From bi1 at soas.ac.uk  Wed Jan 10 13:01:06 2001
From: bi1 at soas.ac.uk (Bruce Ingham)
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 13:01:06 GMT
Subject: Crows in England
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1001018121556.21812A-100000@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.10.JAN.2001.130106.GMT.>

Dear Siouanists
I was surprised to discover recently that one of my students, a
Miss Rowan, is half Crow on the father's side.  She says that he
came here with his mother and her second husband who is English
when he was 6 years old ie in the early 1950's from Canada. He
has never been back and knows very little of his family, but she
says he told her that his actual Crow name is 'Chezvela'.  That has
probably got mangled on its passage into English and across the
'pond', but does it look as though it might mean anything in Crow.
Any clues


Bruce



Dr. Bruce Ingham
Reader in Arabic Linguistic Studies
SOAS


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Fri Jan 12 18:13:26 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:13:26 -0700
Subject: Cheyenne Ornithology Reference (fwd)
Message-ID: <FRI.12.JAN.2001.111326.0700.>

This is an article I've always thought very useful for anyone trying to
sort out Siouan bird terminology, whether for simple lexical purposes, or
as an ethnotaxonomical exercise.

I happened to mention it to Michael McCafferty recently and thought it
might make a reasonable post here.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 13:18:11 -0700 (MST)
From: Koontz John E <koontz at spot.colorado.edu>
To: David Costa <pankihtamwa at earthlink.net>
Cc: Michael Mccafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>,
    "Robert L. Rankin" <rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Cheyenne Ornithology Reference

> What's the reference?

Moore, John H.  1986.  The Ornithology of Cheyenne Religionists.
  Plains Anthropologist 31-113:177-192.

The classification is:

living things > animals > flying creatures > great birds

Note for Bob:  flying creatures is opposed to land creatures, crawling
things, and watermonsters.  I make the third wagdhishka, and the fourth
wakkaNdagi. Great birds are opposed to sacred birds and ordinary birds,
or, wazhiNga.  The sacred birds category includes the thunderbird, the
whirlwinds, and the messengers, some of the latter two of which are
butterflies.  Tornados, crows, woodpeckers, nighthawks, vultures, and
magpies are in this category, too.

(Comparisons to Omaha-Ponca terms.  The following terms are Cheyenne,
perhaps mangled in copying.)

Returning now, for everyone, to eagles, maxeveseo, or great birds,
includes niz 'eagles', oheho 'buzzard', and aenoo 'hawks'.

The eagles are:

moeoniz 'war eagle or eagle, the first color phase of the golden eagle
after fledging'

enskiniz 'striped eagle, immature golden eagle'

niz, xameniz '(ordinary) eagle, mature golden eagle, immature bald eagle'

heoveniz 'yellow eagle, mature golden eagle'

voaxa, histatsitsva 'white eagle, snow head, mature bald eagle, only
grudgingly admitted as an eagle'

totoiniz 'prairie eagle, spotted eagle, mature golden eagle'

maeniz 'red eagle, mature golden eagle, sometimes redtailed and
ferruginous hawks'

otataveniz 'blue eagle, grey eagle, American Swallowtailed Kite'

nizvokamasz 'white-painted eagle, Gyrfalcon'


Cheyenne English usage refers to vultures or buzzards as 'bald eagles',
since the buzzard is called 'bald one' in Cheyenne.  Bald eagles are
called, in English, 'white eagles'.  Cardinals are also called 'robins' in
English.

JEK


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Fri Jan 12 18:17:45 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:17:45 -0700
Subject: More on Eagles
Message-ID: <FRI.12.JAN.2001.111745.0700.>

In a penny, in for a ream.  Or is it a quire?

Here are some Mississippi Valley eagle terms for comparison.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:52:31 -0700 (MST)
From: Koontz John E <koontz at spot.colorado.edu>
To: Michael Mccafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
Cc: RLR <rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Re: eagles

> On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, RLR wrote:
>
> > It looks that way. Kaw has:
> >
> > xuya'  'golden eagle'
> > xuya ppasaN  'bald eagle'
> > xuya lez^e 'spotted eagle' (presumably the immature one).

Buechel gives:

anuN'khasaN, xuya', waNbligles^ka

He specifically indicates that the latter is spotted, which, of course, is
the sense of gles^ka, a match, allowing for the added formant -ka in the
Dakotan, to Kaw lez^e, though the latter comes out looking like Dakota
'tongue', amusingly enough.

Xuya in Kaw is from PDh *xu'dha (or *xu'ra, depending on how you write the
r), which comes out xidha in OP.  Earlier this is PS *xu'ra.  Dakotan
xuya' is from PS *xu'ra, too, of course.  Dakotan and Kaw agree that *r
should be mushed out as y.

ANuN'khasaN is 'white (pale) on both sides' and refers to the (adult) bald
eagle.  Xuya' is defined as 'an aged eagle, a common eagle'.

Of waNbli' Buechel says 'the royal war eagle' ~ gles^ka.  The Indians knew
of four kinds of eagles, waNbli gles^ka, anuN'khiyaN, anuN'khasaN, and the
common eagle xuya'.' The spotted eagle is 'the epitome of the powers of
the north.'

Of anuN'lhiyaN Buechel says 'a cross breed of any living thing.  An
eagle.' He adds:  Situpi kiN a'taya skaska 'while their tail tips only are
black'.  The first part actually says 'tail feathers the wholly white
(reduplicated as plural), so the English is additional, not a translation.
Presumably this pair of phrases characterizes the AnuN'khiyaN.

---

LaFlesche lists for Omaha:  Xidha' 'eagle', PpasuN 'bald eagle' (whitish
head), xidha' ska 'golden eagle' (white eagle), xidha' gdhezhe (Kaw lezhe)
'gray sea eagle' (spotted eagle).  The first term may be a generic.

Dorsey, in a list of birds gives xidha ska and xidha gdhezhe without
gloss.

--

LaFlesche lists for Osage:  xudha' 'eagle' (generic?), x[u]dha'ppa 'bald
eagle', x[u]dha' 'golden eagle', x[u]dha' sha 'red eagle', and x[u]dha'
ska 'white eagle'.  Also a'huttatta 'sacred mottled eagle'.  The [u] are
cases where he reverts to i for u, an Omaha-ism.

He says that xudha'lezhe 'spotted eagle' rfeers to the immature golden
eagle, whose tail feathers are spotted.  Under x[u]dha 'golden eagle' he
says it is the symbolof courage, and that the black on the tips of the
tail feathers represents fire and charcoal.  He refers to x[u]dha sha 'red
eagle' as 'a mythical eagle'.

---

Throughout I've been adding accents, aspiration, retranscribing, etc.

Somewhere I've seen that war eagle terminology in an old source.

I definitely recommend that article on Cheyenne ornithology in the Plains
Anthropologist.  Very nice.

JEK


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Fri Jan 12 18:26:36 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:26:36 -0700
Subject: Crows in England
In-Reply-To: <1BE8E62E4E@soas.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.12.JAN.2001.112636.0700.>

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Bruce Ingham wrote:

> I was surprised to discover recently that one of my students, a
> Miss Rowan, is half Crow on the father's side.  She says that he
> came here with his mother and her second husband who is English
> when he was 6 years old ie in the early 1950's from Canada. He
> has never been back and knows very little of his family, but she
> says he told her that his actual Crow name is 'Chezvela'.  That has
> probably got mangled on its passage into English and across the
> 'pond', but does it look as though it might mean anything in Crow.
> Any clues

Turning from taxonomy to personal names, and, coincidentally, from eagles
to crows, the thing I notice about the name is the v, which is not, I
think, a phoneme in Crow.  But there is a b, and also an m, both
allophones of something like an underlying w.

JEK


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Thu Jan 18 07:30:51 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 00:30:51 -0700
Subject: Oglala
Message-ID: <THU.18.JAN.2001.003051.0700.>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 12:35:22 -0600
From: Louis Garcia <garcrobe at hoopster.little-hoop.cc.nd.us>

I noticed on your language message board, some one asking about Oglala.
...
Oglala or as is said here, Okdada, means a sign of contempt.
Scatters ones own is the sign language sign for this word.
You take your thumb and bring it to the tips of your fingers, to make a
group of five. Then you flick our wrist quickly outwardly.
This means throwing sand or dirt at someone. Upon receiving the sign the
oldtimers went for their knifes.

These Lakota people were always doing this and so received the name.
...

====

JEK:

I've checked in Buechel, Riggs, and Williamson without finding this sense
of oglala (ohdada, okdada, etc.).  I tried locating comparable terms from
the English index of Buechel without any luck either.  I've also tried
looking under 'flick' in the Siouan Archives files without any luck.  This
was because I definitely recall stumbling across a Deloria text (perhaps
only in English?) that refers to a gesture described (in the English) as
"flicking the fingers," and indicates it is a gesture of contempt.  Iktomi
gets into trouble with Buzzard, I think, because he makes this gesture at
him behind his back.  (This is the Dakotan vesion of the story in which
Trickster ends up stuck in a hollow tree.)

What strikes me about this explanation of the name Oglala is that it
becomes more generic and descriptive, and falls more in line with the
common Plains practice of assigning mildly to extremely insulting names to
other subdivisions of the group.


From bi1 at soas.ac.uk  Thu Jan 18 08:28:56 2001
From: bi1 at soas.ac.uk (Bruce Ingham)
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 08:28:56 GMT
Subject: Oglala
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1010118001408.22213B-100000@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.18.JAN.2001.082856.GMT.>

I know it's irrelevant, but it's still interesting about the sign for contempt or
disgust.  The arabs or more strictly Arabians have a similar sign
where they lift both hands to the shoulder facing forward and closed
then flick them both down and forward spreading the fingers as
though shaking off water or something nasty.  This means
'useless', 'bad' or 'disgusting'.

Bruce

I noticed on your language message board, some one asking about Oglala.
...
Oglala or as is said here, Okdada, means a sign of contempt.
Scatters ones own is the sign language sign for this word.
You take your thumb and bring it to the tips of your fingers, to make a
group of five. Then you flick our wrist quickly outwardly.
This means throwing sand or dirt at someone. Upon receiving the sign the
oldtimers went for their knifes.

These Lakota people were always doing this and so received the name.
...

====


Dr. Bruce Ingham
Reader in Arabic Linguistic Studies
SOAS


From soup at vm.inext.cz  Thu Jan 18 08:55:40 2001
From: soup at vm.inext.cz (SOUP)
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 09:55:40 +0100
Subject: Oglala
Message-ID: <THU.18.JAN.2001.095540.0100.>

In Dakota text Deloria has the story where Ikomi sits on the back of a
flying hawk (story n. 7.) and in paragraph n. 8 she uses the verb
oka't?apt?ap, which she explains in a footnote as the gesture of contempt
given in John's message (and I think Buechel has the verb with the same
meaning)

Jan Ullrich

---

Koontz John E forwarded and wrote:

>
> I noticed on your language message board, some one asking about Oglala.
> ...
> Oglala or as is said here, Okdada, means a sign of contempt.
> Scatters ones own is the sign language sign for this word.
> You take your thumb and bring it to the tips of your fingers, to make a
> group of five. Then you flick our wrist quickly outwardly.
> This means throwing sand or dirt at someone. Upon receiving the sign the
> oldtimers went for their knifes.
>
> These Lakota people were always doing this and so received the name.
> ...
>
> ====
>
> JEK:
>
> I've checked in Buechel, Riggs, and Williamson without finding this sense
> of oglala (ohdada, okdada, etc.).  I tried locating comparable terms from
> the English index of Buechel without any luck either.  I've also tried
> looking under 'flick' in the Siouan Archives files without any luck.  This
> was because I definitely recall stumbling across a Deloria text (perhaps
> only in English?) that refers to a gesture described (in the English) as
> "flicking the fingers," and indicates it is a gesture of contempt.  Iktomi
> gets into trouble with Buzzard, I think, because he makes this gesture at
> him behind his back.  (This is the Dakotan vesion of the story in which
> Trickster ends up stuck in a hollow tree.)
>
> What strikes me about this explanation of the name Oglala is that it
> becomes more generic and descriptive, and falls more in line with the
> common Plains practice of assigning mildly to extremely insulting names to
> other subdivisions of the group.
>
>


---
Odchozí zpráva neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolováno antivirovým systémem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.214 / Virová báze: 101 - datum vydání: 16.11.2000


From shanwest at uvic.ca  Sun Jan 21 00:26:16 2001
From: shanwest at uvic.ca (Shannon West)
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 16:26:16 -0800
Subject: Lakhota/Nakota help
Message-ID: <SAT.20.JAN.2001.162616.0800.>

Hi everyone.  It's been a quiet list lately.  I suspect everyone is very
busy.  I know I am.  I'd still like to pick your collective brain though if
you have a little time.  :)

I'm working on a paper about the nature of subjects and objects in
Assiniboine Nakota (though I'm adding a lot of Lakhota because of a big lack
of Assiniboine).  I'm working within a Minimalism framework (Sorry, Brent).

ta(i)-oištimatipi ki he Joe(*i,j) yuškaN
3POSS bedroom det     Joe clean

I have this translated as "She cleaned Joe's room" and "Joe cleaned her
room" (gender difference just used to show mandatory disjoint reference).
How can I tell which element is the subject? It seems to me that the subject
is the zero marked third person, and not Joe.

Q2. John wowaši dayaN okihi cen owakiya = "I hired John because he works
well".

How do we know that it John is the object of the verb owakiya, and not the
zero 3rd person?  i.e. "This morning, I hired him because John works well"
(and John and him are coreferential - ungrammatical in English of course)
Relative clauses come first in the sentence regardless of whether it
modifies subject or object, but I wonder, is John part of the relative
clause in the above sentence?  Or is the relative clause [wowaši dayaN okihi
cen]?  Any ideas how I might make a case for either side?  Presumably, if
John is not part of the relative clause, one should be able to put an adverb
in there before wowaši.  I have no idea if such a thing is possible.

Zeroes are really a pain sometimes.  But lots of fun :)

On another note, I'm having a hard time converting some papers I wrote to
.pdf (it's doing some very odd things to the formatting) or anything else
that is fairly accessible (I'm a WordPerfect user).  I haven't forgotten my
promise to share.  When I break down and get someone else to do it (that is,
after this rush is over), I'll post it somewhere.  If you have WP and want a
copy, let me know and I'll forward it on.

Pinamayaya,
Shannon West  - shanwest at uvic.ca

p.s.  Richard Lundy, if you're still getting this list, would you drop me a
line?  I lost your email address in what I call "The Y2K crash".  Tragic, I
say.  ;)


From are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu  Sun Jan 21 04:01:11 2001
From: are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu (ardis eschenberg)
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 23:01:11 -0500
Subject: quick note about flying things
Message-ID: <SAT.20.JAN.2001.230111.0500.>

I mentally noted in an earlier discussion on classifications of birds that
'wagdhishka' in Omaha-Ponca was being used to refer to flying things.  I am
hesitant about this classification.  It seems to refer mostly to bugs in
current use which seem folk-taxonomically related to reptiles:

wagdhishka hi duba 'alligator' (literally: insect foot four, 'four-footed
insect')

So, this would not necessarily be the best name for the classification of
flying things (it indeed seems to indicate other features as salient, those
which link reptiles and insects).

I seem to have deleted the message this refers to and thus cannot quote it
(i'd bet money though that it was from John K. since it was on Omaha!).  I
apologize.

-Ardis


From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu  Sun Jan 21 15:28:19 2001
From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (RLR)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 09:28:19 -0600
Subject: quick note about flying things
Message-ID: <SUN.21.JAN.2001.092819.0600.>

My recollection is that we were talking about flying things AND creepy
crawly things as separate sets. BTW anyone know how hummingbirds fit? In
some folk taxonomies they go with locusts and other large insects.

Bob

ardis eschenberg wrote:
>
> I mentally noted in an earlier discussion on classifications of birds that
> 'wagdhishka' in Omaha-Ponca was being used to refer to flying things.  I am
> hesitant about this classification.  It seems to refer mostly to bugs in
> current use which seem folk-taxonomically related to reptiles:
>
> wagdhishka hi duba 'alligator' (literally: insect foot four, 'four-footed
> insect')
>
> So, this would not necessarily be the best name for the classification of
> flying things (it indeed seems to indicate other features as salient, those
> which link reptiles and insects).
>
> I seem to have deleted the message this refers to and thus cannot quote it
> (i'd bet money though that it was from John K. since it was on Omaha!).  I
> apologize.
>
> -Ardis


From Zylogy at aol.com  Sun Jan 21 19:00:02 2001
From: Zylogy at aol.com (Jess Tauber)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 14:00:02 EST
Subject: strings and serialization
Message-ID: <SUN.21.JAN.2001.140002.EST.>

Hi all. In cataloguing some less usual typological features of language I
started noticing some interesting things. Languages with large
manner-encoding ideophones (apparently made up serially) oppose as a type
those which have large pathway/locational terms (such as Siouan and
Athabaskan-Eyak)- such terms also possibly serial in origin.

This raises questions about whether such languages are merely extreme
variants of those with more balanced manner/pathway terms, often
morphologized (or even lexicalized) onto stem structure, as found in
Delancey's "bipartite stem belt" and containing languages from Penutian,
Hokan, and Uto-Aztecan.

Working re-editing a dictionary of Yahgan (isolate, Tierra del Fuego) it
became clear that the language when set down (mid 19th C.) was in its eastern
dialect in the early stages of entering into "bipartite" (or in this case
even tripartite) habits. And yet many of the manner/bodypart prefixes, bases,
and pathway/locational suffixes apparently themselves were built up from
smaller parts. Thus I hypothesized that the ancestor was an isolating,
analytical language (perhaps with remnant, lexicalized traces of morphology-
as in Sinitic, or many other Tibeto-Burman). Serialization and creation of
standardized "freezes" created the basic morphemes then fed into the higher
level of bipartite structure.

Now, many Penutian languages appear to have similar serialized strings
underlying many of the base morphemes, as do a number of Hokan languages.
Others in the two stocks, especially those with much more simplification of
the bipartite scheme, use expressive roots to a much greater extent (such as
in Pomo).

But getting back to spatial terms- Siouan has elaborated pathway/locational
sets, this in contradistinction to the very simple i-, a-, o- differentiation
on the verb stem. Might we think of such pathway terms as spatial
"ideophones"? There appears to be some sort of complementary relationship
between manner and pathway terminology in terms of access to the base- even
in those languages possessing both glommed onto the base one layer appears to
be older than the other, and perhaps there has been an alternation in
historical terms. Perhaps we are witnessing evidence of an alternation
between nominal and verbal sources for the verbal equivalent of case marking,
which may also be taking place in the serializing languages of the
Tibeto-Burman stock.

Thoughts??


Best,
Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Mon Jan 22 06:37:53 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 23:37:53 -0700
Subject: quick note about flying things
In-Reply-To: <3A6B0013.F091A37E@lark.cc.ukans.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.21.JAN.2001.233753.0700.>

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, RLR wrote:

> My recollection is that we were talking about flying things AND creepy
> crawly things as separate sets.

Yes.  My fault.  We were talking about 'eagles' in Cheyenne, and I was
pointing out parallels between Mississippi Valley Siouan folk taxonomies
and those discussed for Cheyenne in a reference on Cheyenne folk taxonomy
for birds.  Both Cheyenne and (apparently) Omaha-Ponca distinguish eagles
and some other large birds (in the sense of Linnaean Aves) from small
birds, which, in OP are wazhiNga.  I pointed out as an aside that both
Cheyenne and OP classify a variety of insects, lizards, worms, etc., in a
single class for which OP uses the wagdhishka term.  This term has been
referred to among Siouan comparativists in the last decade or so a the
'creepy-crawly' term, using an English term that seems to have
approximately the same range.


> BTW anyone know how hummingbirds fit? In some folk taxonomies they go
> with locusts and other large insects.

Not a clue.  I suspect that at least some large flying insects might be
classes as birds, however, from the existence of a Winnebago term covering
both owls and moths.

> ardis eschenberg wrote:
> >
> > I mentally noted in an earlier discussion on classifications of birds that
> > 'wagdhishka' in Omaha-Ponca was being used to refer to flying things.  I am
> > hesitant about this classification.  It seems to refer mostly to bugs in
> > current use which seem folk-taxonomically related to reptiles:
> >
> > wagdhishka hi duba 'alligator' (literally: insect foot four, 'four-footed
> > insect')

Precisely.

For what it's worth, I don't know of any modern work on Siouan
ethnobiology at all.

