Ponca

[Rankin, Robert L]

Ordinarily, when I see <ar> in older orthographic rendering of Indian names,
I just assume it represents [a], as in "Arkansas" or "Harjo", Creek for
'brave'.  This is almost always true in the South, where post-vocalic R
didn't have a phonetic value, but it was true of various other R-less
English dialects too (Boston, NYC, etc.). It's true that sometimes it might
be a diacritic for length, but I don't think it has to be.

On the other hand, there were people who said "sofer" for sofa and Cuber for
"Cuba", which, I suppose was a hypercorrection, although it may have been a
geographic dialect pronunciation of word-final schwa.  Presumably they'd
have said "Dakoter" too.

As for "Ponca", there is really no regularly-occurring suffix or enclitic
with a /dh/, the nearest thing to [r] in Ponca, that would explain the
spellings.

Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: Alan H. Hartley
To: Siouan
Sent: 2/10/02 11:40 AM
Subject: Ponca

Lewis & Clark frequently (but by no means always) write the name with
[r] which I've usually taken to be a spelling indication of the length
of the preceding [a]. But there are several cases in which it seems more
than that, e.g., Ponceras, Poncaries.

Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Alan