From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 02:32:40 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:32:40 -0700
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <OF8EC3A98C.E34EFA3C-ON86256F5C.0065FDB7-86256F5C.0068C721@unl.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.193240.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> Alright, I'm going to have to backpedal a little bit here. Of our two
> speakers, one prefers aNgu'-[root], while the other accepts either but
> seems to favor ugu'-[root]. ...
>
> Perhaps this is just a bleeding of the accented second syllable vowel
> into the unaccented first syllable, as seems to happen in several
> similar morphological situations ...

That seems like a reasonable explanation to me.  One thing we lack for
Omaha and Ponca is any real appreciation of the amount of personal and
other lectal variation within it.  Dorsey only offers the aNgu-
alternative in the texts and his draft grammar, as far as I know, but
often levels things without comment.  I do know that there is some
variation in Omaha, let alone in Omaha-Ponca, and some of the more
surprising variations are quite old.

A couple of examples:

Modern OP has gdhe'baN 'ten', for expected gdhe'bdhaN, but I have seen
what amounts to the latter form in an Omaha word list from Long
Expedition.  (Thwaites, I think?)   The interesting thing is that the
modern form is attested in both Omaha and Ponca, though the two groups
were separate by the time the gdhe'bdhaN form was attested for Omaha
speakers.  You have to assume that both groups had gdhebaN by then, or
that contrary to my understanding the two communities were still one
linguistic entity after that.

The alternants bdhu'ga ~ gdhu'ba for 'all' and xdhabe' ~ xa'bdhe for
'tree' are both mentioned by Dorsey and still exist as far as I know.  I
gather that a particular speaker uses one variant or the other and in my
admittedly very limited experience speakers hardly notice which one a
person does use.  Anyway, they don't seem to attach any particular
significance to one or the other.

One other point concerns the mysterious c-cedilla as "th" (in thin) in the
work of Francis LaFlesche - both for Omaha and Osage - which he uses for
what Dorsey writes as s and z.  Dorsey does use c-cedilla for a theta in
writing Ioway-Otoe, and Dorsey (or BAE usage) probably account for
LaFlesche's choice of the symbol.  There is a sheet in the Dorsey archives
in which Dorsey mentions off-handedly that some Omahas use theta for s and
that Francis LaFlesche is an example.  I've also noticed that in the
transcriptions of Alice Fletcher for names of people in the "Village of
Make-Believe Whitemen" s pretty consistently appears as th.  So, this was
either a LaFlesche family trait, or a general one of the group of people
living in this village.  In regard to the former possibility, one of
Joseph LaFlesche's wives was a speaker of Otoe.  Whatever the relevance of
that factor, one has to assume that /s/ as [<theta>] was perfectly
acceptable usage for at least some Omaha speakers.

As far as merging s and z as c-cedilla, I tend to assume that Francis
LaFlesche actually distinguished the sounds as [<theta>] and [<edh>] and
also distinguished the latter from the "r" or "l" sound /dh/ that is
written th in so many systems for writing Omaha-Ponca, Osage, etc.
However, he either didn't care about the orthographic issue of
representing the distinction, or couldn't come up with a solution he
liked.  I suspect the former.  He normally writes dots under the sounds
that Dorsey handwrote little x's under and published as inverted letters,
so one can imagine that extending that scheme to c-cedilla might have
presented at least some annoyances, but he was not the kind of martinet
who would have rejected any solution but writing a nearly invisible dot on
top of the cedilla.  Obviously he could have put the dot over the
c-cedilla or used another symbol, but for some reason he didn't.  Before
his dot period (sorry) LaFlesche wrote geminates as bp, dt, gk, etc., but
I haven't seen any cases of zs.  LaFlesche was familiar with the Hamilton
system and probably several Dorsey systems and I think that these all use
s and z.  So the long and the short of it is that LaFlesche cared more
about asserting the use of an interdental or very fronted dental over the
use of a less fronted dental or alveolar than he cared about representing
voicing.


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 02:37:33 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:37:33 -0700
Subject: Hawk.
In-Reply-To: <e1.79929cb.2ede3519@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.193733.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote:
> That is a possibility.  c^i- corresponds to one of the many ki's
> (dative, etc.) in MVS.  c^i-laxchi could mean something like 'wrap up
> one's own', or 'one's own wrapped up or bound'.  (c^i- would be a
> possessive reflexive prefix here.)  But that analysis doesn't make much
> sense to me semantically for a bird term, and it think it is worthwhile
> to at least pursue the notion that c^ilaxchi' is a basic stem rather
> than a composite stem.

Could it be a reference to using prepared skins in bundles?  Or to seizing
prey in the claws?


From Rgraczyk at aol.com  Wed Dec  1 02:55:23 2004
From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Randolph Graczyk)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 21:55:23 EST
Subject: Hawk.
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.215523.EST.>

With the baa- 'indefinite' prefix, baac^ilaxc^i' means 'baby', ie, something
wrapped up, usually in a cradleboard.

Randy
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From are2 at buffalo.edu  Wed Dec  1 04:02:57 2004
From: are2 at buffalo.edu (are2 at buffalo.edu)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 23:02:57 -0500
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0411301900160.25616@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.230257.0500.>

I've only ever heard aNgu- (not ugu) with the speakers I work with.
But gdhuba/bdhuga are both still variants today.  Also
wagdhabaze/wabdhagaze, wamuska/wamaNske.  I'm sure there are more that
don't come right to mind.
-Ardis


Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> > Alright, I'm going to have to backpedal a little bit here. Of our
> two
> > speakers, one prefers aNgu'-[root], while the other accepts either
> but
> > seems to favor ugu'-[root]. ...
> >
> > Perhaps this is just a bleeding of the accented second syllable
> vowel
> > into the unaccented first syllable, as seems to happen in several
> > similar morphological situations ...
>
> That seems like a reasonable explanation to me.  One thing we lack
> for
> Omaha and Ponca is any real appreciation of the amount of personal
> and
> other lectal variation within it.  Dorsey only offers the aNgu-
> alternative in the texts and his draft grammar, as far as I know,
> but
> often levels things without comment.  I do know that there is some
> variation in Omaha, let alone in Omaha-Ponca, and some of the more
> surprising variations are quite old.
>
> A couple of examples:
>
> Modern OP has gdhe'baN 'ten', for expected gdhe'bdhaN, but I have
> seen
> what amounts to the latter form in an Omaha word list from Long
> Expedition.  (Thwaites, I think?)   The interesting thing is that
> the
> modern form is attested in both Omaha and Ponca, though the two
> groups
> were separate by the time the gdhe'bdhaN form was attested for Omaha
> speakers.  You have to assume that both groups had gdhebaN by then,
> or
> that contrary to my understanding the two communities were still one
> linguistic entity after that.
>
> The alternants bdhu'ga ~ gdhu'ba for 'all' and xdhabe' ~ xa'bdhe for
> 'tree' are both mentioned by Dorsey and still exist as far as I know.
>  I
> gather that a particular speaker uses one variant or the other and in
> my
> admittedly very limited experience speakers hardly notice which one
> a
> person does use.  Anyway, they don't seem to attach any particular
> significance to one or the other.
>
> One other point concerns the mysterious c-cedilla as "th" (in thin)
> in the
> work of Francis LaFlesche - both for Omaha and Osage - which he uses
> for
> what Dorsey writes as s and z.  Dorsey does use c-cedilla for a theta
> in
> writing Ioway-Otoe, and Dorsey (or BAE usage) probably account for
> LaFlesche's choice of the symbol.  There is a sheet in the Dorsey
> archives
> in which Dorsey mentions off-handedly that some Omahas use theta for
> s and
> that Francis LaFlesche is an example.  I've also noticed that in the
> transcriptions of Alice Fletcher for names of people in the "Village
> of
> Make-Believe Whitemen" s pretty consistently appears as th.  So, this
> was
> either a LaFlesche family trait, or a general one of the group of
> people
> living in this village.  In regard to the former possibility, one of
> Joseph LaFlesche's wives was a speaker of Otoe.  Whatever the
> relevance of
> that factor, one has to assume that /s/ as [<theta>] was perfectly
> acceptable usage for at least some Omaha speakers.
>
> As far as merging s and z as c-cedilla, I tend to assume that
> Francis
> LaFlesche actually distinguished the sounds as [<theta>] and [<edh>]
> and
> also distinguished the latter from the "r" or "l" sound /dh/ that is
> written th in so many systems for writing Omaha-Ponca, Osage, etc.
> However, he either didn't care about the orthographic issue of
> representing the distinction, or couldn't come up with a solution he
> liked.  I suspect the former.  He normally writes dots under the
> sounds
> that Dorsey handwrote little x's under and published as inverted
> letters,
> so one can imagine that extending that scheme to c-cedilla might
> have
> presented at least some annoyances, but he was not the kind of
> martinet
> who would have rejected any solution but writing a nearly invisible
> dot on
> top of the cedilla.  Obviously he could have put the dot over the
> c-cedilla or used another symbol, but for some reason he didn't.
> Before
> his dot period (sorry) LaFlesche wrote geminates as bp, dt, gk, etc.,
> but
> I haven't seen any cases of zs.  LaFlesche was familiar with the
> Hamilton
> system and probably several Dorsey systems and I think that these all
> use
> s and z.  So the long and the short of it is that LaFlesche cared
> more
> about asserting the use of an interdental or very fronted dental over
> the
> use of a less fronted dental or alveolar than he cared about
> representing
> voicing.
>
>
>
>


From munro at ucla.edu  Wed Dec  1 04:28:26 2004
From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 20:28:26 -0800
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <00b901c4d730$40e666e0$2ab5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.202826.0800.>

Well, I decided to just share one observation about final Western
Muskogean /i/ as [e] (I don't recall noticing that Haas had said this
about Choctaw...).

First, just to clarify re what Bob's talking about below, this certainly
does not happen in either Choctaw (Ct) or Chickasaw (Cs) with long /i:/.
as in borrowed words like Ct tiih / Cs tii 'tea' or other (not too
common) words like the Cs interjection kii 'oh!' -- in these words, /i:/
is [i:].

(Note that words I've written in italics (or, if you don't receive
those, not in //'s or []'s) are in orthography, but I don't think
there's anything unclear here. Note further that I am ignoring Ct final
-h. Most people don't hear this anyway!)

However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think is
a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct (rarely
also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which does something
like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought by some to be the
source for English okay -- this is really in some dictionaries of
English!). I honestly don't feel that we understand the best
phonemicization of this. I write this ending, when it occurs in Cs (not
often), as -hookay. The ay# just shows I am puzzled (but ay can be
pronounced as [e:] elsewhere, e.g. in áyya'sha 'they are there').

One more thing about final [e], possibly related to Haas's observation.
I frequently teach a class where ordinary UCLA students with no special
background in linguistics (mostly monolingual speakers of English or
bilinguals in Spanish or some Asian language) learn to pronounce and
transcribe Chickasaw. I am always amazed (though no longer surprised)
that about half of them reliably will pronounce a word like malili
'run', with final /i/, with final [e], rather than final [i]. Of course
I'm influenced by the phonemics, but I really hear this vowel only as
[i]. And so does about half (or even more) of a typical class. But the
others feel strongly that this final vowel is [e] (they pronounce it
this way, and we typically discuss the contrast in perception, which
they validate). So my "theory" is that there is some other factor
different from formant height or whatever that these students are
attending to, which is shared with English /e/ but not English /i/
(what? I don't know...). Because they note this feature, they interpret
the vowel as /e/ (and thus [e]).

I'm certainly not saying that Haas was like my students, and in fact I
haven't done the same "experiment" with Choctaw. But this is all a
puzzle to me.

Pam

R. Rankin wrote:

>> . . .Haas states that the allophone [e] for 'i' occurs with length
>> and in utterance final position before glottal stop.  I don't think
>> this was mentioned by Dorsey in the dictionary however.
>
>
> No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a
> quality distinction.  No one has had the courage to undertake a
> complete analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics
> (it would be a massive undertaking).  But in Biloxi, it may make a
> tremendous difference.  All linguists since Dorsey have already
> screwed up Biloxi by collapsing the two series of stops, and I'm
> afraid the vowels are no different.  It is especially important in the
> SE, where [e] is an allophone of /i/ and [epsilon] is an allophone of
> /e/, to figure out JOD's transcription.  As a starting point, I'd look
> for his <e-breve> to represent short /e/.  Then his <e> with no
> diacritics will be either [+long] or an allophone of /i/ (or both,
> unfortunately).  But there are other E's (e.g., with circumflex) to
> deal with too.
>
> Haas's comment about [e] representing long /i:/ I find especially
> interesting, because I think the Ofo rule is the same, and I hadn't
> reread Haas when doing my Ofo analysis.  I'll double check.  Thanx for
> the tip.
>
> Bob
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm

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From jfu at centrum.cz  Wed Dec  1 09:06:47 2004
From: jfu at centrum.cz (Jan Ullrich)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:06:47 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.100647.0100.>

Dear Siouanists

While working on Lakota language teaching materials for young learners I
have been in search for rhymes such as parents tell or read to their
children in Indo-European and other languages. Such rhymes are very
effective in building up and reinforcing young children's vocabulary and
that is why I would like to employ them in the elementary teaching materials
I am working on.
As far as I have been able to tell there are no or very few rhyming sayings
in Lakota. Even the lyrics of the numerous songs don't have rhymes; they
usually have the typical syncopative strophe endings or the neighboring
strophes end with identical enclitics. But I find no "real" rhymes anywhere.

Therefore, I have been wondering whether the lack of rhyme in Lakota is
caused by its morphological and syntactic structure or by the fact that
rhyme as such has not developed in the language. Or a combination of the two
is at play. It is also possible that rhymes haven't been recorded and are
not remembered by temporary speakers (I have been asking speakers about
rhymes for quite some time).

What are your experiences with rhymes in other Siouan languages?

Jan



Jan Ullrich
www.inext.cz/siouan

---
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Zkontrolováno antivirovým systémem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.802 / Virová báze: 545 - datum vydání: 26.11.2004


From rwd0002 at unt.edu  Wed Dec  1 15:05:08 2004
From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:05:08 -0600
Subject: Ofo
In-Reply-To: <008401c4d72b$8eef75c0$2ab5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.090508.0600.>

Quoting "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu>:

> I just yesterday received a copy of the brand new Southeast volume on the
> Handbook of North American Indians from the Smithsonian.
> There's also a previously unpublished photo of Rosa Pierrite (which they are
> now spelling to match the Cajun pronunciation), the last known speaker of Ofo,
> which was nice to see.  (The photo of her in the old Swanton survey made her
look like Aunt Jemimah (spelling?) about to whup up a mess o' pancakes).  This
one is much clearer and less stereotyped.
>
> Bob

Hi Bob:  Thank you for mentioning the wonderful new Southeast volume, with the
previously unpublished photo of Rosa Pierrite.  When you tought us in Kansas, I
remember you giving us a xerox of the "Aunt Jemimah" picture, but I had
forgotten where that was from (I can no longer find it in my papers).  So I am
glad a better picture was published, because the Swanton one was the only one I
knew.

I have, of course, a very special fondness for Rosa Pierrite, since I whupped
up "Grassmann's Law in Ofo", my first ever publication, ultimately thanks to
her.

Do you have your Ofo vocabulary with corrected spellings in sharable form?  I
would love to have a copy of that.

Willem


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 16:22:04 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:22:04 -0700
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <1101873777.41ad4271df8fa@mail4.buffalo.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.092204.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 are2 at buffalo.edu wrote:
> I've only ever heard aNgu- (not ugu) with the speakers I work with.
> But gdhuba/bdhuga are both still variants today.  Also
> wagdhabaze/wabdhagaze, wamuska/wamaNske.  I'm sure there are more that
> don't come right to mind.

Terrific! I haven't run into the first example here (just wabdhagaze), but
I've heard wamaNske (wamoNske?) and Dorsey's texts have wamuske 'bread'.
I wondered about that!  I wondered if it might be a change, or if Dorsey
had it wrong.  Dorsey's form is actually a third variant, I guess, because
of the different final vowel.  However, I think that -ske is a bit odd as
a word final sequence and that -ska would be more common.  Hence, a
spontaneous change to that version would be a reasonable analogical
change.

This reminds me of another mystery, the word for 'student' (and, I think
also 'book learning'), which is ttappuska.  What I actually always heard
was tapska, which, because of the cluster I assumed to be a fast speech
form, perhaps really tttappUska, though I didn't notice any particular gap
for the voiceless U.

There's a second mystery with ttappuska.  If I remember correctly, Doug
Parks once pointed out to me that Pawnee has a similar word for similar
purposes.  I think he thought it a bit odd in Pawnee, and the Omaha form
is certainly a bit odd as an Omaha word, too, because it doesn't have any
obvious analysis as a compound and nothing else would explain the
phonological shape, as far as I can see.  So, it is an atypically long
unanalyzable stem, something that might obviously be a loan word, like
kkukkusi 'pig' or kkukkumaN (?) 'cucumber'.  (Not sure I have the last
right.)  Or (?) sagdha(N)s^(V) 'Englishman', and so on.  The 'Englishman'
term is reconstructed from the rendition in Thwaites - it might also be
sakkanas^(V).  Another word of this sort is hiNbdhiNge 'bean'.  Of course,
all of these examples are considered certain or at least likely to be
loans and the certain or probable sources have been recognized.