JEK


From bi1 at soas.ac.uk  Wed Jan 10 13:01:06 2001
From: bi1 at soas.ac.uk (Bruce Ingham)
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 13:01:06 GMT
Subject: Crows in England
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1001018121556.21812A-100000@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.10.JAN.2001.130106.GMT.>

Dear Siouanists
I was surprised to discover recently that one of my students, a
Miss Rowan, is half Crow on the father's side.  She says that he
came here with his mother and her second husband who is English
when he was 6 years old ie in the early 1950's from Canada. He
has never been back and knows very little of his family, but she
says he told her that his actual Crow name is 'Chezvela'.  That has
probably got mangled on its passage into English and across the
'pond', but does it look as though it might mean anything in Crow.
Any clues


Bruce



Dr. Bruce Ingham
Reader in Arabic Linguistic Studies
SOAS


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Fri Jan 12 18:13:26 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:13:26 -0700
Subject: Cheyenne Ornithology Reference (fwd)
Message-ID: <FRI.12.JAN.2001.111326.0700.>

This is an article I've always thought very useful for anyone trying to
sort out Siouan bird terminology, whether for simple lexical purposes, or
as an ethnotaxonomical exercise.

I happened to mention it to Michael McCafferty recently and thought it
might make a reasonable post here.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 13:18:11 -0700 (MST)
From: Koontz John E <koontz at spot.colorado.edu>
To: David Costa <pankihtamwa at earthlink.net>
Cc: Michael Mccafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>,
    "Robert L. Rankin" <rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Cheyenne Ornithology Reference

> What's the reference?

Moore, John H.  1986.  The Ornithology of Cheyenne Religionists.
  Plains Anthropologist 31-113:177-192.

The classification is:

living things > animals > flying creatures > great birds

Note for Bob:  flying creatures is opposed to land creatures, crawling
things, and watermonsters.  I make the third wagdhishka, and the fourth
wakkaNdagi. Great birds are opposed to sacred birds and ordinary birds,
or, wazhiNga.  The sacred birds category includes the thunderbird, the
whirlwinds, and the messengers, some of the latter two of which are
butterflies.  Tornados, crows, woodpeckers, nighthawks, vultures, and
magpies are in this category, too.

(Comparisons to Omaha-Ponca terms.  The following terms are Cheyenne,
perhaps mangled in copying.)

Returning now, for everyone, to eagles, maxeveseo, or great birds,
includes niz 'eagles', oheho 'buzzard', and aenoo 'hawks'.

The eagles are:

moeoniz 'war eagle or eagle, the first color phase of the golden eagle
after fledging'

enskiniz 'striped eagle, immature golden eagle'

niz, xameniz '(ordinary) eagle, mature golden eagle, immature bald eagle'

heoveniz 'yellow eagle, mature golden eagle'

voaxa, histatsitsva 'white eagle, snow head, mature bald eagle, only
grudgingly admitted as an eagle'

totoiniz 'prairie eagle, spotted eagle, mature golden eagle'

maeniz 'red eagle, mature golden eagle, sometimes redtailed and
ferruginous hawks'

otataveniz 'blue eagle, grey eagle, American Swallowtailed Kite'

nizvokamasz 'white-painted eagle, Gyrfalcon'


Cheyenne English usage refers to vultures or buzzards as 'bald eagles',
since the buzzard is called 'bald one' in Cheyenne.  Bald eagles are
called, in English, 'white eagles'.  Cardinals are also called 'robins' in
English.

JEK


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Fri Jan 12 18:17:45 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:17:45 -0700
Subject: More on Eagles
Message-ID: <FRI.12.JAN.2001.111745.0700.>

In a penny, in for a ream.  Or is it a quire?

Here are some Mississippi Valley eagle terms for comparison.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:52:31 -0700 (MST)
From: Koontz John E <koontz at spot.colorado.edu>
To: Michael Mccafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
Cc: RLR <rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Re: eagles

> On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, RLR wrote:
>
> > It looks that way. Kaw has:
> >
> > xuya'  'golden eagle'
> > xuya ppasaN  'bald eagle'
> > xuya lez^e 'spotted eagle' (presumably the immature one).

Buechel gives:

anuN'khasaN, xuya', waNbligles^ka

He specifically indicates that the latter is spotted, which, of course, is
the sense of gles^ka, a match, allowing for the added formant -ka in the
Dakotan, to Kaw lez^e, though the latter comes out looking like Dakota
'tongue', amusingly enough.

Xuya in Kaw is from PDh *xu'dha (or *xu'ra, depending on how you write the
r), which comes out xidha in OP.  Earlier this is PS *xu'ra.  Dakotan
xuya' is from PS *xu'ra, too, of course.  Dakotan and Kaw agree that *r
should be mushed out as y.

ANuN'khasaN is 'white (pale) on both sides' and refers to the (adult) bald
eagle.  Xuya' is defined as 'an aged eagle, a common eagle'.

Of waNbli' Buechel says 'the royal war eagle' ~ gles^ka.  The Indians knew
of four kinds of eagles, waNbli gles^ka, anuN'khiyaN, anuN'khasaN, and the
common eagle xuya'.' The spotted eagle is 'the epitome of the powers of
the north.'

Of anuN'lhiyaN Buechel says 'a cross breed of any living thing.  An
eagle.' He adds:  Situpi kiN a'taya skaska 'while their tail tips only are
black'.  The first part actually says 'tail feathers the wholly white
(reduplicated as plural), so the English is additional, not a translation.
Presumably this pair of phrases characterizes the AnuN'khiyaN.

