remember: the topic marker kiŋ (he) turns the whole sentence on its left-hand side into one topic 'chunk' - just as if it were only one single noun or - more complex - noun phrase !

The second part of sentence # 1 is:

Quote: ... (he) maḱa akaŋl eċuŋ-pi nuŋwe.
Gloss: ... (that) earth on they-do-it [may it be].
Literal: ... they shall do (that) on earth.

(As for the little word he (= that, s/he/it-there), it could - in theory - be thought of being part of sentence # 1 and/or sentence # 2, i.e. "... kiŋ he" or "he maḱa ...", thus maybe in some way 'glueing' both phrases 'together'. We'd tend to read "he maḱa ..." though, i.e. "he" being the topic of phrase # 2, as such relating to and standing for the preceding phrase # 1 - that, in turn, is topic I with regard to the entire sentence.)

The word between the two parts is iyecel. Its meaning is 'like/in like manner'. It is of adverb type (comparable to the English adverb 'similar-ly'), hence preceding the verb it is modifying:

Quote: (...) iyecel ... eċuŋ pi nuŋwe.
Gloss: (...) similarly ... they-do-it [may it be].
Literal: (...) as they shall do...

(As one can see, there are still other syntactical units telling us how the core sentence - i.e. the one-verb sentences eċun pi : "they-do-it" in our example here - performs. These are the two adverbial phrases in heaven and on earth:

Maḣpiya ekta niṫawaċiŋ eċuŋ pi kiŋ he iyeċel maḱa akaŋl eċuŋ-pi nuŋwe.

As stated above, the adverbials seem to be more free as to in which position within a sentence they can be placed, than adverbs are. The latter usually seek to get as close as possible before 'its' verb (ad-verb is Latin meaning "at the verb").

Now we look at the first part of sentence # 2 :

Quote: Na wauŋḣtani pi kiŋ uŋkiċicażużu pi ye, (...)
Gloss: And we-transgress(ed) [topic marker] forgive-us [wish], (...)
Literal: And that we sinned, please forgive us -> And forgive us our trespasses, (...)

The second part of sentence # 2 is a bit more complex:

Quote: (...) uŋkiṡ tóna ṡicaya eċauŋkiċuŋ pi wiċuŋkiċicażużu pi kiŋ iyeċeca. (...)
Gloss: (...) as-for-us (those-)which badly do/did-against-us them-we-forgive [topic marker] it-is-like-that
Literal: (...) the fact that we on the other hand forgive those doing wrong against us is alike.

So, here we have the usual topic-comment pattern (with the comment part expressing that the semantic contents of the two topics (i.e. clauses) are alike:

Topic I	Topic II	topic marker	Comment
Clause 1	Clause 2	kiŋ	iyeċeca
forgive us ...	we forgive those ...	::	it is alike

 

Different from the above iyecel (which is an adverb) iyeċeca is a verb - or, more precisely, a one-word sentence that we already dealt with earlier.

 

 

Both words, expressing the meaning of English 'as', here, obviously are derived from one common 'root' in Lakota. We actually also have iyecetu, a verb(!) with the meaning "to be so, to become so ..." which is very similar to the verb iyeċeca according to its semantics and shape.
And, as we have learnt earlier, in Sioux different verbs can be put one after another, with the left one semantically modifying ('commenting on') the right one - exactly the way adverbs do! There's no need, basically, for even altering the left one's outer shape. Yet, as it seems, in order to have a closer connection between both verbs, the 'commenting' one is getting truncated quite often in the sense that its final vowel is dropped and the remaining consonant undergoes 'softening'.

This obviously is the case with iyecetu -> iyecel (be aware of that T softens to D in Dakota dialect, whereas it transforms into L in Lakota, the so called L-Dialect).

So, once more the careful assumption that - not unlike in the relationship between verbs & nouns, and nouns & adjectives - there isn't any fundamental difference of word class between verbs and adverbs either, albeit, of course, with regard to syntactical function!

 

This actually was a whole bunch of maybe pretty annoying grammar stuff, so let us have a break for listening to real spoken Lakota language!

We can hear & see a great personality acting at an event of quite some importance for the Teton-Dakota and all Native-American people: