Incidentally, the general name for the kind of affixes you talk about for Cherokee is portmanteau morpheme. Osage has only one: wi, which means "I to you", e.g. wioxtai "I cherish(ed) you". All the other permutations are compositional, although this may be obscured by various morphonological processes, e.g. ąðioxtai "You cherish(ed) me" but ąškǫšta "You want(ed) me". It seems likely to me that the Cherokee prefixes were also compositional/agglutinative in the past, but became portmanteau/fusional over time.
Incidentally, a similar system is found in Basque although there the pronominal elements are generally restricted to auxiliaries. For instance, forms of *edun "have" are used for most transitive verbs. The form for "you to me" is nauk (fam., male), naun (fam., fem.), nauzu (form., sing.), or nauzue (pl.). So maite nauk "You [male, fam.] love me". But "I love you" (to the same person) is maite haut.
Still, you can see a pattern here: There's a consistent link vowel u preceded by a direct object prefix and followed by a subject suffix. Where things get complicated (and one of the reason Basque gets its reputation for impossibility) is that the forms of the affixes aren't constant between conjugations. In the past tense, the first-person prefix becomes nind- and there's an extra affix at the end, e.g. maite ninduken "You [male, fam.] loved me", maite hinduten "I loved you". But the corresponding conditional forms are maite baninduk and maite bahindut, and so on and so forth, mutatis mutandis, through the remaining seven mood/tense combinations.
Incidentally, a similar system is found in Basque although there the pronominal elements are generally restricted to auxiliaries. For instance, forms of *edun "have" are used for most transitive verbs. The form for "you to me" is nauk (fam., male), naun (fam., fem.), nauzu (form., sing.), or nauzue (pl.). So maite nauk "You [male, fam.] love me". But "I love you" (to the same person) is maite haut.
Still, you can see a pattern here: There's a consistent link vowel u preceded by a direct object prefix and followed by a subject suffix. Where things get complicated (and one of the reason Basque gets its reputation for impossibility) is that the forms of the affixes aren't constant between conjugations. In the past tense, the first-person prefix becomes nind- and there's an extra affix at the end, e.g. maite ninduken "You [male, fam.] loved me", maite hinduten "I loved you". But the corresponding conditional forms are maite baninduk and maite bahindut, and so on and so forth, mutatis mutandis, through the remaining seven mood/tense combinations.
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