---

LaFlesche lists for Omaha:  Xidha' 'eagle', PpasuN 'bald eagle' (whitish
head), xidha' ska 'golden eagle' (white eagle), xidha' gdhezhe (Kaw lezhe)
'gray sea eagle' (spotted eagle).  The first term may be a generic.

Dorsey, in a list of birds gives xidha ska and xidha gdhezhe without
gloss.

--

LaFlesche lists for Osage:  xudha' 'eagle' (generic?), x[u]dha'ppa 'bald
eagle', x[u]dha' 'golden eagle', x[u]dha' sha 'red eagle', and x[u]dha'
ska 'white eagle'.  Also a'huttatta 'sacred mottled eagle'.  The [u] are
cases where he reverts to i for u, an Omaha-ism.

He says that xudha'lezhe 'spotted eagle' rfeers to the immature golden
eagle, whose tail feathers are spotted.  Under x[u]dha 'golden eagle' he
says it is the symbolof courage, and that the black on the tips of the
tail feathers represents fire and charcoal.  He refers to x[u]dha sha 'red
eagle' as 'a mythical eagle'.

---

Throughout I've been adding accents, aspiration, retranscribing, etc.

Somewhere I've seen that war eagle terminology in an old source.

I definitely recommend that article on Cheyenne ornithology in the Plains
Anthropologist.  Very nice.

JEK


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Fri Jan 12 18:26:36 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 11:26:36 -0700
Subject: Crows in England
In-Reply-To: <1BE8E62E4E@soas.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <FRI.12.JAN.2001.112636.0700.>

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Bruce Ingham wrote:

> I was surprised to discover recently that one of my students, a
> Miss Rowan, is half Crow on the father's side.  She says that he
> came here with his mother and her second husband who is English
> when he was 6 years old ie in the early 1950's from Canada. He
> has never been back and knows very little of his family, but she
> says he told her that his actual Crow name is 'Chezvela'.  That has
> probably got mangled on its passage into English and across the
> 'pond', but does it look as though it might mean anything in Crow.
> Any clues

Turning from taxonomy to personal names, and, coincidentally, from eagles
to crows, the thing I notice about the name is the v, which is not, I
think, a phoneme in Crow.  But there is a b, and also an m, both
allophones of something like an underlying w.

JEK


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Thu Jan 18 07:30:51 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 00:30:51 -0700
Subject: Oglala
Message-ID: <THU.18.JAN.2001.003051.0700.>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 12:35:22 -0600
From: Louis Garcia <garcrobe at hoopster.little-hoop.cc.nd.us>

I noticed on your language message board, some one asking about Oglala.
...
Oglala or as is said here, Okdada, means a sign of contempt.
Scatters ones own is the sign language sign for this word.
You take your thumb and bring it to the tips of your fingers, to make a
group of five. Then you flick our wrist quickly outwardly.
This means throwing sand or dirt at someone. Upon receiving the sign the
oldtimers went for their knifes.

These Lakota people were always doing this and so received the name.
...

====

JEK:

I've checked in Buechel, Riggs, and Williamson without finding this sense
of oglala (ohdada, okdada, etc.).  I tried locating comparable terms from
the English index of Buechel without any luck either.  I've also tried
looking under 'flick' in the Siouan Archives files without any luck.  This
was because I definitely recall stumbling across a Deloria text (perhaps
only in English?) that refers to a gesture described (in the English) as
"flicking the fingers," and indicates it is a gesture of contempt.  Iktomi
gets into trouble with Buzzard, I think, because he makes this gesture at
him behind his back.  (This is the Dakotan vesion of the story in which
Trickster ends up stuck in a hollow tree.)

What strikes me about this explanation of the name Oglala is that it
becomes more generic and descriptive, and falls more in line with the
common Plains practice of assigning mildly to extremely insulting names to
other subdivisions of the group.


From bi1 at soas.ac.uk  Thu Jan 18 08:28:56 2001
From: bi1 at soas.ac.uk (Bruce Ingham)
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 08:28:56 GMT
Subject: Oglala
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1010118001408.22213B-100000@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.18.JAN.2001.082856.GMT.>

I know it's irrelevant, but it's still interesting about the sign for contempt or
disgust.  The arabs or more strictly Arabians have a similar sign
where they lift both hands to the shoulder facing forward and closed
then flick them both down and forward spreading the fingers as
though shaking off water or something nasty.  This means
'useless', 'bad' or 'disgusting'.

Bruce

I noticed on your language message board, some one asking about Oglala.
...
Oglala or as is said here, Okdada, means a sign of contempt.
Scatters ones own is the sign language sign for this word.
You take your thumb and bring it to the tips of your fingers, to make a
group of five. Then you flick our wrist quickly outwardly.
This means throwing sand or dirt at someone. Upon receiving the sign the
oldtimers went for their knifes.

These Lakota people were always doing this and so received the name.
...