From are2 at buffalo.edu  Wed Dec  1 16:46:38 2004
From: are2 at buffalo.edu (are2 at buffalo.edu)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:46:38 -0500
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010900570.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.114638.0500.>

Ttappuska 'school' usually refers to physical building
TtappuskazhiNga 'school child'  usually used for student

'u' is present but devoiced.  I usually teach students here to
underline voiceless vowels to remind them not to say them, just make
the shape with their lips.

kkukkumi 'cucumber'




Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 are2 at buffalo.edu wrote:
> > I've only ever heard aNgu- (not ugu) with the speakers I work
> with.
> > But gdhuba/bdhuga are both still variants today.  Also
> > wagdhabaze/wabdhagaze, wamuska/wamaNske.  I'm sure there are more
> that
> > don't come right to mind.
>
> Terrific! I haven't run into the first example here (just
> wabdhagaze), but
> I've heard wamaNske (wamoNske?) and Dorsey's texts have wamuske
> 'bread'.
> I wondered about that!  I wondered if it might be a change, or if
> Dorsey
> had it wrong.  Dorsey's form is actually a third variant, I guess,
> because
> of the different final vowel.  However, I think that -ske is a bit
> odd as
> a word final sequence and that -ska would be more common.  Hence, a
> spontaneous change to that version would be a reasonable analogical
> change.
>
> This reminds me of another mystery, the word for 'student' (and, I
> think
> also 'book learning'), which is ttappuska.  What I actually always
> heard
> was tapska, which, because of the cluster I assumed to be a fast
> speech
> form, perhaps really tttappUska, though I didn't notice any
> particular gap
> for the voiceless U.
>
> There's a second mystery with ttappuska.  If I remember correctly,
> Doug
> Parks once pointed out to me that Pawnee has a similar word for
> similar
> purposes.  I think he thought it a bit odd in Pawnee, and the Omaha
> form
> is certainly a bit odd as an Omaha word, too, because it doesn't have
> any
> obvious analysis as a compound and nothing else would explain the
> phonological shape, as far as I can see.  So, it is an atypically
> long
> unanalyzable stem, something that might obviously be a loan word,
> like
> kkukkusi 'pig' or kkukkumaN (?) 'cucumber'.  (Not sure I have the
> last
> right.)  Or (?) sagdha(N)s^(V) 'Englishman', and so on.  The
> 'Englishman'
> term is reconstructed from the rendition in Thwaites - it might also
> be
> sakkanas^(V).  Another word of this sort is hiNbdhiNge 'bean'.  Of
> course,
> all of these examples are considered certain or at least likely to
> be
> loans and the certain or probable sources have been recognized.
>
>
>


From Rgraczyk at aol.com  Wed Dec  1 16:48:08 2004
From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Randolph Graczyk)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:48:08 EST
Subject: Hawk.
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.114808.EST.>

Hawk terms from Hidatsa, courtesy of John Boyle:

iipxooki 'hawk'
karaakshi 'falcon'

The first is a descriptive compound, from iipi 'tail' + xooki 'row, paddle'.
The second looks like it may be from PSkyaNs^ka', with metathesis of the
final cluster.

Randy
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From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 16:52:03 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:52:03 -0700
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <MPECIJHMHLHEIJKNHIGLCEKJCPAA.jfu@centrum.cz>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.095203.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Jan Ullrich wrote:
> While working on Lakota language teaching materials for young learners I
> have been in search for rhymes such as parents tell or read to their
> children in Indo-European and other languages.

My understanding is that rhyming verse was a fashion introduced in Europe
from Arabic, via Spain.  Verse in the classical languages of Europe has
meter, but is otherwise either "blank" (without rhyme) or aliterative, as
in early Germanic verse.  Early Indo-European verse traditions also
emphasize special stock phrasings, Homer's "wine-dark sea" and
"rosy-fingered dawn," which are supposed to help the verse and faciliate
memorizing.  Germanic kennings - somewhat similar in nature and function -
are often deliberately obscure or fantastically metaphorical, e.g.,
Anglo-Saxon "whale road" 'sea' or "spear field" 'battlefield'.

This is not my area and the claims and examples are coming from far back
in my memory, so I may be way off here.

> As far as I have been able to tell there are no or very few rhyming
> sayings in Lakota. Even the lyrics of the numerous songs don't have
> rhymes; they usually have the typical syncopative strophe endings or the
> neighboring strophes end with identical enclitics. But I find no "real"
> rhymes anywhere.
>
> Therefore, I have been wondering whether the lack of rhyme in Lakota is
> caused by its morphological and syntactic structure ...

This would be my guess.  The ends of clauses, hence the ends of lines,
tend to be morphologically constrained in ways that make rhyme either
mandatory or impossible, depending on the clauses, and so not interesting
or easily manipulated.

I'd suspect that rhyme would be more satifactory in languages which have
free word order and simple word-final morphology or none.

> What are your experiences with rhymes in other Siouan languages?

I haven't run into it in Omaha, but truthfully I am pretty much out of my
depth with Omaha songs.  I can only pick out occasional words and I'm at
sea with musical structure.  I generally enjoy what I hear, but I don't
hear it enough to grasp the patterns.

I mention songs automatically, because they do have a metrical structure,
though I'm not sure that the lyrics do.  I think definitely not, in fact.
Hence the vocables and other elaborate phrasing techniques, to fit the
lyrics to the melody.

I have seen attempts to analyze Siouan literature as verse but I haven't
been especially convinced by any of them.  There is definitely a structure
to higaN (or is it hikkaN?) stories, especially when well told, and this
seems to me to go beyond the 4x rule, serially applied, but I think this
structure is more a matter of balance and organization and presentational
style than verse, and I don't think there's any metrical element at all.
A well told story comes across more like a well-written essay rather than
a sonnet.  Everything is organized just so.  There's never any "oh, by the
way, I forgot to say" or "and then, um, I guess" and parallelisms and
lacks of parallelism flow elegantly in a way that has to be a result of
calculation and practice.


From boris at terracom.net  Wed Dec  1 17:01:55 2004
From: boris at terracom.net (Alan Knutson)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:01:55 -0600
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010925300.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.110155.0600.>

-----Original Message-----
Although I know this is not the type of rhyme Jan was thinking of but
for the past 30 plus years I've been fascinated by the name "totanka
yotanka". Being a linguistics student at the time it popped out at me,
is this a type of rhyme common in naming customs or am I out in
centerfield?

Alan K


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 17:04:28 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:04:28 -0700
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010925300.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.100428.0700.>

We did have a discussion a while back of proverbs, and I think we
concluded that though they are not especially prominent - e.g., not used
as devices in stories - and might be different in various ways, they did
occur.  I think Jimm Good Tracks was able to supply a number of convincing
examples for Ioway-Otoe-Missouria.

Somewhat in a verse line I remember Lowie's examples of Crow (and
Hidatsa?) "charms" or "verses" for putting oneself to sleep.  I don't
rmember what Lowie called them, or in specific how any of them went.  (I
must have fallen asleep.)

I wonder if one way to prompt for things like this would be to ask people
to finish a sentence like "My grandmother (etc.) always says (used to say,
said) ..."


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 17:20:54 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:20:54 -0700
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <00f101c4d7c7$76c78ef0$535faad0@alscom>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.102054.0700.>

Alan notes:
> Although I know this is not the type of rhyme Jan was thinking of but
> for the past 30 plus years I've been fascinated by the name "totanka
> yotanka". Being a linguistics student at the time it popped out at me,
> is this a type of rhyme common in naming customs or am I out in
> centerfield?

I think this isn't quite right, but, on reflection, I'm not sure I know it
correctly either.  ThathaNka Iyot(h?)aNka?  'Sitting Bull" of course.

I think I've noticed or heard of a few cases in which Dakota speakers
seemed to like a sort of repetition of sounds in expressions - seemingly
considered it interesting or attractive or noteworthy or maybe just
amusing.  One is the Lakota word for pepper.  Another example was a name
that means "Charging Whirlwind" which also involves repeated mn-clusters.
Maybe repeating mn-clusters is the only thing that triggers this.  I've
tried to reconstruct the name example in my memory - I got it from Dick
Carter - but the best I can recall is maybe omni womni and then a third
word that (also) won't come back to me - yuhomni, kahomni?  I haven't ever
been in a position to know if this sort of thing can be manipulated
deliberately or is simply treasured when it occurs, maybe somewhat like
Americans remarking "I'm a poet and didn't know it" when rhymes occur
accidentally.


From ahartley at d.umn.edu  Wed Dec  1 17:39:49 2004
From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:39:49 -0600
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <41AD486A.7050707@ucla.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.113949.0600.>

Pamela Munro wrote:

> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think is
> a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct (rarely
> also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which does something
> like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought by some to be the
> source for English okay -- this is really in some dictionaries of
> English!).

That's an attractive idea, but it's unsupported in the record of
English, at least in the OED, where there's no hint of a southeastern
provenance for the word. In fact, the several earliest examples the OED
(draft entry in new edition on line) quots are all from the northeast:

1839 C. G. GREENE in Boston Morning Post 23 Mar. 2/2 He..would have the
'contribution box', et ceteras, o.k. all correct and cause the corks to
fly, like sparks, upward.
1839 Salem Gaz. 12 Apr. 2/3 The house was O.K. at the last concert, and
did credit to the musical taste of the young ladies and gents.
1839 Boston Evening Transcript 11 Oct. 2/3 Our Bank Directors have not
thought it worth their while to call a meeting, even for consultation,
on the subject. It is O.K. (all correct) in this quarter.
1840 Atlas (Boston) 19 Aug. 2/4 These initials, according to Jack
Downing, were first used by Gen. Jackson. ‘Those papers, Amos [Kendall],
are all correct. I have marked them O.K.’ (oll korrect). The Gen. was
never good at spelling.
1840 Morning Herald (N.Y.) 21 Apr. 2/4 The Brigadier..reviewed his
Brigade..and pronounced every thing O.K.

The OED etymology espouses the "oll korrect" hypothesis and goes on to
say "Other suggestions, e.g. that O.K. represents an alleged Choctaw
word oke 'it is' (actually the affirmative verbal suffix -okii ‘indeed,
contrary to your supposition’), or French au quai, or Scottish English
och aye, or that it derives from a word in the West African language
Wolof via slaves in the southern States of America, all lack any form of
acceptable documentation." And then "In form okeh (as used by Dr.
Woodrow Wilson: see quots. 1919, 1939 at sense 1 of adjective) on the
understanding that the word represents an alleged Choctaw word oke (see
above)." The 1919 Wilson quot is:

1919 H. L. MENCKEN Amer. Lang. 161 Dr. Woodrow Wilson is said..to use
okeh in endorsing government papers.

(I can't find the mentioned 1939 quot anywhere in the entry.)

With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is it,
as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?

Alan H.


From Rgraczyk at aol.com  Wed Dec  1 17:52:44 2004
From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Randolph Graczyk)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 12:52:44 EST
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.125244.EST.>

In Crow and, from what I know, in other Siouan languages, we tend to see
recurrent patterns--though not rhyme--at the beginning of sentences, with the
repetion of sentence connectives like Crow dee'laa 'and then', etc.  It is also
common in Crow discourse to repeat the final verb of a sentence or stretch of
discourse as the first verb of the next section:
'......he went'.  'He went and.....'

I agree with John that the morphological and syntactic structure of Siouan
languages makes rhyming virtually impossible.

Randy
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From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Wed Dec  1 18:45:32 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:45:32 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.194532.0100.>

 >>While working on Lakota language teaching materials for young learners I
have been in search for rhymes such as parents tell or read to their
children in Indo-European and other languages.<<<<


 >My understanding is that rhyming verse was a fashion introduced in Europe
from Arabic, via Spain.  Verse in the classical languages of Europe has
meter, but is otherwise either "blank" (without rhyme) or aliterative, as
in early Germanic verse.  Early Indo-European verse traditions also
emphasize special stock phrasings, Homer's "wine-dark sea" and
"rosy-fingered dawn," which are supposed to help the verse and faciliate
memorizing.  Germanic kennings - somewhat similar in nature and function -
are often deliberately obscure or fantastically metaphorical, e.g.,
Anglo-Saxon "whale road" 'sea' or "spear field" 'battlefield'.<<


This is correct, yet bear in mind that also ancient Chinese poetry
styles (e.g. Ch'i-Lü/Qilü - an eight-line poem with seven characters per
line and following rigorous prosodic rules - or Chueh-chü/Jueju - a
Quatrain) have to use end-rhymes in certain lines, whereas other styles
are more free and don't have rhymes. In Germanic (and other
Indoeuropean) tongues there is (was) alliteration (Stabreim), free forms
and endrhyme, too, so that one cannot state apodictically that rhyme or
not rhyme is strictly depending on a language's specific structure.

When beginning to study Hungarian poetry, my initial opinion also went
into this direction because of the very special structure of the H
language. And infact the rhyming is a bit special compared to other
languages like e.g. English, German, Chinese, Romanian or what have you
for its feature of agglutinativeness (i.e. the rhyming endings mostly
are grammatical suffixes of limited number). But it works (sounds!) as
well - at least for ears accustomed to the language.
In Hungarian, very often the verb comes last in a sentence (so you often
have the verb endings to carry the rhyme), but not always, and moreover,
in poetry Hungarian syntax is pretty variable and free.
This is very different with Siouan languages, and therefore syntax might
appear to be a certain drawback for endrhyme poetry there. So I tend to
agree with both of you that this can be one reason for the "lack of
rhymes" in Lakota - although endrhyme isn't totally impossible there,
albeit a bit monotonous perhaps. Using the various (but quite limited)
enclitics to bear the rhyme might be well appropriate for lullabies,
childrens' and ceremonial/spiritual songs etc..
(BTW, I too was searching for Lakota pieces of poetry, invain, they're
all in English.)

Alfred


From munro at ucla.edu  Wed Dec  1 18:55:08 2004
From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:55:08 -0800
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <41AE01E5.7030706@d.umn.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.105508.0800.>

I was not suggesting I thought "okay" was from the Choctaw suffix, just
that you will find that in dictionaries.

If the OED has "okii", they are probably quoting someone else who works
on Choctaw, and that is a possibly phonemicization, though not the one I
would go for, because of the phonetic problems I mentioned. It is
certainly NOT Choctaw /o:ke:/, because there is no phonemic /e:/ in
Choctaw -- it's simply a matter of deciding what the best
phonemicization is here. Leaving off the h is fine (the h is certainly a
separate morpheme, but people (Chickasaws and Choctaws) include the h
when they refer to this form, so that's how I think of it (I regard it
as a feature of typical Choctaw men's speech, though women use it also).
I would definitely say the o is long myself (I think it is a form of
'be', probably), but maybe that's debatable. As to whether it's a
suffix, that sort of depends on what level of analysis you're referring
to. I think of it that way most of the time, but I could see arguments
for not doing so, so once again, I wouldn't fight what the OED has now.
These are all probably too small problems for anyone to worry about who
is not interested in specifically Western Muskogean problems, and I'm
sorry I bothered you all, but I did want to comment on the point about
Haas and Choctaw [e]. I don't know to what degree the OED really cares
about these debates.

Pam



Alan H. Hartley wrote:

> Pamela Munro wrote:
>
>> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think
>> is a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct
>> (rarely also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which
>> does something like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought
>> by some to be the source for English okay -- this is really in some
>> dictionaries of English!).
>
>
> That's an attractive idea, but it's unsupported in the record of
> English, at least in the OED, where there's no hint of a southeastern
> provenance for the word. In fact, the several earliest examples the
> OED (draft entry in new edition on line) quots are all from the
> northeast:
>
> 1839 C. G. GREENE in Boston Morning Post 23 Mar. 2/2 He..would have
> the 'contribution box', et ceteras, o.k. all correct and cause the
> corks to fly, like sparks, upward.
> 1839 Salem Gaz. 12 Apr. 2/3 The house was O.K. at the last concert,
> and did credit to the musical taste of the young ladies and gents.
> 1839 Boston Evening Transcript 11 Oct. 2/3 Our Bank Directors have not
> thought it worth their while to call a meeting, even for consultation,
> on the subject. It is O.K. (all correct) in this quarter.
> 1840 Atlas (Boston) 19 Aug. 2/4 These initials, according to Jack
> Downing, were first used by Gen. Jackson. ‘Those papers, Amos
> [Kendall], are all correct. I have marked them O.K.’ (oll korrect).
> The Gen. was never good at spelling.
> 1840 Morning Herald (N.Y.) 21 Apr. 2/4 The Brigadier..reviewed his
> Brigade..and pronounced every thing O.K.
>
> The OED etymology espouses the "oll korrect" hypothesis and goes on to
> say "Other suggestions, e.g. that O.K. represents an alleged Choctaw
> word oke 'it is' (actually the affirmative verbal suffix -okii
> ‘indeed, contrary to your supposition’), or French au quai, or
> Scottish English och aye, or that it derives from a word in the West
> African language Wolof via slaves in the southern States of America,
> all lack any form of acceptable documentation." And then "In form okeh
> (as used by Dr. Woodrow Wilson: see quots. 1919, 1939 at sense 1 of
> adjective) on the understanding that the word represents an alleged
> Choctaw word oke (see above)." The 1919 Wilson quot is:
>
> 1919 H. L. MENCKEN Amer. Lang. 161 Dr. Woodrow Wilson is said..to use
> okeh in endorsing government papers.
>
> (I can't find the mentioned 1939 quot anywhere in the entry.)
>
> With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is
> it, as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?
>
> Alan H.
>
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm


From ahartley at d.umn.edu  Wed Dec  1 19:18:59 2004
From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 13:18:59 -0600
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <41AE138C.8000300@ucla.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.131859.0600.>

Thanks for the additional background, Pam.

> I don't know to what degree the OED really cares about these debates.

Such a debate may be considered peripheral by the editors, but not if it
bears on something in the dictionary.

Alan H


From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Wed Dec  1 19:17:39 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 20:17:39 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.201739.0100.>

Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"

Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka
i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

Buechel gives _i'yotakA_ (to sit down) different from _yaNkA_ (to sit/be
sitting). So the famous chief's name obviously describes a buffalo in
the movement of sitting down (with the forelegs still standing on the
ground).


Alfred


From chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu  Wed Dec  1 19:25:06 2004
From: chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:25:06 -0800
Subject: OK and rhymes
In-Reply-To: <41AE114C.6090201@fa-kuan.muc.de>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.112506.0800.>

Just to throw a little extra wood on the fire, on two points that have been
circulating. First of all I don't think we'll ever know for sure the origin
of OK. All the explanations seem rather fanciful. But there's a Caddo
exclamation "ukkih" which means something like "wow!" and it probably
qualifies as well as most of these other suggestions.

I've been a little uncomfortable with the discussion of rhyming, which
makes it sound like some higher manifestation of artistic sensibility. It's
actually something that's arisen in certain cultures in certain ways, and I
don't see any reason to interpret it as an index of a culture's degree of
sophistication, or whatever. Native American "oral literature" has other
aesthetic values, and there's no reason to see an absence of rhyming as
some kind of deficit, or to think that people would have developed it if
only they'd been lucky enough to have a different kind of morphology.

