Oglala (was Re: Locative Postpositions)

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Alan H. Hartley wrote:
> John, did I understand you correctly that there are (shaky?) analogies
> for the correspondence between Dakotan g and OP b?

Yes, shakey, as elaborated now above.

> (Incidentally, Dorsey
> as cited by Hodge gives the OP form as Ubchacha: I spose that's just a
> different spelling of the same affricate.)

It's not an affricate; it's a liquid.  But Dorsey represents it with a
cent sign, and that cent-sign may be confused for something else by some
people. Cent-sign was in lieu of edh, which Dorsey used in manuscript and
in some outside publication (he also sometimes used dh), but which was
unavailable to the GPO printers of his day.  Boas doesn't help by
converting to a c-cedilla in his International Conference of Americanists
paper.  In this case the publisher was French (or Canadian ?) and lacked a
cent sign.  Dorsey uses c-cedilla for theta, and LaFlesche, probably
adapting this, uses c-cedilla to represent s and z.  There is evidence
that some speakers of Omaha used theta for s, and that LaFlesche probably
spoke this dialect.  LaFlesche uses c-cedilla for s and z in Osage, too,
though there the theta pronunciation is entirely absent. This has confused
several generations of Siouanists, not to mention Omahas and Osages.