The Washo language is allergic to a vowel at the beginning of stem. This is a common phenomenon in the languages of the world - even in languages where the glottal stop is a phoneme (a sound as distinct as p or m) and does make a difference between words (e.g., Hawaiian au and a'u do not mean the same thing), the glottal stop is often added before the vowel.
The majority of Washo stems do not begin with a vowel, but a consonant. These stems still require prefixes, but these are different prefixes. Most of these prefixes are related to the ones you have already learned.
The first person prefix is di-, which produces diháŋa "my mouth" and di'á:ťu "my elder brother, gege".
Now, di- may not seem related to le-, but an alternation between d, l/r, and n is quite common. In Oscan, a sister language to Latin, the confusion even caused the Greek letters for d and r to change places in the Oscan alphabet. Another example - the existence of an spoken l in the oldest forms of Egyptian comes from the variation in the spelling of the word "dwarf", which sometimes has an r, sometimes an n, and sometimes an aleph. Since Washo does not have an r, all the qualities of an r are subsumed in l.
The second person prefix is 'um- (note the presence of the glottal stop) or 'ım-. This is an example of descriptive grammar. A standard European grammar selects one form (usually that of the capitol) and condemns all others as WRONG. Descriptive grammars, such as those linguistics majors turn into theses, try to describe all relatively common ways of speaking. Jacobsen, however, did intend to write an teaching grammar (some are reference grammars), and therefore had to chose one example form. So Jacobsen uses 'um-, apparently because it was more common. Even in a small speech community such as Washo, there are variations. The difference between 'um- and 'ım- may have something to do with vowel harmony (see the paragraph below), but Jacobsen provides no examples, so I cannot say anything further. Other words which show the second person prefix are 'umtó'o, "your throat", and 'um'í:sa , "your older sister, jiejie".
The third person prefix, da-/de-, adds another trick in the Washo grammatical repertoire. The choice of da- or de- depends on the vowel in the following syllable; if the vowel in the following syllable is a or o, the prefix is da-, but if the vowel in the following syllable is any other vowel, the prefix is de-. This is called vowel harmony, and it is worth noting that the direction of travel is the reverse of vowel coloring. The prefix le- , which triggers vowel coloring, affects the vowel after it, whereas the prefix da-/de- changes according to the following vowel. There are slightly different vowel harmony systems for southern and norther varieties of Washo, but once again I have not researched the details thoroughly - yet. In any case, Jacobsen's examples are fairly simple. The examples follow:
dap'á:pıš "his lungs" vs. dip'á:pıš "my lungs"
da'á:ťu "his older brother" vs. di'á:ťu "my older brother"
dep'ísew "his ear(s)" vs. dip'ísew "my ear(s)"
debéyu "his younger brother, ta didi" vs. dibéyu "my younger brother, wo didi"
Only two vocabulary words in this lesson are not related to body or family members, the two inalienable categories of the Washo tongue: wá:laš "bread" and k'ómol "ball". The bread in question is made from pine nuts, a staple of the Washo diet, rather than wheat or barley. One of the causes of toothlessness prior to the introduction of corn and wheat was the constant rubbing of stone particles and shells against the teeth. Think about that when you bite into a pistachio!
The inclusion of a word such as "ball" is a reminder that play is an essential component of human life, not just the reserve of wealthier societies. Washo society was very survival oriented, even possessing an ogre, the hanawiyiy (check spelling), which ate lazy children, but the existence of words such as p'áyti' 'play' and k'ómol "ball" indicate that all work and no play makes Jackrabbit (pelew) a dull boy.
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