--Wally


From lcumberl at indiana.edu  Wed Dec  1 19:38:38 2004
From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (lcumberl at indiana.edu)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:38:38 -0500
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010925300.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.143838.0500.>

I have the same feeling as others that Siouan morphology would inhibit
end-rhyming - so many ya's and ye's! This discussion reminds me of cultures that
practice head-rhyming, in which it is the first full syllable of specified lines
that rhyme (e.g., Mongolian), but even that possibility would be limited in
Siouan, again due to morphology.

What I have noticed in so may Assiniboine and Lakhota songs is the art of
vocables, where lines are filled out rhythmically. And, of course, some entire
songs or entire verses of songs are just vocables.  A Lakhota singer once told
me that he believes that learning songs is the best place to start when trying
to learn the language because the music reinforces the patterns of the words,
even though there is no "rhyme" in the sense that we think of it. So maybe a
good pedagogical tool is to teach songs, or to set things to music where
possible. Some of you may recall our excursion into various language versions of
"Head, Shoulder, Knees, and Toes" but if I were to make a practice of this, I
think I'd go with more culturally appropriate melodies, perhaps accompanied by
hand drum.

Linda


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 20:49:42 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:49:42 -0600
Subject: Ofo
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.144942.0600.>

> Thank you for mentioning the wonderful new Southeast volume, with the
previously unpublished photo of Rosa Pierrite.  When you taught us in Kansas, I
remember you giving us a xerox of the "Aunt Jemimah" picture, but I had
forgotten where that was from (I can no longer find it in my papers).  So I am
glad a better picture was published, because the Swanton one was the only one I
knew.

Me too.  The original was in one of the John R. Swanton survey volumes.  It was
either his Indian Tribes of the US or his Southeastern tribes book.  Both
volumes are at the office and I don't remember which one it's in.  I didn't know
there were any other photos of Mrs. Pierrite in existence.  We owe a great debt
to her and to Swanton.

BTW there is a short novel entitled "The Last Ofo" by an Indian writer from the
U. of Oklahoma (not an Ofo descendent).  When I heard of it, I bought a copy.
It's an interesting read -- an avowed work of fiction -- about the last Ofo, a
man with the surname Darko in this account, who grew up in Louisiana and who,
near the end of his life, worked with some rather unpleasant Smithsonian
anthropologists documenting his language.  List members with an interest in Ofo
and Biloxi might want to pick it up.  I got a used copy from Amazon.

> I have, of course, a very special fondness for Rosa Pierrite, since I whupped
> up "Grassmann's Law in Ofo", my first ever publication, ultimately thanks to
> her.

Willem also did the chapters on the Biloxi and Ofo languages for the Handbook
volume, although they didn't allot him enough space to do his knowledge justice.

> Do you have your Ofo vocabulary with corrected spellings in sharable form?  I
> would love to have a copy of that.

It's not in the latest version, but I can get one out later this week.

Bob


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 20:59:03 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 13:59:03 -0700
Subject: Ofo
In-Reply-To: <001d01c4d7e7$5b8ea9f0$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.135903.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> BTW there is a short novel entitled "The Last Ofo" by an Indian writer
> from the U. of Oklahoma (not an Ofo descendent).  When I heard of it, I
> bought a copy.  It's an interesting read -- an avowed work of fiction --
> about the last Ofo, a man with the surname Darko in this account, who
> grew up in Louisiana and who, near the end of his life, worked with some
> rather unpleasant Smithsonian anthropologists documenting his language.
> List members with an interest in Ofo and Biloxi might want to pick it
> up.  I got a used copy from Amazon.

Sounds like the Ishi story and its various interpretations taken up and
applied to the work of Dorsey and Swanton.


From jfu at centrum.cz  Wed Dec  1 21:18:32 2004
From: jfu at centrum.cz (Jan Ullrich)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 22:18:32 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <1101929918.41ae1dbe146ba@webmail.iu.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.221832.0100.>

Thanks to all of you who replied to my e-mail about rhyming verse in Siouan
languages.

I didn't mean to suggest that the "lack of rhyme" or the morphological and
syntactic characteristic of any language is anything defective. And I am
sorry if anyone got that impression. And I do not believe others who
responded to my e-mail meant to suggest anything of that nature either.

As a matter of fact, I was asked and encouraged to search for rhymes by some
of the native teachers that I work with. They would love to use rhymes when
teaching the young students, but don't know any themselves and aren't sure
if there were any in the past. We even tried to create rhymes together but
finding a rhyming word was a very difficult process even doing digital
searches through a lexical database of 36,000 entries.
The replies by other Siouanists confirmed my impression that rhyming is
difficult if not impossible in Lakota. But again, I am not saying this in
any derogatory way. Lakota has its own ways of expressing beauty in speech.

I strongly agree Linda as concerns songs. As a student of a few languages
and a language teacher I experienced many times that students do grasp
vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar rules very easily through song
lyrics, whether they are rhymed or not. So songs, preferably traditional,
are certainly something to use for pedagogical purposes. Unfortunately,
today there seems to be but a few traditional songs that deal with the kind
of vocabulary needed for children at the age of 5-8. Something else to
search for.

Jan


---
Odchozí zpráva neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolováno antivirovým systémem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.802 / Virová báze: 545 - datum vydání: 26.11.2004


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 21:15:38 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 15:15:38 -0600
Subject: Ofo
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.151538.0600.>

>> BTW there is a short novel entitled "The Last Ofo" by an Indian writer
>> from the U. of Oklahoma (not an Ofo descendent).

> Sounds like the Ishi story and its various interpretations taken up and
> applied to the work of Dorsey and Swanton.

Something like that.  I don't think the author had any particular linguists in
mind in his novella, but they don't come off as particularly sympathetic
figures.

The author had obviously done some homework and he refers to the Ofo as
descendents of the Mosopelea, etc.

Bob


From jfu at centrum.cz  Wed Dec  1 21:26:01 2004
From: jfu at centrum.cz (Jan Ullrich)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 22:26:01 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <41AE18D3.3000108@fa-kuan.muc.de>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.222601.0100.>

  Alfred W. Tüting wrote:
> Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"
> Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or
> Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

I am not sure where the Tatanka Iyotanka form - common in popular
literature - originates from. I have reasons to believe that the correct
form is ThathaN'ka I'yotake, pronounced ThathaN'kiyotake in fast speech.

Jan


---
Odchozí zpráva neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolováno antivirovým systémem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.802 / Virová báze: 545 - datum vydání: 26.11.2004


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 21:39:51 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 15:39:51 -0600
Subject: Muskogean and Biloxi/Ofo
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.153951.0600.>

> Well, I decided to just share one observation about final Western
> Muskogean /i/ as [e] (I don't recall noticing that Haas had said this
> about Choctaw...).

She said it about Biloxi in '68.  I'm saying it about Choctaw.

> First, just to clarify re what Bob's talking about below, this certainly
> does not happen in either Choctaw (Ct) or Chickasaw (Cs) with long /i:/.
> as in borrowed words like Ct tiih / Cs tii 'tea' or other (not too
> common) words like the Cs interjection kii 'oh!' -- in these words, /i:/
> is [i:].

That's true, but, on the other hand, maybe that's because there's an internal
rule in Choctaw that in fact raises long, internal [e:] (or diphthong [ey]) to
[i:].  I'm thinking of *tayki 'female' that is phonetically [te:k-] in some
languages but [ti:k] in Choctaw.  Final position in the word or phrase was where
I got it most often.  I'm not sure whether any of these forms had -h or not, I'm
afraid.  I'm one of those who had a hard time hearing it at least at first,
although it's certainly there underlyingly.

> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think is
> a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct (rarely
> also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which does something
> like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought by some to be the
> source for English okay -- this is really in some dictionaries of
> English!). I honestly don't feel that we understand the best
> phonemicization of this. I write this ending, when it occurs in Cs (not
> often), as -hookay. The ay# just shows I am puzzled (but ay can be
> pronounced as [e:] elsewhere, e.g. in áyya'sha 'they are there').

As Pam knows, /ay/ > [ey] or [e:] in Creek quite regularly in closed syllables
and it's pretty common elsewhere in Muskogean, although I can't quote details
off the top of my head.  But most of these ay > e(y) changes are internal, and
in closed syllables.  The final [-e] remains a bit of a problem.  I wonder if a
rising-falling sentence intonation on [hoke] in Choctaw could be influencing
length and quality?

As an aside, I used to baffle students on oral exams by asking "In Chinese "ma-,
ma^, ma`" and "ma" with different tones all mean different things.  OK, in
English you can say "Yes." "Yes?" "Yes! Yeeees (with hesitation signaling
...but...) and "Yayis! all with different tones and meaning different things
(statement, question, emphatic statement, partial agreement, etc).  Now, why
isn't English a tone language like Chinese?"  You get the most amazing
non-answers to that question, and most students never think to mention that the
English utterances are all entire sentences, with sentence-intonation contours.
Oh well, it's also true that some of those English "yeses" have qualitative
differences in the vowel.  I guess that's my point about the Choctaw.

Bob


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 22:20:42 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 16:20:42 -0600
Subject: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi.
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.162042.0600.>

> Just to throw a little extra wood on the fire, on two points that have been
> circulating. First of all I don't think we'll ever know for sure the origin of
> OK. All the explanations seem rather fanciful. But there's a Caddo exclamation
> "ukkih" which means something like "wow!" and it probably qualifies as well as
> most of these other suggestions.

 I wonder of this has any connection with the Choctaw [ho:keh] Pam was
 discussing?  The Caddo and other Caddoan-speaking groups were certainly in
 Louisiana at the time of the DeSoto expedition (Wally has a nice paper in an
 anthology about the Caddoan place names in the Spanish accounts).  I only bring
 it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan influence in Biloxi and
 Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.

 Ofo:                        a-cé ki           'corn'
Biloxi:                     a-yé:ki           'corn'
Pawnee:                     ré:k  su       'corn'
Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
Wichita:                      té:    s ?       'corn'
Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'

Ofo c (=ch) is a regular reflex of earlier *y, so a Siouan form *a-yé:ki can be
 compared to a possible Caddoan prototype something like *Ré:kisu? where R is my
 indeterminate sonorant covering the n/r/t correspondence set. This term for
 'corn' is unique to the southeastern Siouan subgroup.  Tutelo, the other
 attested language in this Ohio Valley Siouan subgroup, does not share the term,
 reinforcing the notion that the borrowing went from Caddoan to Ofo and Biloxi,
 not the other way around.  In any event, Tutelo, Ofo and Biloxi in the South,
 like Mandan, Crow and Hidatsa in the Northwest, had apparently separated from
 the rest of Siouan well before the in­troduction of any domesticated cultigen
 except the gourd.

 I'm afraid *Re:kisu? is my own Haas-style "boxcar reconstruction" from the
 Caddoan cognate set.  At least various of the pieces seem represented across
the
 family!  Biloxi and Ofo initial a- in these items would be the normal reflex of
 the noun prefix *wa- after initial labial resonants had been lost, so it is
 separable.  Caddoan -su? at the end of the term may have been interpreted as su
 'seed' by Siouan speakers.

 So, if Caddoan was in touch directly or indirectly with Biloxi and Ofo, could
 Caddo ukkih be connected with Choctaw hokeh.  (Recall that Choctaw has no
 distinction between o and u and between e and i.)  The phonemic match is
awfully
 close.  As Pam says, the Choctaw form looks as though is it based on the verb
 'be'.  Is the Caddo form made up of native morphology, or is it a stray term
 that could have been borrowed?

 Bob


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 22:42:59 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 16:42:59 -0600
Subject: OK and the OED.
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.164259.0600.>

> With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is it,
> as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?

I'll defer to Pam on this.  The H may or may not be etymologically a part of
oke.  It is a final consonant on many verb forms but there are other instances
where it has been reanalysed as the initial consonant of a following enclitic.
For example, the question particle, oN or aN has been reanalysed as -hoN or -haN
by some speakers.  Synchronically, I'd guess that you could argue for either
[hoke] or [oke].  The final vowel is definitely not [i] or [ii] in the Choctaw
I've heard.  I'm remaining neutral on the phonemic value of it, since it doesn't
matter to a potential English borrowing anyway (English speakers would hear it
as [ey]).

It might be worth combing literature from the deep South around the 1830's to
see if maybe it crops up.  I have to admit I've never liked the "Oll Korrect"
explanation.  It incorporates two non-characteristics of American English
pronunciation and spelling.

Bob


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 22:44:39 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 15:44:39 -0700
Subject: OK and rhymes
In-Reply-To: <673715ADACA28DB98E0D1277@[192.168.2.34]>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.154439.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Wallace Chafe wrote:
> I've been a little uncomfortable with the discussion of rhyming, which
> makes it sound like some higher manifestation of artistic sensibility.
> It's actually something that's arisen in certain cultures in certain
> ways, and I don't see any reason to interpret it as an index of a
> culture's degree of sophistication, or whatever.

I certainly didn't intend any notion of cultural superiority to appear in
my part of the discussion of the presence or absence of rhyme, or, for
that matter alliteration, meter, kennings, or proverbs.  Since most of the
discussion was mine, I am probably the guilty party here, and should offer
apologies if this seemed to apply in anything I said.

I plead guilty to one relevant prejudice.  I probably take entirely too
much pleasure in noticing that things my native culture regards as
universal are not.  So I probably dwelt excessively on the "present :
missing" comparisons.  I didn't mean it to be a list of "good : bad" or
"advanced : not advanced" comparisons, but rather a list of "surprise, not
essential" things.

I tried to bolster this by pointing out that in my understanding rhyme is
an imported fashion in European literatures.  Thus, rhyme is not inherent
or original in European practice.  It comes from outside and modifies or
replaces earlier traditions.  Unfortunately, the Middle Eastern cultural
practices introduced into Medieval Europe are characterized as advances in
a historical perspective, and I failed to consider this.

I suppose they are advances in terms of the internal history of European
culture, in which present conditions are always regarded as more advanced
than the past conditions, and "very advanced" means "near contemporary in
form."  In some cases these introductions were advances in science or
medicine, which some of us might regard independent of cultural
considerations.  I'm kind of pre-modernist (primitive?) in this respect
myself.  However, I don't see any culture-independent way to characterize
changes in literary style as advances, and I intend the example of the
introduction of rhyme into Europe in precisely that way.  Poetries can be
+rhyme or -rhyme.  In that perspective, rhyme + meter vs. non-rhyme (or
alliteration) + meter are simply different literary choices of equivalent
value.

Interestingly, I think Siouan and other Native American literatures show
that meter - metrical verse, anyway - is also not universal.  This isn't
to say that Native American music doesn't have strict metrical structure.
I'd be astounded if *that* wasn't universal.

"Native American" really isn't the right term here, since the examples are
really just Siouan, and Siouan from the Plains area at that.  Native
American covers a vast amount of physical and culture territory with
enormous diversity.  The Siouan parts of the Plains are a small fragment
of that.  I'm aware that there are studies that analyse the verse
structure of other Native American literatures, and I'm not disputing that
such things exist.  They may even exist in Plains Siouan, though I haven't
been convinced of it yet.

Of course, when I think that poetry in the European (and Euro-American)
sense might not be universal, I imagine myself plopping this data down in
front of my highschool English teachers and exclaiming "I told you so!"
I say "might not be" because, of course, I'm not convinced this is true.
For one thing, song - music with lyrics - is, I think, universal, and
certainly music generally and song specifically are present in Plains
cultures.  In fact, omnipresent and very lively.  Lyrics might be
considered prima facie evidence that there is poetry, i.e., lyrics are
perhaps necessarily poetry, even if they are written in tradition without
meter or some kind of sound echoes or other such potential universals of
poetry.  And maybe there really are meter or sound echoes, too, even
though I haven't yet noticed them.  Maybe I can fairly say "We haven't yet
noticed them."

"Sound echoes" (meaning things like rhyme or alliteration) explains the
references I made to mn-repetitions and such.  These were intended as
annecdotal evidence that Dakota speakers were as sensitive to such things
esthetically as anyone, and in their native language(s), too, even if such
things weren't elevated to literary conventions.  In other words, rhymes
and other sound echoes may well be universally interesting, even if they
aren't universally singled out for conventional use.

Kind of makes me wonder what Dakota et al. have that English et al. lack.
I suppose the absence of simple correlates to the classifiers must feel
like a rather awkward hole.  Francis LaFlesche is rather marked in his use
of adjectives correlating with the classifiers.  He doesn't say anything
general about the importance of not letting this information get lost, but
I've noticed he tends to insist of the extended forms.


From chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu  Thu Dec  2 02:54:09 2004
From: chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 18:54:09 -0800
Subject: OK again
In-Reply-To: <00a901c4d7f4$14b7fa10$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.185409.0800.>

I guess there's no linguistic reason why Caddo ukkih and Choctaw ho:keh
might not be the result of borrowing in one direction or the other. Caddo
has only three vowels, so a correspondence of Caddo i and u with Choctaw o
and e would be expected. There's nothing unusual about ukkih from the point
of view of Caddo phonology. Geminate consonants are very common, whatever
that means.

I agree with Bob about the Oll Korrect explanation, which probably ought to
be put to rest for good, unless somebody finds some really convincing
documentation of its use.

As for 'corn', I tend to be a little skeptical of "boxcar reconstructions".
In any case, I'm pretty sure the last syllable of Caddo kisi? isn't cognate
with the endings of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Wichita words. Those endings
correspond quite regularly to a Caddo noun suffix -?uh, not to -i?.