====


Dr. Bruce Ingham
Reader in Arabic Linguistic Studies
SOAS


From soup at vm.inext.cz  Thu Jan 18 08:55:40 2001
From: soup at vm.inext.cz (SOUP)
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 09:55:40 +0100
Subject: Oglala
Message-ID: <THU.18.JAN.2001.095540.0100.>

In Dakota text Deloria has the story where Ikomi sits on the back of a
flying hawk (story n. 7.) and in paragraph n. 8 she uses the verb
oka't?apt?ap, which she explains in a footnote as the gesture of contempt
given in John's message (and I think Buechel has the verb with the same
meaning)

Jan Ullrich

---

Koontz John E forwarded and wrote:

>
> I noticed on your language message board, some one asking about Oglala.
> ...
> Oglala or as is said here, Okdada, means a sign of contempt.
> Scatters ones own is the sign language sign for this word.
> You take your thumb and bring it to the tips of your fingers, to make a
> group of five. Then you flick our wrist quickly outwardly.
> This means throwing sand or dirt at someone. Upon receiving the sign the
> oldtimers went for their knifes.
>
> These Lakota people were always doing this and so received the name.
> ...
>
> ====
>
> JEK:
>
> I've checked in Buechel, Riggs, and Williamson without finding this sense
> of oglala (ohdada, okdada, etc.).  I tried locating comparable terms from
> the English index of Buechel without any luck either.  I've also tried
> looking under 'flick' in the Siouan Archives files without any luck.  This
> was because I definitely recall stumbling across a Deloria text (perhaps
> only in English?) that refers to a gesture described (in the English) as
> "flicking the fingers," and indicates it is a gesture of contempt.  Iktomi
> gets into trouble with Buzzard, I think, because he makes this gesture at
> him behind his back.  (This is the Dakotan vesion of the story in which
> Trickster ends up stuck in a hollow tree.)
>
> What strikes me about this explanation of the name Oglala is that it
> becomes more generic and descriptive, and falls more in line with the
> common Plains practice of assigning mildly to extremely insulting names to
> other subdivisions of the group.
>
>


---
Odchoz? zpr?va neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolov?no antivirov?m syst?mem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.214 / Virov? b?ze: 101 - datum vyd?n?: 16.11.2000


From shanwest at uvic.ca  Sun Jan 21 00:26:16 2001
From: shanwest at uvic.ca (Shannon West)
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 16:26:16 -0800
Subject: Lakhota/Nakota help
Message-ID: <SAT.20.JAN.2001.162616.0800.>

Hi everyone.  It's been a quiet list lately.  I suspect everyone is very
busy.  I know I am.  I'd still like to pick your collective brain though if
you have a little time.  :)

I'm working on a paper about the nature of subjects and objects in
Assiniboine Nakota (though I'm adding a lot of Lakhota because of a big lack
of Assiniboine).  I'm working within a Minimalism framework (Sorry, Brent).

ta(i)-oi?timatipi ki he Joe(*i,j) yu?kaN
3POSS bedroom det     Joe clean

I have this translated as "She cleaned Joe's room" and "Joe cleaned her
room" (gender difference just used to show mandatory disjoint reference).
How can I tell which element is the subject? It seems to me that the subject
is the zero marked third person, and not Joe.

Q2. John wowa?i dayaN okihi cen owakiya = "I hired John because he works
well".

How do we know that it John is the object of the verb owakiya, and not the
zero 3rd person?  i.e. "This morning, I hired him because John works well"
(and John and him are coreferential - ungrammatical in English of course)
Relative clauses come first in the sentence regardless of whether it
modifies subject or object, but I wonder, is John part of the relative
clause in the above sentence?  Or is the relative clause [wowa?i dayaN okihi
cen]?  Any ideas how I might make a case for either side?  Presumably, if
John is not part of the relative clause, one should be able to put an adverb
in there before wowa?i.  I have no idea if such a thing is possible.

Zeroes are really a pain sometimes.  But lots of fun :)

On another note, I'm having a hard time converting some papers I wrote to
.pdf (it's doing some very odd things to the formatting) or anything else
that is fairly accessible (I'm a WordPerfect user).  I haven't forgotten my
promise to share.  When I break down and get someone else to do it (that is,
after this rush is over), I'll post it somewhere.  If you have WP and want a
copy, let me know and I'll forward it on.

Pinamayaya,
Shannon West  - shanwest at uvic.ca

p.s.  Richard Lundy, if you're still getting this list, would you drop me a
line?  I lost your email address in what I call "The Y2K crash".  Tragic, I
say.  ;)


From are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu  Sun Jan 21 04:01:11 2001
From: are2 at acsu.buffalo.edu (ardis eschenberg)
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 23:01:11 -0500
Subject: quick note about flying things
Message-ID: <SAT.20.JAN.2001.230111.0500.>

I mentally noted in an earlier discussion on classifications of birds that
'wagdhishka' in Omaha-Ponca was being used to refer to flying things.  I am
hesitant about this classification.  It seems to refer mostly to bugs in
current use which seem folk-taxonomically related to reptiles:

wagdhishka hi duba 'alligator' (literally: insect foot four, 'four-footed
insect')

So, this would not necessarily be the best name for the classification of
flying things (it indeed seems to indicate other features as salient, those
which link reptiles and insects).

I seem to have deleted the message this refers to and thus cannot quote it
(i'd bet money though that it was from John K. since it was on Omaha!).  I
apologize.

