Talk:tȟašúŋke

According to sources, in Lakhota "her" is iye / ish, "his" is t'awa, and "their" is t'awapi. Tȟašúŋka/e would be tȟaȟča šúŋka (deer + dog), likewise tȟatȟaŋka (bison), from tȟaȟča tȟaŋka (deer + big). -Manfariel (talk) 11:48, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Yes, this seems a bit odd. I came here specifically after mentioning to someone how Lakhota gets its word for horse from its word for dog, and how in some expressions, such as riding a horse, the root for dog suffices by itself, because it's obvious what the speaker really means. That's a well known derivational phenomenon that has occurred in English too (e.g. "space opera", not "space soap opera").

But now we're saying that the word that means dog in its standalone form changes to mean horse when inflectional affixes are added to it. Even assuming the Lakhota speakers have no cultural history of caring for dogs as pets, it would be quite odd for the language to have no means of even expressing the concept. I know very little about this language, but I think we are clearly missing something here. —Soap— 12:24, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

You are correct, this entry should be amended to be archaic. The term "Tȟašúŋke" is an archaic possesive third person singular (his) form of 'šúŋka' (dog), now only used in personal names. (Most famously Tȟašúŋke Witkó "Crazy Horse" (lit. His horse is crazy).

A specific word for horse would be šúŋkawakȟáŋ literally (holy, mysterious or powerful dog).

Most compound words about horses, however, still use the morpheme /šúŋk/ /šúŋg/ (dog) (E.g. 'šúŋgyúha' (to own horses), 'šúŋk'óle' (to look for horses), 'šúŋwátȟogla' (wild horse), 'šuŋgská' (white horse).

šúŋka tȟáwa means (his dog). 

The root of the usage of the same term for both animals is probably the fact that traditionally Lakota people universally used dogs as pack-animals for dragging travois (a necessity in their nomadic lifestyle). After the Spanish introduced wild horses to the west in the 1500s, they began to replace dogs in this work.Hk5183 (talk) 21:23, 26 September 2022 (UTC)