Wally

>  I wonder of this has any connection with the Choctaw [ho:keh] Pam was
>  discussing?  The Caddo and other Caddoan-speaking groups were certainly
> in
>  Louisiana at the time of the DeSoto expedition (Wally has a nice paper
> in an
>  anthology about the Caddoan place names in the Spanish accounts).  I
> only bring
>  it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan influence in
> Biloxi and
>  Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>
>  Ofo:                        a-cé ki           'corn'
> Biloxi:                     a-yé:ki           'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ré:k  su       'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
> Wichita:                      té:    s ?       'corn'
> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'
>
> Ofo c (=ch) is a regular reflex of earlier *y, so a Siouan form *a-yé:ki
> can be
>  compared to a possible Caddoan prototype something like *Ré:kisu? where
> R is my
>  indeterminate sonorant covering the n/r/t correspondence set. This term
> for
>  'corn' is unique to the southeastern Siouan subgroup.  Tutelo, the other
>  attested language in this Ohio Valley Siouan subgroup, does not share
> the term,
>  reinforcing the notion that the borrowing went from Caddoan to Ofo and
> Biloxi,
>  not the other way around.  In any event, Tutelo, Ofo and Biloxi in the
> South,
>  like Mandan, Crow and Hidatsa in the Northwest, had apparently separated
> from
>  the rest of Siouan well before the in­troduction of any domesticated
> cultigen
>  except the gourd.
>
>  I'm afraid *Re:kisu? is my own Haas-style "boxcar reconstruction" from
> the
>  Caddoan cognate set.  At least various of the pieces seem represented
> across the
>  family!  Biloxi and Ofo initial a- in these items would be the normal
> reflex of
>  the noun prefix *wa- after initial labial resonants had been lost, so it
> is
>  separable.  Caddoan -su? at the end of the term may have been
> interpreted as su
>  'seed' by Siouan speakers.
>
>  So, if Caddoan was in touch directly or indirectly with Biloxi and Ofo,
> could
>  Caddo ukkih be connected with Choctaw hokeh.  (Recall that Choctaw has no
>  distinction between o and u and between e and i.)  The phonemic match is
> awfully
>  close.  As Pam says, the Choctaw form looks as though is it based on the
> verb
>  'be'.  Is the Caddo form made up of native morphology, or is it a stray
> term
>  that could have been borrowed?
>
>  Bob
>
>


From cstelfer at ucalgary.ca  Thu Dec  2 02:55:11 2004
From: cstelfer at ucalgary.ca (Corey Telfer)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:55:11 -0700
Subject: PDF embedded fonts.
In-Reply-To: <087201c4ceab$c1532e40$2fb5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.195511.0700.>

Hi Bob,

   The Ablaut paper looks good.  I haven't gone through it entirely yet, but
the small errors I remember from the first copy seem to be cleaned up.

   My Romanian paper is basically the seed of my master's thesis.  In
looking at Romanian 'palatalization' (the addition of an off-glide [j] to
form plurals and second person singular verbs) I found both palatalization
and assibilation effects.  This is not really surprising, considering both
processes tend to be caused by high front vocoids.  In my paper, I take the
radical position that the coronalization of Romanian velars is due to
assibilation.

   It seems likely that the assibilation of coronals is the result of
audiorily-based substitution.  The narrowing of the oral cavity in the
production of high front vowels seems to cause extra frication in stop
releases.  This frication is then reanalyzed as stridency, and thus the
feature [+strident] is inserted into the feature matrix.  I argued that the
same process could happen in velars, except that adding stridency to a velar
should result in [ks], which is an extremely rare segment (only existing in
Blackfoot as far as I know).  Thus the grammar might choose to alter the
velar to a coronal in order to preserve the stridency.  This explains why
coronalization can result in either [ts] or c^ - both are equally strident,
so either one is an expected outcome of this process.

    Romanian is interesting because it contains both [ts] and c^ in its
inventory, but coronalization results only in c^.  I argue that this is due
to the fact that articulatory palatalization also plays a role in the
language (eg. sj --> s^).  Since palatalization is active, c^ is picked over
[ts] in this case.  So this is the basic idea behind my thesis, which will
probably be titled something like "The interaction of assibilation and
palatalization".  I realize that this analysis might not be very appealing,
and that many people may want to stick with the well-accepted model of
articulatory assimilation.  Of you have any comments or questions, I'd love
to hear them.

Corey.

PS.  As I'm sure you know, American policy and Americans in general are not
too popular up here in Canada right now, but whenever I hear someone make an
anti-American comment I tell them about the great Americans I met this
summer in Nebraska.  I can't thank you enough for making me feel welcome.  I
remain impressed by American hospitality and look forward to visiting (or
even studying there) in the future.


"R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:

> Hi Corey,
>
> Can't remember exactly what I sent or was supposed to send, but here is an
> improved copy of the Ablaut paper.  I tried reading it on my wife's
computer
> which lacks any Siouan fonts and it looks like they embedded OK this time.
> Adobe Acrobat is really pretty lame at getting these things right.  It's
> probably great for straight English prose, but phonetic symbols make it
choke.
>
> I was in Edmonton a couple of weeks ago and noticed you were giving a
paper on
> Romanian at the provincial meeting in Banff.  I used to do Romanian back
in the
> early '70's when i was a Balkanist.  What was your paper about?
>
> Best,
>
> Bob
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Corey Telfer" <cstelfer at ucalgary.ca>
> To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: PDF embedded fonts.
>
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> >    I had a bear of a time making your PDF file come out right Bob, but
> > eventually I made it work.  The first copy I printed out had a lot of
fonts
> > wrong, and I only figured that out because I happened to be familiar with
> > the words in question.  I went back to the computer and eventually made
it
> > better, but I'm still not 100% certain that I have all the right
characters
> > in my copy.  If you could provide it as a word document and provide us
with
> > the fonts, that might work better...
> >
> >    I'm sorry to hear that your house was broken into and I hope nothing
too
> > valuable was lost.
> >
> > Corey Telfer
> > University of Calgary
> >
> >
> >
> > "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:
> >
> > > Yes, ideally and theoretically the necessary fonts are embedded
within .pdf
> > > documents.  However, I have found that this is unfortunately not
always the
> > > case.  Any number of times I have tried to make .pdf files of certain
> > documents,
> > > especially using the IroquoianABC font which includes a lot of
overstrike
> > > characters, and found that the resultant .pdf file did not reproduce
the
> > fonts
> > > properly.  It has also often been the case that material in columns
gets
> > shifted
> > > around.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong.  Nor do I know if there is a
> > > difference between the outcomes using "distiller" and "pdf writer"
choices.
> > > I'll give it my best shot though.
> > >
> > > This is going to take a few days since my home was burglarized Monday
and
> > I'm
> > > having to deal with a lot of unexpected paperwork.  Late next week
> > probably.
> > >
> > > Bob
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> >
>



--


From ahartley at d.umn.edu  Thu Dec  2 03:26:14 2004
From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 21:26:14 -0600
Subject: OK again
In-Reply-To: <C3774397E8A84711866E2F81@[192.168.2.34]>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.212614.0600.>

Wallace Chafe wrote:

> I agree with Bob about the Oll Korrect explanation, which probably ought
> to be put to rest for good, unless somebody finds some really convincing
> documentation of its use.

Apologies for the continued English excursion from the Muskogean/Caddoan
excursion from Siouan, but here (abridged) is what the OED says at the
two O.K. homonyms (to which I certainly can't add anything, not having
had time to read Read):

---

O.K.(1) "from the initial letters of Old Kinderhook, the nickname of
Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), president of the United States (1837-41)
(< Kinderhook, the name of Van Buren's hometown in New York State),
after OK a. and OK int.1 Cf. Old Hickory s.v. HICKORY n. 2c.
   The use as an interjection is purely as an electoral slogan and
rapidly comes to overlap with OK int.1 This assimilation is especially
clear late in 1840, during the election proper, when the slogan is used
to signal success in a particular locality (see quots. 18402, 18403 at
sense B.), although the process had begun within a few weeks of the
appearance of the initials:
   1840 Democratic Republican New Era (N.Y.) 27 May 2/6 We acknowledge
the receipt of a very pretty gold Pin,..having upon it the (to the
'Whigs') very frightful letters O.K., significant of the birth-place of
Martin Van Buren, old Kinderhook, as also the rallying word of the
Democracy of the late election, 'all correct'... Those who wear them
should bear in mind that it will require their most strenuous
exertions..to make all things O.K.
   Allen W. Read argues that the widespread use of the slogan was
critical in popularizing the original, usual sense of OK (see Amer.
Speech (1963) 38 83-102)."
A. n.
1. Old Kinderhook, a nickname for Martin Van Buren, United States
president and the Democratic presidential candidate, during the election
of 1840. Chiefly attrib. in O.K. Club, a group in the Democratic party's
central organization in New York which campaigned vigorously for Van
Buren during this election; cf. TAMMANY n.
2. A Democratic campaigner in New York during the presidential election
of 1840; a member of the O.K. Club.
B. int. temporary. Used as an election slogan by the Democratic party
(originally in New York) in the presidential election of 1840. Obs.
Merging almost immediately with OK int.1; see etymological note above.

---

O.K.(2) "see A. W. Read in Amer. Speech (1963) 38, (1964) 39, etc. From
the detailed evidence provided by A. W. Read it seems clear that O.K.
first appeared in 1839 (an instance of a contemporary vogue for humorous
abbreviations of this type), and that in 1840 it became greatly
reinforced by association with the initialism O.K. n1."


From munro at ucla.edu  Thu Dec  2 03:26:49 2004
From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:26:49 -0800
Subject: OK and the OED.
In-Reply-To: <00bf01c4d7f7$2ef0e650$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.192649.0800.>

I agree with everything Bob's said here, except that I think the h
definitely is not etymologically part of this item (maybe, as Bob says,
it is a clitic). The final vowel is not phonetically [i] (I do feel both
vowels are long, per Choctaw -- who knows how English speakers hear them).

Pam

R. Rankin wrote:

>
>> With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is it,
>> as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?
>
>
> I'll defer to Pam on this.  The H may or may not be etymologically a
> part of oke.  It is a final consonant on many verb forms but there are
> other instances where it has been reanalysed as the initial consonant
> of a following enclitic. For example, the question particle, oN or aN
> has been reanalysed as -hoN or -haN by some speakers.  Synchronically,
> I'd guess that you could argue for either [hoke] or [oke].  The final
> vowel is definitely not [i] or [ii] in the Choctaw I've heard.  I'm
> remaining neutral on the phonemic value of it, since it doesn't matter
> to a potential English borrowing anyway (English speakers would hear
> it as [ey]).
>
> It might be worth combing literature from the deep South around the
> 1830's to see if maybe it crops up.  I have to admit I've never liked
> the "Oll Korrect" explanation.  It incorporates two
> non-characteristics of American English pronunciation and spelling.
>
> Bob
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm


From cstelfer at ucalgary.ca  Thu Dec  2 03:40:02 2004
From: cstelfer at ucalgary.ca (Corey Telfer)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 20:40:02 -0700
Subject: Accidental message
In-Reply-To: <087201c4ceab$c1532e40$2fb5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.204002.0700.>

Sorry everybody,

     That last message was intended for Bob, not the whole list.  I
responded to the message that he accidentally sent to everybody...  If
anybody has comments about my ideas however, I wouldn't mind if you
responded directly to me - it's always good to get feedback.

Corey.



"R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:

> Hi Corey,
>
> Can't remember exactly what I sent or was supposed to send, but here is an
> improved copy of the Ablaut paper.  I tried reading it on my wife's
computer
> which lacks any Siouan fonts and it looks like they embedded OK this time.
> Adobe Acrobat is really pretty lame at getting these things right.  It's
> probably great for straight English prose, but phonetic symbols make it
choke.
>
> I was in Edmonton a couple of weeks ago and noticed you were giving a
paper on
> Romanian at the provincial meeting in Banff.  I used to do Romanian back
in the
> early '70's when i was a Balkanist.  What was your paper about?
>
> Best,
>
> Bob
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Corey Telfer" <cstelfer at ucalgary.ca>
> To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: PDF embedded fonts.
>
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> >    I had a bear of a time making your PDF file come out right Bob, but
> > eventually I made it work.  The first copy I printed out had a lot of
fonts
> > wrong, and I only figured that out because I happened to be familiar with
> > the words in question.  I went back to the computer and eventually made
it
> > better, but I'm still not 100% certain that I have all the right
characters
> > in my copy.  If you could provide it as a word document and provide us
with
> > the fonts, that might work better...
> >
> >    I'm sorry to hear that your house was broken into and I hope nothing
too
> > valuable was lost.
> >
> > Corey Telfer
> > University of Calgary
> >
> >
> >
> > "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:
> >
> > > Yes, ideally and theoretically the necessary fonts are embedded
within .pdf
> > > documents.  However, I have found that this is unfortunately not
always the
> > > case.  Any number of times I have tried to make .pdf files of certain
> > documents,
> > > especially using the IroquoianABC font which includes a lot of
overstrike
> > > characters, and found that the resultant .pdf file did not reproduce
the
> > fonts
> > > properly.  It has also often been the case that material in columns
gets
> > shifted
> > > around.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong.  Nor do I know if there is a
> > > difference between the outcomes using "distiller" and "pdf writer"
choices.
> > > I'll give it my best shot though.
> > >
> > > This is going to take a few days since my home was burglarized Monday
and
> > I'm
> > > having to deal with a lot of unexpected paperwork.  Late next week
> > probably.
> > >
> > > Bob
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> >
>



--


From heike.boedeker at netcologne.de  Thu Dec  2 13:15:37 2004
From: heike.boedeker at netcologne.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Heike_B=F6deker?=)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 14:15:37 +0100
Subject: OK and rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412011359100.15212@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.141537.0100.>

Dear John,

> This isn't to say that Native American music doesn't have strict
> metrical structure. I'd be astounded if *that* wasn't universal.

Actually, this is another item to add to our collection of non-
universals :-) There indeed are types of performances (e.g. in Arabo-
Irano-Turkic and South Asian musics) that are rhythmically, but not
metrically organized...

> Interestingly, I think Siouan and other Native American literatures
> show that meter - metrical verse, anyway - is also not universal.

... interestingly, Ancient Near Eastern poetry was like that, too,
c.f.:

Izre'el, Shlomo (2001): Adapa and the South Wind: Language has the
Power of Life and Death. (Mesopotamian Civilizations, 10) Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns

[esp. p. 99: "While the poetic structure of this myth in all of its
recensions has been acknowledged by most scholars, whether or not the
rhythmic pattern that has been observed can be termed *meter* is
another matter."]

All the best,

Heike


--
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From jmcbride at kawnation.com  Thu Dec  2 15:18:29 2004
From: jmcbride at kawnation.com (Justin McBride)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 09:18:29 -0600
Subject: Ofo, Choctaw, &  Rhymes
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.091829.0600.>

This is completely unrelated to Siouan linguistics, but I figured I'd share it with you anyhow.

In a strange turn of Jungian synchronicity, most of the big Siouan List topics this week seem to me to center around an old professor of mine from the University of Oklahoma.  Geary Hobson, who wrote the novella "The Last Ofos", also wrote the foreword to an R. A. Lafferty book called "Okla Hannali" about a fictional Choctaw character.  Now, I know only two or three Choctaws, so this book was really the first introduction I ever had to anything like unto Choctaw culture.  Nowadays I always think of this book and subsequently Professor Hobson whenever I think of the Choctaws.  Furthermore, for one of his Native American Literature classes back in the day, I had to read from a book called "The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indian," wherein traditional Native songs, counts, recitations, and stories were translated into English (often from another intercessory European language), and arranged in verse form.  If I recall correctly, some of these "poems" were even made to rhyme in English.  I remember him talking in class about how such literary devices are less than universal, and how our seemingly fundamental notion of rhyming is absent in some if not all the Native languages that he knew of.  This is of course no earth-shattering revelation, but I'd never really considered it before, and so it stuck with me.  Oh, and Professor Hobson was a Quapaw, so he coincidentally hails from Siouan stock.

I'll leave you with a silly memory from the same time.  One old Native song in this poetry book had been translated first into a Scandinavian language, where it had obviously been embellished with some Nordic imagery.  This song must have been discovered during the compilation process, translated into English, and then arranged to look more familiar to the book's anglophonic readers.  It was such a strange thing for me to read a very modern looking song about fjords, skiffs, and the sea-faring life attributed a Native from a Northeast Woodlands culture!

-jtm
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From Granta at edgehill.ac.uk  Thu Dec  2 19:57:33 2004
From: Granta at edgehill.ac.uk (Anthony Grant)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 19:57:33 +0000
Subject: Caddoan 'corn'
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.195733.0000.>

And don't forget Adai <ocasuck> 'corn', one of the few Caddoan-looking
words in the Adai list.....

Anthony

>>> rankin at ku.edu 02/12/2004 19:43:15 >>>
I certainly would never presume to have any command of Caddoan
historical phonology, but whether or not the final syllable is
reconstructible from the set, I'm quite convinced of a Caddoan source,
either direct or indirect, for the Biloxi and Ofo words for 'corn'.

> As for 'corn', I tend to be a little skeptical of "boxcar
reconstructions".
In any case, I'm pretty sure the last syllable of Caddo kisi? isn't
cognate
with the endings of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Wichita words. Those
endings
correspond quite regularly to a Caddo noun suffix -?uh, not to -i?.



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From rankin at ku.edu  Thu Dec  2 19:43:15 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 13:43:15 -0600
Subject: Caddoan 'corn'
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.134315.0600.>

I certainly would never presume to have any command of Caddoan historical phonology, but whether or not the final syllable is reconstructible from the set, I'm quite convinced of a Caddoan source, either direct or indirect, for the Biloxi and Ofo words for 'corn'.  

> As for 'corn', I tend to be a little skeptical of "boxcar reconstructions".
In any case, I'm pretty sure the last syllable of Caddo kisi? isn't cognate
with the endings of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Wichita words. Those endings
correspond quite regularly to a Caddo noun suffix -?uh, not to -i?.




From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU  Thu Dec  2 21:34:39 2004
From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 14:34:39 -0700
Subject: Rhymes
In-Reply-To: <002c01c4d882$2df2c710$6000a8c0@Language>
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.143439.0700.>

May I remind us of Del Hymes' extensive work with what he calls
"ethnopoetics"?  His claim is that many, many of the texts that are
recorded in Native American languages as straight prose are really much
more like epic poems.  The clues are in the repeated use of conjunctions
or other kinds of discourse particles.  Richard Lungstrum's dissertation
was an attempt to apply the idea to Lakhota texts -- with some success, I
think.  The "poetry" lies, then, not in the structure of the lines or in
rhythm or sound effects, but in the timing of the report of events and
ideas.  See Hymes' book "In vain I tried to tell you..." for a place to
start.