-Ardis


From rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu  Sun Jan 21 15:28:19 2001
From: rankin at lark.cc.ukans.edu (RLR)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 09:28:19 -0600
Subject: quick note about flying things
Message-ID: <SUN.21.JAN.2001.092819.0600.>

My recollection is that we were talking about flying things AND creepy
crawly things as separate sets. BTW anyone know how hummingbirds fit? In
some folk taxonomies they go with locusts and other large insects.

Bob

ardis eschenberg wrote:
>
> I mentally noted in an earlier discussion on classifications of birds that
> 'wagdhishka' in Omaha-Ponca was being used to refer to flying things.  I am
> hesitant about this classification.  It seems to refer mostly to bugs in
> current use which seem folk-taxonomically related to reptiles:
>
> wagdhishka hi duba 'alligator' (literally: insect foot four, 'four-footed
> insect')
>
> So, this would not necessarily be the best name for the classification of
> flying things (it indeed seems to indicate other features as salient, those
> which link reptiles and insects).
>
> I seem to have deleted the message this refers to and thus cannot quote it
> (i'd bet money though that it was from John K. since it was on Omaha!).  I
> apologize.
>
> -Ardis


From Zylogy at aol.com  Sun Jan 21 19:00:02 2001
From: Zylogy at aol.com (Jess Tauber)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 14:00:02 EST
Subject: strings and serialization
Message-ID: <SUN.21.JAN.2001.140002.EST.>

Hi all. In cataloguing some less usual typological features of language I
started noticing some interesting things. Languages with large
manner-encoding ideophones (apparently made up serially) oppose as a type
those which have large pathway/locational terms (such as Siouan and
Athabaskan-Eyak)- such terms also possibly serial in origin.

This raises questions about whether such languages are merely extreme
variants of those with more balanced manner/pathway terms, often
morphologized (or even lexicalized) onto stem structure, as found in
Delancey's "bipartite stem belt" and containing languages from Penutian,
Hokan, and Uto-Aztecan.

Working re-editing a dictionary of Yahgan (isolate, Tierra del Fuego) it
became clear that the language when set down (mid 19th C.) was in its eastern
dialect in the early stages of entering into "bipartite" (or in this case
even tripartite) habits. And yet many of the manner/bodypart prefixes, bases,
and pathway/locational suffixes apparently themselves were built up from
smaller parts. Thus I hypothesized that the ancestor was an isolating,
analytical language (perhaps with remnant, lexicalized traces of morphology-
as in Sinitic, or many other Tibeto-Burman). Serialization and creation of
standardized "freezes" created the basic morphemes then fed into the higher
level of bipartite structure.

Now, many Penutian languages appear to have similar serialized strings
underlying many of the base morphemes, as do a number of Hokan languages.
Others in the two stocks, especially those with much more simplification of
the bipartite scheme, use expressive roots to a much greater extent (such as
in Pomo).

But getting back to spatial terms- Siouan has elaborated pathway/locational
sets, this in contradistinction to the very simple i-, a-, o- differentiation
on the verb stem. Might we think of such pathway terms as spatial
"ideophones"? There appears to be some sort of complementary relationship
between manner and pathway terminology in terms of access to the base- even
in those languages possessing both glommed onto the base one layer appears to
be older than the other, and perhaps there has been an alternation in
historical terms. Perhaps we are witnessing evidence of an alternation
between nominal and verbal sources for the verbal equivalent of case marking,
which may also be taking place in the serializing languages of the
Tibeto-Burman stock.

Thoughts??


Best,
Jess Tauber
zylogy at aol.com


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Mon Jan 22 06:37:53 2001
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 23:37:53 -0700
Subject: quick note about flying things
In-Reply-To: <3A6B0013.F091A37E@lark.cc.ukans.edu>
Message-ID: <SUN.21.JAN.2001.233753.0700.>

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, RLR wrote:

> My recollection is that we were talking about flying things AND creepy
> crawly things as separate sets.

Yes.  My fault.  We were talking about 'eagles' in Cheyenne, and I was
pointing out parallels between Mississippi Valley Siouan folk taxonomies
and those discussed for Cheyenne in a reference on Cheyenne folk taxonomy
for birds.  Both Cheyenne and (apparently) Omaha-Ponca distinguish eagles
and some other large birds (in the sense of Linnaean Aves) from small
birds, which, in OP are wazhiNga.  I pointed out as an aside that both
Cheyenne and OP classify a variety of insects, lizards, worms, etc., in a
single class for which OP uses the wagdhishka term.  This term has been
referred to among Siouan comparativists in the last decade or so a the
'creepy-crawly' term, using an English term that seems to have
approximately the same range.


> BTW anyone know how hummingbirds fit? In some folk taxonomies they go
> with locusts and other large insects.

Not a clue.  I suspect that at least some large flying insects might be
classes as birds, however, from the existence of a Winnebago term covering
both owls and moths.

> ardis eschenberg wrote:
> >
> > I mentally noted in an earlier discussion on classifications of birds that
> > 'wagdhishka' in Omaha-Ponca was being used to refer to flying things.  I am
> > hesitant about this classification.  It seems to refer mostly to bugs in
> > current use which seem folk-taxonomically related to reptiles:
> >
> > wagdhishka hi duba 'alligator' (literally: insect foot four, 'four-footed
> > insect')

Precisely.

For what it's worth, I don't know of any modern work on Siouan
ethnobiology at all.

JEK