David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu


From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Fri Dec  3 08:00:05 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 09:00:05 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <FRI.3.DEC.2004.090005.0100.>

 >>Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"

Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka
i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

Buechel gives _i'yotakA_ (to sit down) different from _yaNkA_ (to sit/be
sitting). So the famous chief's name obviously describes a buffalo in
the movement of sitting down (with the forelegs still standing on the
ground).<<<<

 >  Alfred W. Tüting wrote:
Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"
Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or
Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

I am not sure where the Tatanka Iyotanka form - common in popular
literature - originates from. I have reasons to believe that the correct
form is ThathaN'ka I'yotake, pronounced ThathaN'kiyotake in fast speech.
Jan <<

Sorry for my (consequent!) typos in misspelling the pronunciation :( (it
should've been [txatxaN'ka] of course.

BTW, what over and over is puzzling to me is the use of umlaut change in
proper names, which seems to be pretty arbitrary (cf. the differing
versions here: - iyotake/iyotaka).



Alfred


From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Fri Dec  3 08:23:30 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 09:23:30 +0100
Subject: Romanian: palatalization/assibilation
Message-ID: <FRI.3.DEC.2004.092330.0100.>

 > (Corey) My Romanian paper is basically the seed of my master's
thesis.  In
looking at Romanian 'palatalization' (the addition of an off-glide [j] to
form plurals and second person singular verbs) I found both palatalization
and assibilation effects.  This is not really surprising, considering both
processes tend to be caused by high front vocoids.  In my paper, I take the
radical position that the coronalization of Romanian velars is due to
assibilation... <<


 From my point of view as a (linguistically aware) speaker for about 40
years this thesis seems very convincing to me. (BTW, palatalization
seems to affect different consonants in different ways, e.g. with  [z]
in _vezi_ , palatalization is hardly perceivable.)

The title of an old movie (1965?), back in Bukarest, is coming on my
mind, which was "Un cartof - doi cartofi" :-)


Alfred


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Thu Dec  9 06:48:36 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 23:48:36 -0700
Subject: Sitting Bull (RE: lack of rhymes) (fwd)
Message-ID: <WED.8.DEC.2004.234836.0700.>

I see I misdirected this.  Jan's mail has one of those header arrangements
that overrides the default response of "reply to list."  I tend not to
notice that my assumptions are wrong.  That tendency may not be limited to
email.

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Jan Ullrich wrote:
> I am not sure where the Tatanka Iyotanka form - common in popular
> literature - originates from. I have reasons to believe that the correct
> form is ThathaN'ka I'yotake, pronounced ThathaN'kiyotake in fast speech.

Whether it's widespread in the popular literature or simply a nonce form,
ThathaN'ka I'yotaNke might arise from European sensibilities - something
that almost rhymes being adjusted by the memory so that it does.  I use
European here in its cultural sense, not its geographical one.  That is
Anglo-American sensibilities are perhaps responsible.  [And it may have
been me who produced this form, making it my Anglo-American sensibilities
specifically.]


From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Fri Dec 10 19:49:11 2004
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty)
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 14:49:11 -0500
Subject: Saint Louis
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0410191653010.17818@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.10.DEC.2004.144911.0500.>

Does anyone have any records of Native names for the French town of St.
Louis on the Mississippi?

Thank you,

Michael


From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu  Fri Dec 10 21:32:35 2004
From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson)
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 15:32:35 -0600
Subject: Saint Louis
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1041210144822.19959Y-100000@ariel.ucs.indiana.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.10.DEC.2004.153235.0600.>

Michael wrote:
> Does anyone have any records of Native names for the French town of St.
> Louis on the Mississippi?

We had a discussion on this around the beginning of this year.
I think the only Siouan ones we could come up with were the
OP forms noted below.

>>From the Dorsey dictionary, not specified whether Omaha or Ponka,
we have:

    Ppa'hi-z^ii'de              "Red Neck"

And from Fletcher and La Flesche, p. 101, for the Omaha, we have:

    Ppahi'(N) z^iide ttaNwaN    "Red Hair Town"
                                "(Referring to the color
                                  of Governor Clark's hair.)"

I believe it was my request for the very information that
Michael is asking for that started the Short Bread Thread.

Rory


From Louis_Garcia at littlehoop.cc  Fri Dec 10 21:33:22 2004
From: Louis_Garcia at littlehoop.cc (Louis Garcia)
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 15:33:22 -0600
Subject: Saint Louis
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1041210144822.19959Y-100000@ariel.ucs.indiana.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.10.DEC.2004.153322.0600.>

Michael:
I don't have my place names here at work.
St. Louis was named something like Pasa Taotonwe. Red heads'Town referring
to Clark of Lewis and Clark.
He was the Indian Agent (Ateyapi) and received many delegations at that
city.
My two cents,
Louie

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
[mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of Michael Mccafferty
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 1:49 PM
To: Siouan List
Subject: Saint Louis



Does anyone have any records of Native names for the French town of St.
Louis on the Mississippi?

Thank you,

Michael


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec 15 15:55:43 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:55:43 -0700
Subject: Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP (Re: Biloxi/Ofo)
In-Reply-To: <00b901c4d730$40e666e0$2ab5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.085543.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a quality
> distinction.  No one has had the courage to undertake a complete
> analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics (it would
> be a massive undertaking).

Agreed.  I did look at this to some extent in the OP texts and came to the
conclusion that e-breve is pretty closely associated with the context
Ch__#, e.g., =the, =khe, =dhiNkhe 'the', but also e'be 'who' (first e),
e'di 'there (demonstrative)', edi' 'there was (existential predicative)',
e'gidhe 'it came to pass that ...; as expected ...', he' 'female
declarative'.  Various longer forms have -<e-breve>, like t?e=dhe 'kill',
we'ahide 'far away', and so on. I-breve was in variation with i and also
mostly final.

Typical cases of i-breve in Dorsey are kki 'if, when', -z^i NEG, Kki
(khi?) 'And ...', =s^ti 'too', s^i 'also', and so on.

Typical cases of a-breve are =ga 'male imperative', =a 'female
imperative', =a 'interrogative', ha' 'well', ha' 'male declarative'.

Typical cases of u-breve are exclamations, huN, wu, wuNh.

It looks to me as if it could be argued that e-breve, i-breve, and a-breve
are indications of a short vowel, but that lack of a breve would not be
conclusive evidence of a long vowel.

This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey writes
with final i, but LaFlesche with final e.

The only form I have been able to come up with quickly is:

ppaN'ghi 'parsnip' (JOD 90:653.11) :  ppaNghe 'radish' (Swetland 91:144)

- ppaN'ghe is the form in in Ks and Os
- there's no breve on this form in Dorsey

Possibly relevant are cases like

dhe'ze 'tongue', but cf. Da c^e'z^i', Wi reezi'

In this case PSi seems to have -i, but Dh has -e.

wathaN'zi 'corn plant' (all sources), but cf. Qu wathaN'se
idha'di 'father' (all sources), but cf. Qu ida'tte
ine'gi 'mother's brother' (all sources), but cf. Qu itte'ke
sagi' 'hard' (all sources), but cf. Ks  da'sage 'harden in wind'
-ppu'kki instrumental sound root, but cf. Ks -ppokki ~ -ppokke ditto

In these cases some Dh has -e, but most -i.

Not participating in this pattern are forms that seem to end in hi from
PDh *hu in the sense of 'plant', e.g., bu(u)'de hi 'oak' or hazi 'grape'
(probably from haz-hi); body parts like nu(u)'si 'armpits', ppi'zi 'gall',
i'kki 'chin'; kinterms like itti'mi 'father's sister'; verbs like uaN'si
'jump', c^hi' 'to copulate', tte'xi 'difficult'.  Also ma(a)'si 'hail'.

A number of these OP -i are from *-u, but not all, e.g., not ppi'zi or
itti'mi.


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec 15 16:24:44 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:24:44 -0700
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
In-Reply-To: <00a901c4d7f4$14b7fa10$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.092444.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
>I only bring it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan
>influence in Biloxi and Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>
>  Ofo:                        a-cé ki           'corn'
> Biloxi:                     a-yé:ki           'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ré:k  su       'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
> Wichita:                      té:    s ?       'corn'
> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'

Doug Parks lists an absolutive (independent noun forming) suffix -u for
Pawnee.  The comparable element in Wichita seems to be ?a, though I don't
mean to suggest that this is cognate.  Even douvting it was cognate would
be overreaching myself in Caddoan!  I believe that in both cases these
elements occur with some nouns, but not with others with no conditioning
factor known.  The critical element is that the suffix occurs with an
affected noun in its independent form, but is lost when the noun is
combined with something else (presumably following).

I suppose that since in this corn set Pawnee has -s, Arikara has -su?, and
Wichita -s? that isn't a factor here.


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec 15 17:09:16 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:09:16 -0600
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.110916.0600.>

> And Adai <ocasuck>, however that was pronounced (? /okesak/)

It's hard for me to judge exactly which Caddoan forms are cognates within that
family.  I only included those that pretty clearly shared the *Re:k or *Re:ki
portion of the word that turns up in Biloxi and Ofo.  There were probably quite
a few Caddoan dialects spoken in Louisiana and thereabouts around the time of
DeSoto.  Nor do I know whether 'corn' is actually cognate in Caddoan or whether
the term represents borrowings.  It's certainly far from cognate in Siouan,
where there are 3 or 4 different sources for the word in different subgroups (or
crosscutting subgroups).

Bob


From pankihtamwa at earthlink.net  Wed Dec 15 16:45:57 2004
From: pankihtamwa at earthlink.net (David Costa)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:45:57 -0800
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.084557.0800.>

One might as well include Kitsai /kotai/ 'corn' as well (HNAI 13: 64), tho
it doesn't match the word in any of the sister languages. A loan word from
who knows where?

David C

> On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:

>>I only bring it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan
>>influence in Biloxi and Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>>
>> Ofo:                        a-cé ki           'corn'
>> Biloxi:                     a-yé:ki           'corn'
>> Pawnee:                     ré:k  su       'corn'
>> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
>> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
>> Wichita:                      té:    s ?       'corn'
>> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'
>
> Doug Parks lists an absolutive (independent noun forming) suffix -u for
> Pawnee.  The comparable element in Wichita seems to be ?a, though I don't
> mean to suggest that this is cognate.  Even doubting it was cognate would
> be overreaching myself in Caddoan!  I believe that in both cases these
> elements occur with some nouns, but not with others with no conditioning
> factor known.  The critical element is that the suffix occurs with an
> affected noun in its independent form, but is lost when the noun is
> combined with something else (presumably following).
>
> I suppose that since in this corn set Pawnee has -s, Arikara has -su?, and
> Wichita -s? that isn't a factor here.
>


From Granta at edgehill.ac.uk  Wed Dec 15 16:53:13 2004
From: Granta at edgehill.ac.uk (Anthony Grant)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:53:13 +0000
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.165313.0000.>

And Adai <ocasuck>, however that was pronounced (? /okesak/)

Anthony

>>> John.Koontz at colorado.edu 15/12/2004 16:24:44 >>>
On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
>I only bring it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan
>influence in Biloxi and Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>
>  Ofo:                        a-cé ki           'corn'
> Biloxi:                     a-yé:ki           'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ré:k  su       'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
> Wichita:                      té:    s ?       'corn'
> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'

Doug Parks lists an absolutive (independent noun forming) suffix -u for
Pawnee.  The comparable element in Wichita seems to be ?a, though I don't
mean to suggest that this is cognate.  Even douvting it was cognate would
be overreaching myself in Caddoan!  I believe that in both cases these
elements occur with some nouns, but not with others with no conditioning
factor known.  The critical element is that the suffix occurs with an
affected noun in its independent form, but is lost when the noun is
combined with something else (presumably following).

I suppose that since in this corn set Pawnee has -s, Arikara has -su?, and
Wichita -s? that isn't a factor here.


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From are2 at buffalo.edu  Wed Dec 15 17:24:00 2004
From: are2 at buffalo.edu (are2 at buffalo.edu)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:24:00 -0500
Subject: Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP (Re: Biloxi/Ofo)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0411301943230.25616@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.122400.0500.>

/i/ word finally in Omaha frequently sounds like /e/ in rapid speech.
GasaNdhi 'tomorrow' for example sounds like gasaNdhe very often.
-Ardis


Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> > No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a
> quality
> > distinction.  No one has had the courage to undertake a complete
> > analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics (it
> would
> > be a massive undertaking).
>
> Agreed.  I did look at this to some extent in the OP texts and came
> to the
> conclusion that e-breve is pretty closely associated with the
> context
> Ch__#, e.g., =the, =khe, =dhiNkhe 'the', but also e'be 'who' (first
> e),
> e'di 'there (demonstrative)', edi' 'there was (existential
> predicative)',
> e'gidhe 'it came to pass that ...; as expected ...', he' 'female
> declarative'.  Various longer forms have -<e-breve>, like t?e=dhe
> 'kill',
> we'ahide 'far away', and so on. I-breve was in variation with i and
> also
> mostly final.
>
> Typical cases of i-breve in Dorsey are kki 'if, when', -z^i NEG, Kki
> (khi?) 'And ...', =s^ti 'too', s^i 'also', and so on.
>
> Typical cases of a-breve are =ga 'male imperative', =a 'female
> imperative', =a 'interrogative', ha' 'well', ha' 'male declarative'.
>
> Typical cases of u-breve are exclamations, huN, wu, wuNh.
>
> It looks to me as if it could be argued that e-breve, i-breve, and
> a-breve
> are indications of a short vowel, but that lack of a breve would not
> be
> conclusive evidence of a long vowel.
>
> This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey
> writes
> with final i, but LaFlesche with final e.
>
> The only form I have been able to come up with quickly is:
>
> ppaN'ghi 'parsnip' (JOD 90:653.11) :  ppaNghe 'radish' (Swetland
> 91:144)
>
> - ppaN'ghe is the form in in Ks and Os
> - there's no breve on this form in Dorsey
>
> Possibly relevant are cases like
>
> dhe'ze 'tongue', but cf. Da c^e'z^i', Wi reezi'
>
> In this case PSi seems to have -i, but Dh has -e.
>
> wathaN'zi 'corn plant' (all sources), but cf. Qu wathaN'se
> idha'di 'father' (all sources), but cf. Qu ida'tte
> ine'gi 'mother's brother' (all sources), but cf. Qu itte'ke
> sagi' 'hard' (all sources), but cf. Ks  da'sage 'harden in wind'
> -ppu'kki instrumental sound root, but cf. Ks -ppokki ~ -ppokke ditto
>
> In these cases some Dh has -e, but most -i.
>
> Not participating in this pattern are forms that seem to end in hi
> from
> PDh *hu in the sense of 'plant', e.g., bu(u)'de hi 'oak' or hazi
> 'grape'
> (probably from haz-hi); body parts like nu(u)'si 'armpits', ppi'zi
> 'gall',
> i'kki 'chin'; kinterms like itti'mi 'father's sister'; verbs like
> uaN'si
> 'jump', c^hi' 'to copulate', tte'xi 'difficult'.  Also ma(a)'si
> 'hail'.
>
> A number of these OP -i are from *-u, but not all, e.g., not ppi'zi
> or
> itti'mi.
>
>
>


From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com  Wed Dec 15 18:05:12 2004
From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:05:12 -0800
Subject: Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP (Re: Biloxi/Ofo)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0411301943230.25616@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.100512.0800.>

-- This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey writes
with final i, but LaFlesche with final e. --

This same phenomenon also seems to have occurred in Biloxi, where it seems Dorsey wrote many words with final -i (1890s) that Haas and Swadesh (1930s) later recorded as ending in final -e, + glottal stop.

For instance, Dorsey's "fire" is peti vs. Haas's pe?te? (with ? representing glottal stops).  And since you were talking about "corn", Dorsey writes yek, yeki, or ayeki vs. Haas's yeke? and ayeke? (again ? representing glottal stop).  (Note that the form ayeki or ayeke seems to be shortened by dropping the initial a- on several occasions.)

Dave


Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu> wrote:
On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a quality
> distinction. No one has had the courage to undertake a complete
> analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics (it would
> be a massive undertaking).

Agreed. I did look at this to some extent in the OP texts and came to the
conclusion that e-breve is pretty closely associated with the context
Ch__#, e.g., =the, =khe, =dhiNkhe 'the', but also e'be 'who' (first e),
e'di 'there (demonstrative)', edi' 'there was (existential predicative)',
e'gidhe 'it came to pass that ...; as expected ...', he' 'female
declarative'. Various longer forms have -, like t?e=dhe 'kill',
we'ahide 'far away', and so on. I-breve was in variation with i and also
mostly final.

Typical cases of i-breve in Dorsey are kki 'if, when', -z^i NEG, Kki
(khi?) 'And ...', =s^ti 'too', s^i 'also', and so on.

Typical cases of a-breve are =ga 'male imperative', =a 'female
imperative', =a 'interrogative', ha' 'well', ha' 'male declarative'.

Typical cases of u-breve are exclamations, huN, wu, wuNh.

It looks to me as if it could be argued that e-breve, i-breve, and a-breve
are indications of a short vowel, but that lack of a breve would not be
conclusive evidence of a long vowel.

This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey writes
with final i, but LaFlesche with final e.

The only form I have been able to come up with quickly is:

ppaN'ghi 'parsnip' (JOD 90:653.11) : ppaNghe 'radish' (Swetland 91:144)

- ppaN'ghe is the form in in Ks and Os
- there's no breve on this form in Dorsey

Possibly relevant are cases like

dhe'ze 'tongue', but cf. Da c^e'z^i', Wi reezi'

In this case PSi seems to have -i, but Dh has -e.

wathaN'zi 'corn plant' (all sources), but cf. Qu wathaN'se
idha'di 'father' (all sources), but cf. Qu ida'tte
ine'gi 'mother's brother' (all sources), but cf. Qu itte'ke
sagi' 'hard' (all sources), but cf. Ks da'sage 'harden in wind'
-ppu'kki instrumental sound root, but cf. Ks -ppokki ~ -ppokke ditto

In these cases some Dh has -e, but most -i.

Not participating in this pattern are forms that seem to end in hi from
PDh *hu in the sense of 'plant', e.g., bu(u)'de hi 'oak' or hazi 'grape'
(probably from haz-hi); body parts like nu(u)'si 'armpits', ppi'zi 'gall',
i'kki 'chin'; kinterms like itti'mi 'father's sister'; verbs like uaN'si
'jump', c^hi' 'to copulate', tte'xi 'difficult'. Also ma(a)'si 'hail'.

A number of these OP -i are from *-u, but not all, e.g., not ppi'zi or
itti'mi.


		
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From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Thu Dec 16 02:01:44 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 19:01:44 -0700
Subject: Biloxi ayeke?/ayeki (Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP)
In-Reply-To: <20041215180512.97602.qmail@web53802.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.190144.0700.>

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, David Kaufman wrote:
> And since you were talking about "corn", Dorsey writes yek, yeki, or
> ayeki vs. Haas's yeke? and ayeke? (again ? representing glottal stop).
> (Note that the form ayeki or ayeke seems to be shortened by dropping the
> initial a- on several occasions.)

Bob actually mentioned this in his corn comment, but for some reason his
text seems to have come through with most of the vowels missing, including
the e in this one.

I think that Bob's also mentioned that Biloxi has #a- < *wa-.  In Dhegiha
and in Mississippi Valley generally "crop" terms seem to have wa-
initially, e.g., OP wathaNzi 'corn (plant)' and wahaba 'corn (seed, ear)'.
I think my glosses here are somewhat off.  I seem to recall wahaba hi
specifically as 'ear of corn', so maybe wahaba alone is more like 'corn
seed'.  Think of hi here as 'stalk'.  It's a bit like oak and acorn in
English, perhaps, the plant as the plant and the plant as its fruit.

I think of this wa- as 'unpossessed' by analogy with a form like wahi
'bone', but I may be wrong in both cases.  I think Bob thinks of things
like this as fossilized classifiers from a Pre-Siouan period.


From goodtracks at GBRonline.com  Fri Dec 24 03:26:27 2004
From: goodtracks at GBRonline.com (Jimm GoodTracks)
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 21:26:27 -0600
Subject: Fw: BLESSED HOLIDAYS
Message-ID: <THU.23.DEC.2004.212627.0600.>

Clear Day


Kigóñe Gírokihina Báñi Chégerokan 

Happy Holidays and Blessed New Year

&

May you have three spiritual gifts of the Season

 

MáyannPi             Spirit of Christmas                   PEACE

Wakída   Gladness of Cristmas        HOPE

WaPíkikihi                 Heart of Christmas                     GOOD-WILL

 

 

Jimm and Grandsons, David and Joseph


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From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Fri Dec 24 14:17:00 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 15:17:00 +0100
Subject: Wanikiya Tun
Message-ID: <FRI.24.DEC.2004.151700.0100.>

Wanikiya Tunpi Taanpetu Waste nahan Omaka Teca iyuskinyanpi ye !

(wani'kxiya txuN'pi txa?aN'petu was^te' nahaN' o'makxa txe'ca
iyus^'kiNyaNpi ye!)


Alfred
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From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 02:32:40 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:32:40 -0700
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <OF8EC3A98C.E34EFA3C-ON86256F5C.0065FDB7-86256F5C.0068C721@unl.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.193240.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> Alright, I'm going to have to backpedal a little bit here. Of our two
> speakers, one prefers aNgu'-[root], while the other accepts either but
> seems to favor ugu'-[root]. ...
>
> Perhaps this is just a bleeding of the accented second syllable vowel
> into the unaccented first syllable, as seems to happen in several
> similar morphological situations ...

That seems like a reasonable explanation to me.  One thing we lack for
Omaha and Ponca is any real appreciation of the amount of personal and
other lectal variation within it.  Dorsey only offers the aNgu-
alternative in the texts and his draft grammar, as far as I know, but
often levels things without comment.  I do know that there is some
variation in Omaha, let alone in Omaha-Ponca, and some of the more
surprising variations are quite old.

A couple of examples:

Modern OP has gdhe'baN 'ten', for expected gdhe'bdhaN, but I have seen
what amounts to the latter form in an Omaha word list from Long
Expedition.  (Thwaites, I think?)   The interesting thing is that the
modern form is attested in both Omaha and Ponca, though the two groups
were separate by the time the gdhe'bdhaN form was attested for Omaha
speakers.  You have to assume that both groups had gdhebaN by then, or
that contrary to my understanding the two communities were still one
linguistic entity after that.

The alternants bdhu'ga ~ gdhu'ba for 'all' and xdhabe' ~ xa'bdhe for
'tree' are both mentioned by Dorsey and still exist as far as I know.  I
gather that a particular speaker uses one variant or the other and in my
admittedly very limited experience speakers hardly notice which one a
person does use.  Anyway, they don't seem to attach any particular
significance to one or the other.

One other point concerns the mysterious c-cedilla as "th" (in thin) in the
work of Francis LaFlesche - both for Omaha and Osage - which he uses for
what Dorsey writes as s and z.  Dorsey does use c-cedilla for a theta in
writing Ioway-Otoe, and Dorsey (or BAE usage) probably account for
LaFlesche's choice of the symbol.  There is a sheet in the Dorsey archives
in which Dorsey mentions off-handedly that some Omahas use theta for s and
that Francis LaFlesche is an example.  I've also noticed that in the
transcriptions of Alice Fletcher for names of people in the "Village of
Make-Believe Whitemen" s pretty consistently appears as th.  So, this was
either a LaFlesche family trait, or a general one of the group of people
living in this village.  In regard to the former possibility, one of
Joseph LaFlesche's wives was a speaker of Otoe.  Whatever the relevance of
that factor, one has to assume that /s/ as [<theta>] was perfectly
acceptable usage for at least some Omaha speakers.

As far as merging s and z as c-cedilla, I tend to assume that Francis
LaFlesche actually distinguished the sounds as [<theta>] and [<edh>] and
also distinguished the latter from the "r" or "l" sound /dh/ that is
written th in so many systems for writing Omaha-Ponca, Osage, etc.
However, he either didn't care about the orthographic issue of
representing the distinction, or couldn't come up with a solution he
liked.  I suspect the former.  He normally writes dots under the sounds
that Dorsey handwrote little x's under and published as inverted letters,
so one can imagine that extending that scheme to c-cedilla might have
presented at least some annoyances, but he was not the kind of martinet
who would have rejected any solution but writing a nearly invisible dot on
top of the cedilla.  Obviously he could have put the dot over the
c-cedilla or used another symbol, but for some reason he didn't.  Before
his dot period (sorry) LaFlesche wrote geminates as bp, dt, gk, etc., but
I haven't seen any cases of zs.  LaFlesche was familiar with the Hamilton
system and probably several Dorsey systems and I think that these all use
s and z.  So the long and the short of it is that LaFlesche cared more
about asserting the use of an interdental or very fronted dental over the
use of a less fronted dental or alveolar than he cared about representing
voicing.


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 02:37:33 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 19:37:33 -0700
Subject: Hawk.
In-Reply-To: <e1.79929cb.2ede3519@aol.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.193733.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote:
> That is a possibility.  c^i- corresponds to one of the many ki's
> (dative, etc.) in MVS.  c^i-laxchi could mean something like 'wrap up
> one's own', or 'one's own wrapped up or bound'.  (c^i- would be a
> possessive reflexive prefix here.)  But that analysis doesn't make much
> sense to me semantically for a bird term, and it think it is worthwhile
> to at least pursue the notion that c^ilaxchi' is a basic stem rather
> than a composite stem.

Could it be a reference to using prepared skins in bundles?  Or to seizing
prey in the claws?


From Rgraczyk at aol.com  Wed Dec  1 02:55:23 2004
From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Randolph Graczyk)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 21:55:23 EST
Subject: Hawk.
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.215523.EST.>

With the baa- 'indefinite' prefix, baac^ilaxc^i' means 'baby', ie, something
wrapped up, usually in a cradleboard.

Randy
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From are2 at buffalo.edu  Wed Dec  1 04:02:57 2004
From: are2 at buffalo.edu (are2 at buffalo.edu)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 23:02:57 -0500
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0411301900160.25616@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.230257.0500.>

I've only ever heard aNgu- (not ugu) with the speakers I work with.
But gdhuba/bdhuga are both still variants today.  Also
wagdhabaze/wabdhagaze, wamuska/wamaNske.  I'm sure there are more that
don't come right to mind.
-Ardis


Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> > Alright, I'm going to have to backpedal a little bit here. Of our
> two
> > speakers, one prefers aNgu'-[root], while the other accepts either
> but
> > seems to favor ugu'-[root]. ...
> >
> > Perhaps this is just a bleeding of the accented second syllable
> vowel
> > into the unaccented first syllable, as seems to happen in several
> > similar morphological situations ...
>
> That seems like a reasonable explanation to me.  One thing we lack
> for
> Omaha and Ponca is any real appreciation of the amount of personal
> and
> other lectal variation within it.  Dorsey only offers the aNgu-
> alternative in the texts and his draft grammar, as far as I know,
> but
> often levels things without comment.  I do know that there is some
> variation in Omaha, let alone in Omaha-Ponca, and some of the more
> surprising variations are quite old.
>
> A couple of examples:
>
> Modern OP has gdhe'baN 'ten', for expected gdhe'bdhaN, but I have
> seen
> what amounts to the latter form in an Omaha word list from Long
> Expedition.  (Thwaites, I think?)   The interesting thing is that
> the
> modern form is attested in both Omaha and Ponca, though the two
> groups
> were separate by the time the gdhe'bdhaN form was attested for Omaha
> speakers.  You have to assume that both groups had gdhebaN by then,
> or
> that contrary to my understanding the two communities were still one
> linguistic entity after that.
>
> The alternants bdhu'ga ~ gdhu'ba for 'all' and xdhabe' ~ xa'bdhe for
> 'tree' are both mentioned by Dorsey and still exist as far as I know.
>  I
> gather that a particular speaker uses one variant or the other and in
> my
> admittedly very limited experience speakers hardly notice which one
> a
> person does use.  Anyway, they don't seem to attach any particular
> significance to one or the other.
>
> One other point concerns the mysterious c-cedilla as "th" (in thin)
> in the
> work of Francis LaFlesche - both for Omaha and Osage - which he uses
> for
> what Dorsey writes as s and z.  Dorsey does use c-cedilla for a theta
> in
> writing Ioway-Otoe, and Dorsey (or BAE usage) probably account for
> LaFlesche's choice of the symbol.  There is a sheet in the Dorsey
> archives
> in which Dorsey mentions off-handedly that some Omahas use theta for
> s and
> that Francis LaFlesche is an example.  I've also noticed that in the
> transcriptions of Alice Fletcher for names of people in the "Village
> of
> Make-Believe Whitemen" s pretty consistently appears as th.  So, this
> was
> either a LaFlesche family trait, or a general one of the group of
> people
> living in this village.  In regard to the former possibility, one of
> Joseph LaFlesche's wives was a speaker of Otoe.  Whatever the
> relevance of
> that factor, one has to assume that /s/ as [<theta>] was perfectly
> acceptable usage for at least some Omaha speakers.
>
> As far as merging s and z as c-cedilla, I tend to assume that
> Francis
> LaFlesche actually distinguished the sounds as [<theta>] and [<edh>]
> and
> also distinguished the latter from the "r" or "l" sound /dh/ that is
> written th in so many systems for writing Omaha-Ponca, Osage, etc.
> However, he either didn't care about the orthographic issue of
> representing the distinction, or couldn't come up with a solution he
> liked.  I suspect the former.  He normally writes dots under the
> sounds
> that Dorsey handwrote little x's under and published as inverted
> letters,
> so one can imagine that extending that scheme to c-cedilla might
> have
> presented at least some annoyances, but he was not the kind of
> martinet
> who would have rejected any solution but writing a nearly invisible
> dot on
> top of the cedilla.  Obviously he could have put the dot over the
> c-cedilla or used another symbol, but for some reason he didn't.
> Before
> his dot period (sorry) LaFlesche wrote geminates as bp, dt, gk, etc.,
> but
> I haven't seen any cases of zs.  LaFlesche was familiar with the
> Hamilton
> system and probably several Dorsey systems and I think that these all
> use
> s and z.  So the long and the short of it is that LaFlesche cared
> more
> about asserting the use of an interdental or very fronted dental over
> the
> use of a less fronted dental or alveolar than he cared about
> representing
> voicing.
>
>
>
>


From munro at ucla.edu  Wed Dec  1 04:28:26 2004
From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro)
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 20:28:26 -0800
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <00b901c4d730$40e666e0$2ab5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <TUE.30.NOV.2004.202826.0800.>

Well, I decided to just share one observation about final Western
Muskogean /i/ as [e] (I don't recall noticing that Haas had said this
about Choctaw...).

First, just to clarify re what Bob's talking about below, this certainly
does not happen in either Choctaw (Ct) or Chickasaw (Cs) with long /i:/.
as in borrowed words like Ct tiih / Cs tii 'tea' or other (not too
common) words like the Cs interjection kii 'oh!' -- in these words, /i:/
is [i:].

(Note that words I've written in italics (or, if you don't receive
those, not in //'s or []'s) are in orthography, but I don't think
there's anything unclear here. Note further that I am ignoring Ct final
-h. Most people don't hear this anyway!)

However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think is
a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct (rarely
also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which does something
like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought by some to be the
source for English okay -- this is really in some dictionaries of
English!). I honestly don't feel that we understand the best
phonemicization of this. I write this ending, when it occurs in Cs (not
often), as -hookay. The ay# just shows I am puzzled (but ay can be
pronounced as [e:] elsewhere, e.g. in ?yya'sha 'they are there').

One more thing about final [e], possibly related to Haas's observation.
I frequently teach a class where ordinary UCLA students with no special
background in linguistics (mostly monolingual speakers of English or
bilinguals in Spanish or some Asian language) learn to pronounce and
transcribe Chickasaw. I am always amazed (though no longer surprised)
that about half of them reliably will pronounce a word like malili
'run', with final /i/, with final [e], rather than final [i]. Of course
I'm influenced by the phonemics, but I really hear this vowel only as
[i]. And so does about half (or even more) of a typical class. But the
others feel strongly that this final vowel is [e] (they pronounce it
this way, and we typically discuss the contrast in perception, which
they validate). So my "theory" is that there is some other factor
different from formant height or whatever that these students are
attending to, which is shared with English /e/ but not English /i/
(what? I don't know...). Because they note this feature, they interpret
the vowel as /e/ (and thus [e]).

I'm certainly not saying that Haas was like my students, and in fact I
haven't done the same "experiment" with Choctaw. But this is all a
puzzle to me.

Pam

R. Rankin wrote:

>> . . .Haas states that the allophone [e] for 'i' occurs with length
>> and in utterance final position before glottal stop.  I don't think
>> this was mentioned by Dorsey in the dictionary however.
>
>
> No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a
> quality distinction.  No one has had the courage to undertake a
> complete analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics
> (it would be a massive undertaking).  But in Biloxi, it may make a
> tremendous difference.  All linguists since Dorsey have already
> screwed up Biloxi by collapsing the two series of stops, and I'm
> afraid the vowels are no different.  It is especially important in the
> SE, where [e] is an allophone of /i/ and [epsilon] is an allophone of
> /e/, to figure out JOD's transcription.  As a starting point, I'd look
> for his <e-breve> to represent short /e/.  Then his <e> with no
> diacritics will be either [+long] or an allophone of /i/ (or both,
> unfortunately).  But there are other E's (e.g., with circumflex) to
> deal with too.
>
> Haas's comment about [e] representing long /i:/ I find especially
> interesting, because I think the Ofo rule is the same, and I hadn't
> reread Haas when doing my Ofo analysis.  I'll double check.  Thanx for
> the tip.
>
> Bob
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm

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From jfu at centrum.cz  Wed Dec  1 09:06:47 2004
From: jfu at centrum.cz (Jan Ullrich)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:06:47 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.100647.0100.>

Dear Siouanists

While working on Lakota language teaching materials for young learners I
have been in search for rhymes such as parents tell or read to their
children in Indo-European and other languages. Such rhymes are very
effective in building up and reinforcing young children's vocabulary and
that is why I would like to employ them in the elementary teaching materials
I am working on.
As far as I have been able to tell there are no or very few rhyming sayings
in Lakota. Even the lyrics of the numerous songs don't have rhymes; they
usually have the typical syncopative strophe endings or the neighboring
strophes end with identical enclitics. But I find no "real" rhymes anywhere.

Therefore, I have been wondering whether the lack of rhyme in Lakota is
caused by its morphological and syntactic structure or by the fact that
rhyme as such has not developed in the language. Or a combination of the two
is at play. It is also possible that rhymes haven't been recorded and are
not remembered by temporary speakers (I have been asking speakers about
rhymes for quite some time).

What are your experiences with rhymes in other Siouan languages?

Jan



Jan Ullrich
www.inext.cz/siouan

---
Odchoz? zpr?va neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolov?no antivirov?m syst?mem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.802 / Virov? b?ze: 545 - datum vyd?n?: 26.11.2004


From rwd0002 at unt.edu  Wed Dec  1 15:05:08 2004
From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:05:08 -0600
Subject: Ofo
In-Reply-To: <008401c4d72b$8eef75c0$2ab5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.090508.0600.>

Quoting "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu>:

> I just yesterday received a copy of the brand new Southeast volume on the
> Handbook of North American Indians from the Smithsonian.
> There's also a previously unpublished photo of Rosa Pierrite (which they are
> now spelling to match the Cajun pronunciation), the last known speaker of Ofo,
> which was nice to see.  (The photo of her in the old Swanton survey made her
look like Aunt Jemimah (spelling?) about to whup up a mess o' pancakes).  This
one is much clearer and less stereotyped.
>
> Bob

Hi Bob:  Thank you for mentioning the wonderful new Southeast volume, with the
previously unpublished photo of Rosa Pierrite.  When you tought us in Kansas, I
remember you giving us a xerox of the "Aunt Jemimah" picture, but I had
forgotten where that was from (I can no longer find it in my papers).  So I am
glad a better picture was published, because the Swanton one was the only one I
knew.

I have, of course, a very special fondness for Rosa Pierrite, since I whupped
up "Grassmann's Law in Ofo", my first ever publication, ultimately thanks to
her.

Do you have your Ofo vocabulary with corrected spellings in sharable form?  I
would love to have a copy of that.

Willem


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 16:22:04 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:22:04 -0700
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <1101873777.41ad4271df8fa@mail4.buffalo.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.092204.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 are2 at buffalo.edu wrote:
> I've only ever heard aNgu- (not ugu) with the speakers I work with.
> But gdhuba/bdhuga are both still variants today.  Also
> wagdhabaze/wabdhagaze, wamuska/wamaNske.  I'm sure there are more that
> don't come right to mind.

Terrific! I haven't run into the first example here (just wabdhagaze), but
I've heard wamaNske (wamoNske?) and Dorsey's texts have wamuske 'bread'.
I wondered about that!  I wondered if it might be a change, or if Dorsey
had it wrong.  Dorsey's form is actually a third variant, I guess, because
of the different final vowel.  However, I think that -ske is a bit odd as
a word final sequence and that -ska would be more common.  Hence, a
spontaneous change to that version would be a reasonable analogical
change.

This reminds me of another mystery, the word for 'student' (and, I think
also 'book learning'), which is ttappuska.  What I actually always heard
was tapska, which, because of the cluster I assumed to be a fast speech
form, perhaps really tttappUska, though I didn't notice any particular gap
for the voiceless U.

There's a second mystery with ttappuska.  If I remember correctly, Doug
Parks once pointed out to me that Pawnee has a similar word for similar
purposes.  I think he thought it a bit odd in Pawnee, and the Omaha form
is certainly a bit odd as an Omaha word, too, because it doesn't have any
obvious analysis as a compound and nothing else would explain the
phonological shape, as far as I can see.  So, it is an atypically long
unanalyzable stem, something that might obviously be a loan word, like
kkukkusi 'pig' or kkukkumaN (?) 'cucumber'.  (Not sure I have the last
right.)  Or (?) sagdha(N)s^(V) 'Englishman', and so on.  The 'Englishman'
term is reconstructed from the rendition in Thwaites - it might also be
sakkanas^(V).  Another word of this sort is hiNbdhiNge 'bean'.  Of course,
all of these examples are considered certain or at least likely to be
loans and the certain or probable sources have been recognized.


From are2 at buffalo.edu  Wed Dec  1 16:46:38 2004
From: are2 at buffalo.edu (are2 at buffalo.edu)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:46:38 -0500
Subject: OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010900570.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.114638.0500.>

Ttappuska 'school' usually refers to physical building
TtappuskazhiNga 'school child'  usually used for student

'u' is present but devoiced.  I usually teach students here to
underline voiceless vowels to remind them not to say them, just make
the shape with their lips.

kkukkumi 'cucumber'




Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 are2 at buffalo.edu wrote:
> > I've only ever heard aNgu- (not ugu) with the speakers I work
> with.
> > But gdhuba/bdhuga are both still variants today.  Also
> > wagdhabaze/wabdhagaze, wamuska/wamaNske.  I'm sure there are more
> that
> > don't come right to mind.
>
> Terrific! I haven't run into the first example here (just
> wabdhagaze), but
> I've heard wamaNske (wamoNske?) and Dorsey's texts have wamuske
> 'bread'.
> I wondered about that!  I wondered if it might be a change, or if
> Dorsey
> had it wrong.  Dorsey's form is actually a third variant, I guess,
> because
> of the different final vowel.  However, I think that -ske is a bit
> odd as
> a word final sequence and that -ska would be more common.  Hence, a
> spontaneous change to that version would be a reasonable analogical
> change.
>
> This reminds me of another mystery, the word for 'student' (and, I
> think
> also 'book learning'), which is ttappuska.  What I actually always
> heard
> was tapska, which, because of the cluster I assumed to be a fast
> speech
> form, perhaps really tttappUska, though I didn't notice any
> particular gap
> for the voiceless U.
>
> There's a second mystery with ttappuska.  If I remember correctly,
> Doug
> Parks once pointed out to me that Pawnee has a similar word for
> similar
> purposes.  I think he thought it a bit odd in Pawnee, and the Omaha
> form
> is certainly a bit odd as an Omaha word, too, because it doesn't have
> any
> obvious analysis as a compound and nothing else would explain the
> phonological shape, as far as I can see.  So, it is an atypically
> long
> unanalyzable stem, something that might obviously be a loan word,
> like
> kkukkusi 'pig' or kkukkumaN (?) 'cucumber'.  (Not sure I have the
> last
> right.)  Or (?) sagdha(N)s^(V) 'Englishman', and so on.  The
> 'Englishman'
> term is reconstructed from the rendition in Thwaites - it might also
> be
> sakkanas^(V).  Another word of this sort is hiNbdhiNge 'bean'.  Of
> course,
> all of these examples are considered certain or at least likely to
> be
> loans and the certain or probable sources have been recognized.
>
>
>


From Rgraczyk at aol.com  Wed Dec  1 16:48:08 2004
From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Randolph Graczyk)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:48:08 EST
Subject: Hawk.
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.114808.EST.>

Hawk terms from Hidatsa, courtesy of John Boyle:

iipxooki 'hawk'
karaakshi 'falcon'

The first is a descriptive compound, from iipi 'tail' + xooki 'row, paddle'.
The second looks like it may be from PSkyaNs^ka', with metathesis of the
final cluster.

Randy
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From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 16:52:03 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 09:52:03 -0700
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <MPECIJHMHLHEIJKNHIGLCEKJCPAA.jfu@centrum.cz>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.095203.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Jan Ullrich wrote:
> While working on Lakota language teaching materials for young learners I
> have been in search for rhymes such as parents tell or read to their
> children in Indo-European and other languages.

My understanding is that rhyming verse was a fashion introduced in Europe
from Arabic, via Spain.  Verse in the classical languages of Europe has
meter, but is otherwise either "blank" (without rhyme) or aliterative, as
in early Germanic verse.  Early Indo-European verse traditions also
emphasize special stock phrasings, Homer's "wine-dark sea" and
"rosy-fingered dawn," which are supposed to help the verse and faciliate
memorizing.  Germanic kennings - somewhat similar in nature and function -
are often deliberately obscure or fantastically metaphorical, e.g.,
Anglo-Saxon "whale road" 'sea' or "spear field" 'battlefield'.

This is not my area and the claims and examples are coming from far back
in my memory, so I may be way off here.

> As far as I have been able to tell there are no or very few rhyming
> sayings in Lakota. Even the lyrics of the numerous songs don't have
> rhymes; they usually have the typical syncopative strophe endings or the
> neighboring strophes end with identical enclitics. But I find no "real"
> rhymes anywhere.
>
> Therefore, I have been wondering whether the lack of rhyme in Lakota is
> caused by its morphological and syntactic structure ...

This would be my guess.  The ends of clauses, hence the ends of lines,
tend to be morphologically constrained in ways that make rhyme either
mandatory or impossible, depending on the clauses, and so not interesting
or easily manipulated.

I'd suspect that rhyme would be more satifactory in languages which have
free word order and simple word-final morphology or none.

> What are your experiences with rhymes in other Siouan languages?

I haven't run into it in Omaha, but truthfully I am pretty much out of my
depth with Omaha songs.  I can only pick out occasional words and I'm at
sea with musical structure.  I generally enjoy what I hear, but I don't
hear it enough to grasp the patterns.

I mention songs automatically, because they do have a metrical structure,
though I'm not sure that the lyrics do.  I think definitely not, in fact.
Hence the vocables and other elaborate phrasing techniques, to fit the
lyrics to the melody.

I have seen attempts to analyze Siouan literature as verse but I haven't
been especially convinced by any of them.  There is definitely a structure
to higaN (or is it hikkaN?) stories, especially when well told, and this
seems to me to go beyond the 4x rule, serially applied, but I think this
structure is more a matter of balance and organization and presentational
style than verse, and I don't think there's any metrical element at all.
A well told story comes across more like a well-written essay rather than
a sonnet.  Everything is organized just so.  There's never any "oh, by the
way, I forgot to say" or "and then, um, I guess" and parallelisms and
lacks of parallelism flow elegantly in a way that has to be a result of
calculation and practice.


From boris at terracom.net  Wed Dec  1 17:01:55 2004
From: boris at terracom.net (Alan Knutson)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:01:55 -0600
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010925300.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.110155.0600.>

-----Original Message-----
Although I know this is not the type of rhyme Jan was thinking of but
for the past 30 plus years I've been fascinated by the name "totanka
yotanka". Being a linguistics student at the time it popped out at me,
is this a type of rhyme common in naming customs or am I out in
centerfield?

Alan K


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 17:04:28 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:04:28 -0700
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010925300.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.100428.0700.>

We did have a discussion a while back of proverbs, and I think we
concluded that though they are not especially prominent - e.g., not used
as devices in stories - and might be different in various ways, they did
occur.  I think Jimm Good Tracks was able to supply a number of convincing
examples for Ioway-Otoe-Missouria.

Somewhat in a verse line I remember Lowie's examples of Crow (and
Hidatsa?) "charms" or "verses" for putting oneself to sleep.  I don't
rmember what Lowie called them, or in specific how any of them went.  (I
must have fallen asleep.)

I wonder if one way to prompt for things like this would be to ask people
to finish a sentence like "My grandmother (etc.) always says (used to say,
said) ..."


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 17:20:54 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:20:54 -0700
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <00f101c4d7c7$76c78ef0$535faad0@alscom>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.102054.0700.>

Alan notes:
> Although I know this is not the type of rhyme Jan was thinking of but
> for the past 30 plus years I've been fascinated by the name "totanka
> yotanka". Being a linguistics student at the time it popped out at me,
> is this a type of rhyme common in naming customs or am I out in
> centerfield?

I think this isn't quite right, but, on reflection, I'm not sure I know it
correctly either.  ThathaNka Iyot(h?)aNka?  'Sitting Bull" of course.

I think I've noticed or heard of a few cases in which Dakota speakers
seemed to like a sort of repetition of sounds in expressions - seemingly
considered it interesting or attractive or noteworthy or maybe just
amusing.  One is the Lakota word for pepper.  Another example was a name
that means "Charging Whirlwind" which also involves repeated mn-clusters.
Maybe repeating mn-clusters is the only thing that triggers this.  I've
tried to reconstruct the name example in my memory - I got it from Dick
Carter - but the best I can recall is maybe omni womni and then a third
word that (also) won't come back to me - yuhomni, kahomni?  I haven't ever
been in a position to know if this sort of thing can be manipulated
deliberately or is simply treasured when it occurs, maybe somewhat like
Americans remarking "I'm a poet and didn't know it" when rhymes occur
accidentally.


From ahartley at d.umn.edu  Wed Dec  1 17:39:49 2004
From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:39:49 -0600
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <41AD486A.7050707@ucla.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.113949.0600.>

Pamela Munro wrote:

> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think is
> a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct (rarely
> also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which does something
> like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought by some to be the
> source for English okay -- this is really in some dictionaries of
> English!).

That's an attractive idea, but it's unsupported in the record of
English, at least in the OED, where there's no hint of a southeastern
provenance for the word. In fact, the several earliest examples the OED
(draft entry in new edition on line) quots are all from the northeast:

1839 C. G. GREENE in Boston Morning Post 23 Mar. 2/2 He..would have the
'contribution box', et ceteras, o.k. all correct and cause the corks to
fly, like sparks, upward.
1839 Salem Gaz. 12 Apr. 2/3 The house was O.K. at the last concert, and
did credit to the musical taste of the young ladies and gents.
1839 Boston Evening Transcript 11 Oct. 2/3 Our Bank Directors have not
thought it worth their while to call a meeting, even for consultation,
on the subject. It is O.K. (all correct) in this quarter.
1840 Atlas (Boston) 19 Aug. 2/4 These initials, according to Jack
Downing, were first used by Gen. Jackson. ?Those papers, Amos [Kendall],
are all correct. I have marked them O.K.? (oll korrect). The Gen. was
never good at spelling.
1840 Morning Herald (N.Y.) 21 Apr. 2/4 The Brigadier..reviewed his
Brigade..and pronounced every thing O.K.

The OED etymology espouses the "oll korrect" hypothesis and goes on to
say "Other suggestions, e.g. that O.K. represents an alleged Choctaw
word oke 'it is' (actually the affirmative verbal suffix -okii ?indeed,
contrary to your supposition?), or French au quai, or Scottish English
och aye, or that it derives from a word in the West African language
Wolof via slaves in the southern States of America, all lack any form of
acceptable documentation." And then "In form okeh (as used by Dr.
Woodrow Wilson: see quots. 1919, 1939 at sense 1 of adjective) on the
understanding that the word represents an alleged Choctaw word oke (see
above)." The 1919 Wilson quot is:

1919 H. L. MENCKEN Amer. Lang. 161 Dr. Woodrow Wilson is said..to use
okeh in endorsing government papers.

(I can't find the mentioned 1939 quot anywhere in the entry.)

With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is it,
as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?

Alan H.


From Rgraczyk at aol.com  Wed Dec  1 17:52:44 2004
From: Rgraczyk at aol.com (Randolph Graczyk)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 12:52:44 EST
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.125244.EST.>

In Crow and, from what I know, in other Siouan languages, we tend to see
recurrent patterns--though not rhyme--at the beginning of sentences, with the
repetion of sentence connectives like Crow dee'laa 'and then', etc.  It is also
common in Crow discourse to repeat the final verb of a sentence or stretch of
discourse as the first verb of the next section:
'......he went'.  'He went and.....'

I agree with John that the morphological and syntactic structure of Siouan
languages makes rhyming virtually impossible.

Randy
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From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Wed Dec  1 18:45:32 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:45:32 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.194532.0100.>

 >>While working on Lakota language teaching materials for young learners I
have been in search for rhymes such as parents tell or read to their
children in Indo-European and other languages.<<<<


 >My understanding is that rhyming verse was a fashion introduced in Europe
from Arabic, via Spain.  Verse in the classical languages of Europe has
meter, but is otherwise either "blank" (without rhyme) or aliterative, as
in early Germanic verse.  Early Indo-European verse traditions also
emphasize special stock phrasings, Homer's "wine-dark sea" and
"rosy-fingered dawn," which are supposed to help the verse and faciliate
memorizing.  Germanic kennings - somewhat similar in nature and function -
are often deliberately obscure or fantastically metaphorical, e.g.,
Anglo-Saxon "whale road" 'sea' or "spear field" 'battlefield'.<<


This is correct, yet bear in mind that also ancient Chinese poetry
styles (e.g. Ch'i-L?/Qil? - an eight-line poem with seven characters per
line and following rigorous prosodic rules - or Chueh-ch?/Jueju - a
Quatrain) have to use end-rhymes in certain lines, whereas other styles
are more free and don't have rhymes. In Germanic (and other
Indoeuropean) tongues there is (was) alliteration (Stabreim), free forms
and endrhyme, too, so that one cannot state apodictically that rhyme or
not rhyme is strictly depending on a language's specific structure.

When beginning to study Hungarian poetry, my initial opinion also went
into this direction because of the very special structure of the H
language. And infact the rhyming is a bit special compared to other
languages like e.g. English, German, Chinese, Romanian or what have you
for its feature of agglutinativeness (i.e. the rhyming endings mostly
are grammatical suffixes of limited number). But it works (sounds!) as
well - at least for ears accustomed to the language.
In Hungarian, very often the verb comes last in a sentence (so you often
have the verb endings to carry the rhyme), but not always, and moreover,
in poetry Hungarian syntax is pretty variable and free.
This is very different with Siouan languages, and therefore syntax might
appear to be a certain drawback for endrhyme poetry there. So I tend to
agree with both of you that this can be one reason for the "lack of
rhymes" in Lakota - although endrhyme isn't totally impossible there,
albeit a bit monotonous perhaps. Using the various (but quite limited)
enclitics to bear the rhyme might be well appropriate for lullabies,
childrens' and ceremonial/spiritual songs etc..
(BTW, I too was searching for Lakota pieces of poetry, invain, they're
all in English.)

Alfred


From munro at ucla.edu  Wed Dec  1 18:55:08 2004
From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:55:08 -0800
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <41AE01E5.7030706@d.umn.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.105508.0800.>

I was not suggesting I thought "okay" was from the Choctaw suffix, just
that you will find that in dictionaries.

If the OED has "okii", they are probably quoting someone else who works
on Choctaw, and that is a possibly phonemicization, though not the one I
would go for, because of the phonetic problems I mentioned. It is
certainly NOT Choctaw /o:ke:/, because there is no phonemic /e:/ in
Choctaw -- it's simply a matter of deciding what the best
phonemicization is here. Leaving off the h is fine (the h is certainly a
separate morpheme, but people (Chickasaws and Choctaws) include the h
when they refer to this form, so that's how I think of it (I regard it
as a feature of typical Choctaw men's speech, though women use it also).
I would definitely say the o is long myself (I think it is a form of
'be', probably), but maybe that's debatable. As to whether it's a
suffix, that sort of depends on what level of analysis you're referring
to. I think of it that way most of the time, but I could see arguments
for not doing so, so once again, I wouldn't fight what the OED has now.
These are all probably too small problems for anyone to worry about who
is not interested in specifically Western Muskogean problems, and I'm
sorry I bothered you all, but I did want to comment on the point about
Haas and Choctaw [e]. I don't know to what degree the OED really cares
about these debates.

Pam



Alan H. Hartley wrote:

> Pamela Munro wrote:
>
>> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think
>> is a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct
>> (rarely also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which
>> does something like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought
>> by some to be the source for English okay -- this is really in some
>> dictionaries of English!).
>
>
> That's an attractive idea, but it's unsupported in the record of
> English, at least in the OED, where there's no hint of a southeastern
> provenance for the word. In fact, the several earliest examples the
> OED (draft entry in new edition on line) quots are all from the
> northeast:
>
> 1839 C. G. GREENE in Boston Morning Post 23 Mar. 2/2 He..would have
> the 'contribution box', et ceteras, o.k. all correct and cause the
> corks to fly, like sparks, upward.
> 1839 Salem Gaz. 12 Apr. 2/3 The house was O.K. at the last concert,
> and did credit to the musical taste of the young ladies and gents.
> 1839 Boston Evening Transcript 11 Oct. 2/3 Our Bank Directors have not
> thought it worth their while to call a meeting, even for consultation,
> on the subject. It is O.K. (all correct) in this quarter.
> 1840 Atlas (Boston) 19 Aug. 2/4 These initials, according to Jack
> Downing, were first used by Gen. Jackson. ?Those papers, Amos
> [Kendall], are all correct. I have marked them O.K.? (oll korrect).
> The Gen. was never good at spelling.
> 1840 Morning Herald (N.Y.) 21 Apr. 2/4 The Brigadier..reviewed his
> Brigade..and pronounced every thing O.K.
>
> The OED etymology espouses the "oll korrect" hypothesis and goes on to
> say "Other suggestions, e.g. that O.K. represents an alleged Choctaw
> word oke 'it is' (actually the affirmative verbal suffix -okii
> ?indeed, contrary to your supposition?), or French au quai, or
> Scottish English och aye, or that it derives from a word in the West
> African language Wolof via slaves in the southern States of America,
> all lack any form of acceptable documentation." And then "In form okeh
> (as used by Dr. Woodrow Wilson: see quots. 1919, 1939 at sense 1 of
> adjective) on the understanding that the word represents an alleged
> Choctaw word oke (see above)." The 1919 Wilson quot is:
>
> 1919 H. L. MENCKEN Amer. Lang. 161 Dr. Woodrow Wilson is said..to use
> okeh in endorsing government papers.
>
> (I can't find the mentioned 1939 quot anywhere in the entry.)
>
> With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is
> it, as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?
>
> Alan H.
>
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm


From ahartley at d.umn.edu  Wed Dec  1 19:18:59 2004
From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 13:18:59 -0600
Subject: Biloxi/Ofo
In-Reply-To: <41AE138C.8000300@ucla.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.131859.0600.>

Thanks for the additional background, Pam.

> I don't know to what degree the OED really cares about these debates.

Such a debate may be considered peripheral by the editors, but not if it
bears on something in the dictionary.

Alan H


From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Wed Dec  1 19:17:39 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 20:17:39 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.201739.0100.>

Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"

Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka
i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

Buechel gives _i'yotakA_ (to sit down) different from _yaNkA_ (to sit/be
sitting). So the famous chief's name obviously describes a buffalo in
the movement of sitting down (with the forelegs still standing on the
ground).


Alfred


From chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu  Wed Dec  1 19:25:06 2004
From: chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 11:25:06 -0800
Subject: OK and rhymes
In-Reply-To: <41AE114C.6090201@fa-kuan.muc.de>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.112506.0800.>

Just to throw a little extra wood on the fire, on two points that have been
circulating. First of all I don't think we'll ever know for sure the origin
of OK. All the explanations seem rather fanciful. But there's a Caddo
exclamation "ukkih" which means something like "wow!" and it probably
qualifies as well as most of these other suggestions.

I've been a little uncomfortable with the discussion of rhyming, which
makes it sound like some higher manifestation of artistic sensibility. It's
actually something that's arisen in certain cultures in certain ways, and I
don't see any reason to interpret it as an index of a culture's degree of
sophistication, or whatever. Native American "oral literature" has other
aesthetic values, and there's no reason to see an absence of rhyming as
some kind of deficit, or to think that people would have developed it if
only they'd been lucky enough to have a different kind of morphology.

--Wally


From lcumberl at indiana.edu  Wed Dec  1 19:38:38 2004
From: lcumberl at indiana.edu (lcumberl at indiana.edu)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:38:38 -0500
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412010925300.12908@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.143838.0500.>

I have the same feeling as others that Siouan morphology would inhibit
end-rhyming - so many ya's and ye's! This discussion reminds me of cultures that
practice head-rhyming, in which it is the first full syllable of specified lines
that rhyme (e.g., Mongolian), but even that possibility would be limited in
Siouan, again due to morphology.

What I have noticed in so may Assiniboine and Lakhota songs is the art of
vocables, where lines are filled out rhythmically. And, of course, some entire
songs or entire verses of songs are just vocables.  A Lakhota singer once told
me that he believes that learning songs is the best place to start when trying
to learn the language because the music reinforces the patterns of the words,
even though there is no "rhyme" in the sense that we think of it. So maybe a
good pedagogical tool is to teach songs, or to set things to music where
possible. Some of you may recall our excursion into various language versions of
"Head, Shoulder, Knees, and Toes" but if I were to make a practice of this, I
think I'd go with more culturally appropriate melodies, perhaps accompanied by
hand drum.

Linda


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 20:49:42 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:49:42 -0600
Subject: Ofo
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.144942.0600.>

> Thank you for mentioning the wonderful new Southeast volume, with the
previously unpublished photo of Rosa Pierrite.  When you taught us in Kansas, I
remember you giving us a xerox of the "Aunt Jemimah" picture, but I had
forgotten where that was from (I can no longer find it in my papers).  So I am
glad a better picture was published, because the Swanton one was the only one I
knew.

Me too.  The original was in one of the John R. Swanton survey volumes.  It was
either his Indian Tribes of the US or his Southeastern tribes book.  Both
volumes are at the office and I don't remember which one it's in.  I didn't know
there were any other photos of Mrs. Pierrite in existence.  We owe a great debt
to her and to Swanton.

BTW there is a short novel entitled "The Last Ofo" by an Indian writer from the
U. of Oklahoma (not an Ofo descendent).  When I heard of it, I bought a copy.
It's an interesting read -- an avowed work of fiction -- about the last Ofo, a
man with the surname Darko in this account, who grew up in Louisiana and who,
near the end of his life, worked with some rather unpleasant Smithsonian
anthropologists documenting his language.  List members with an interest in Ofo
and Biloxi might want to pick it up.  I got a used copy from Amazon.

> I have, of course, a very special fondness for Rosa Pierrite, since I whupped
> up "Grassmann's Law in Ofo", my first ever publication, ultimately thanks to
> her.

Willem also did the chapters on the Biloxi and Ofo languages for the Handbook
volume, although they didn't allot him enough space to do his knowledge justice.

> Do you have your Ofo vocabulary with corrected spellings in sharable form?  I
> would love to have a copy of that.

It's not in the latest version, but I can get one out later this week.

Bob


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 20:59:03 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 13:59:03 -0700
Subject: Ofo
In-Reply-To: <001d01c4d7e7$5b8ea9f0$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.135903.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> BTW there is a short novel entitled "The Last Ofo" by an Indian writer
> from the U. of Oklahoma (not an Ofo descendent).  When I heard of it, I
> bought a copy.  It's an interesting read -- an avowed work of fiction --
> about the last Ofo, a man with the surname Darko in this account, who
> grew up in Louisiana and who, near the end of his life, worked with some
> rather unpleasant Smithsonian anthropologists documenting his language.
> List members with an interest in Ofo and Biloxi might want to pick it
> up.  I got a used copy from Amazon.

Sounds like the Ishi story and its various interpretations taken up and
applied to the work of Dorsey and Swanton.


From jfu at centrum.cz  Wed Dec  1 21:18:32 2004
From: jfu at centrum.cz (Jan Ullrich)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 22:18:32 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <1101929918.41ae1dbe146ba@webmail.iu.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.221832.0100.>

Thanks to all of you who replied to my e-mail about rhyming verse in Siouan
languages.

I didn't mean to suggest that the "lack of rhyme" or the morphological and
syntactic characteristic of any language is anything defective. And I am
sorry if anyone got that impression. And I do not believe others who
responded to my e-mail meant to suggest anything of that nature either.

As a matter of fact, I was asked and encouraged to search for rhymes by some
of the native teachers that I work with. They would love to use rhymes when
teaching the young students, but don't know any themselves and aren't sure
if there were any in the past. We even tried to create rhymes together but
finding a rhyming word was a very difficult process even doing digital
searches through a lexical database of 36,000 entries.
The replies by other Siouanists confirmed my impression that rhyming is
difficult if not impossible in Lakota. But again, I am not saying this in
any derogatory way. Lakota has its own ways of expressing beauty in speech.

I strongly agree Linda as concerns songs. As a student of a few languages
and a language teacher I experienced many times that students do grasp
vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar rules very easily through song
lyrics, whether they are rhymed or not. So songs, preferably traditional,
are certainly something to use for pedagogical purposes. Unfortunately,
today there seems to be but a few traditional songs that deal with the kind
of vocabulary needed for children at the age of 5-8. Something else to
search for.

Jan


---
Odchoz? zpr?va neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolov?no antivirov?m syst?mem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.802 / Virov? b?ze: 545 - datum vyd?n?: 26.11.2004


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 21:15:38 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 15:15:38 -0600
Subject: Ofo
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.151538.0600.>

>> BTW there is a short novel entitled "The Last Ofo" by an Indian writer
>> from the U. of Oklahoma (not an Ofo descendent).

> Sounds like the Ishi story and its various interpretations taken up and
> applied to the work of Dorsey and Swanton.

Something like that.  I don't think the author had any particular linguists in
mind in his novella, but they don't come off as particularly sympathetic
figures.

The author had obviously done some homework and he refers to the Ofo as
descendents of the Mosopelea, etc.

Bob


From jfu at centrum.cz  Wed Dec  1 21:26:01 2004
From: jfu at centrum.cz (Jan Ullrich)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 22:26:01 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
In-Reply-To: <41AE18D3.3000108@fa-kuan.muc.de>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.222601.0100.>

  Alfred W. T?ting wrote:
> Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"
> Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or
> Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

I am not sure where the Tatanka Iyotanka form - common in popular
literature - originates from. I have reasons to believe that the correct
form is ThathaN'ka I'yotake, pronounced ThathaN'kiyotake in fast speech.

Jan


---
Odchoz? zpr?va neobsahuje viry.
Zkontrolov?no antivirov?m syst?mem AVG (http://www.grisoft.cz).
Verze: 6.0.802 / Virov? b?ze: 545 - datum vyd?n?: 26.11.2004


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 21:39:51 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 15:39:51 -0600
Subject: Muskogean and Biloxi/Ofo
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.153951.0600.>

> Well, I decided to just share one observation about final Western
> Muskogean /i/ as [e] (I don't recall noticing that Haas had said this
> about Choctaw...).

She said it about Biloxi in '68.  I'm saying it about Choctaw.

> First, just to clarify re what Bob's talking about below, this certainly
> does not happen in either Choctaw (Ct) or Chickasaw (Cs) with long /i:/.
> as in borrowed words like Ct tiih / Cs tii 'tea' or other (not too
> common) words like the Cs interjection kii 'oh!' -- in these words, /i:/
> is [i:].

That's true, but, on the other hand, maybe that's because there's an internal
rule in Choctaw that in fact raises long, internal [e:] (or diphthong [ey]) to
[i:].  I'm thinking of *tayki 'female' that is phonetically [te:k-] in some
languages but [ti:k] in Choctaw.  Final position in the word or phrase was where
I got it most often.  I'm not sure whether any of these forms had -h or not, I'm
afraid.  I'm one of those who had a hard time hearing it at least at first,
although it's certainly there underlyingly.

> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think is
> a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct (rarely
> also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which does something
> like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought by some to be the
> source for English okay -- this is really in some dictionaries of
> English!). I honestly don't feel that we understand the best
> phonemicization of this. I write this ending, when it occurs in Cs (not
> often), as -hookay. The ay# just shows I am puzzled (but ay can be
> pronounced as [e:] elsewhere, e.g. in ?yya'sha 'they are there').

As Pam knows, /ay/ > [ey] or [e:] in Creek quite regularly in closed syllables
and it's pretty common elsewhere in Muskogean, although I can't quote details
off the top of my head.  But most of these ay > e(y) changes are internal, and
in closed syllables.  The final [-e] remains a bit of a problem.  I wonder if a
rising-falling sentence intonation on [hoke] in Choctaw could be influencing
length and quality?

As an aside, I used to baffle students on oral exams by asking "In Chinese "ma-,
ma^, ma`" and "ma" with different tones all mean different things.  OK, in
English you can say "Yes." "Yes?" "Yes! Yeeees (with hesitation signaling
...but...) and "Yayis! all with different tones and meaning different things
(statement, question, emphatic statement, partial agreement, etc).  Now, why
isn't English a tone language like Chinese?"  You get the most amazing
non-answers to that question, and most students never think to mention that the
English utterances are all entire sentences, with sentence-intonation contours.
Oh well, it's also true that some of those English "yeses" have qualitative
differences in the vowel.  I guess that's my point about the Choctaw.

Bob


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 22:20:42 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 16:20:42 -0600
Subject: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi.
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.162042.0600.>

> Just to throw a little extra wood on the fire, on two points that have been
> circulating. First of all I don't think we'll ever know for sure the origin of
> OK. All the explanations seem rather fanciful. But there's a Caddo exclamation
> "ukkih" which means something like "wow!" and it probably qualifies as well as
> most of these other suggestions.

 I wonder of this has any connection with the Choctaw [ho:keh] Pam was
 discussing?  The Caddo and other Caddoan-speaking groups were certainly in
 Louisiana at the time of the DeSoto expedition (Wally has a nice paper in an
 anthology about the Caddoan place names in the Spanish accounts).  I only bring
 it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan influence in Biloxi and
 Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.

 Ofo:                        a-c? ki           'corn'
Biloxi:                     a-y?:ki           'corn'
Pawnee:                     r?:k  su       'corn'
Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
Wichita:                      t?:    s ?       'corn'
Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'

Ofo c (=ch) is a regular reflex of earlier *y, so a Siouan form *a-y?:ki can be
 compared to a possible Caddoan prototype something like *R?:kisu? where R is my
 indeterminate sonorant covering the n/r/t correspondence set. This term for
 'corn' is unique to the southeastern Siouan subgroup.  Tutelo, the other
 attested language in this Ohio Valley Siouan subgroup, does not share the term,
 reinforcing the notion that the borrowing went from Caddoan to Ofo and Biloxi,
 not the other way around.  In any event, Tutelo, Ofo and Biloxi in the South,
 like Mandan, Crow and Hidatsa in the Northwest, had apparently separated from
 the rest of Siouan well before the in?troduction of any domesticated cultigen
 except the gourd.

 I'm afraid *Re:kisu? is my own Haas-style "boxcar reconstruction" from the
 Caddoan cognate set.  At least various of the pieces seem represented across
the
 family!  Biloxi and Ofo initial a- in these items would be the normal reflex of
 the noun prefix *wa- after initial labial resonants had been lost, so it is
 separable.  Caddoan -su? at the end of the term may have been interpreted as su
 'seed' by Siouan speakers.

 So, if Caddoan was in touch directly or indirectly with Biloxi and Ofo, could
 Caddo ukkih be connected with Choctaw hokeh.  (Recall that Choctaw has no
 distinction between o and u and between e and i.)  The phonemic match is
awfully
 close.  As Pam says, the Choctaw form looks as though is it based on the verb
 'be'.  Is the Caddo form made up of native morphology, or is it a stray term
 that could have been borrowed?

 Bob


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec  1 22:42:59 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 16:42:59 -0600
Subject: OK and the OED.
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.164259.0600.>

> With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is it,
> as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?

I'll defer to Pam on this.  The H may or may not be etymologically a part of
oke.  It is a final consonant on many verb forms but there are other instances
where it has been reanalysed as the initial consonant of a following enclitic.
For example, the question particle, oN or aN has been reanalysed as -hoN or -haN
by some speakers.  Synchronically, I'd guess that you could argue for either
[hoke] or [oke].  The final vowel is definitely not [i] or [ii] in the Choctaw
I've heard.  I'm remaining neutral on the phonemic value of it, since it doesn't
matter to a potential English borrowing anyway (English speakers would hear it
as [ey]).

It might be worth combing literature from the deep South around the 1830's to
see if maybe it crops up.  I have to admit I've never liked the "Oll Korrect"
explanation.  It incorporates two non-characteristics of American English
pronunciation and spelling.

Bob


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec  1 22:44:39 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 15:44:39 -0700
Subject: OK and rhymes
In-Reply-To: <673715ADACA28DB98E0D1277@[192.168.2.34]>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.154439.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Wallace Chafe wrote:
> I've been a little uncomfortable with the discussion of rhyming, which
> makes it sound like some higher manifestation of artistic sensibility.
> It's actually something that's arisen in certain cultures in certain
> ways, and I don't see any reason to interpret it as an index of a
> culture's degree of sophistication, or whatever.

I certainly didn't intend any notion of cultural superiority to appear in
my part of the discussion of the presence or absence of rhyme, or, for
that matter alliteration, meter, kennings, or proverbs.  Since most of the
discussion was mine, I am probably the guilty party here, and should offer
apologies if this seemed to apply in anything I said.

I plead guilty to one relevant prejudice.  I probably take entirely too
much pleasure in noticing that things my native culture regards as
universal are not.  So I probably dwelt excessively on the "present :
missing" comparisons.  I didn't mean it to be a list of "good : bad" or
"advanced : not advanced" comparisons, but rather a list of "surprise, not
essential" things.

I tried to bolster this by pointing out that in my understanding rhyme is
an imported fashion in European literatures.  Thus, rhyme is not inherent
or original in European practice.  It comes from outside and modifies or
replaces earlier traditions.  Unfortunately, the Middle Eastern cultural
practices introduced into Medieval Europe are characterized as advances in
a historical perspective, and I failed to consider this.

I suppose they are advances in terms of the internal history of European
culture, in which present conditions are always regarded as more advanced
than the past conditions, and "very advanced" means "near contemporary in
form."  In some cases these introductions were advances in science or
medicine, which some of us might regard independent of cultural
considerations.  I'm kind of pre-modernist (primitive?) in this respect
myself.  However, I don't see any culture-independent way to characterize
changes in literary style as advances, and I intend the example of the
introduction of rhyme into Europe in precisely that way.  Poetries can be
+rhyme or -rhyme.  In that perspective, rhyme + meter vs. non-rhyme (or
alliteration) + meter are simply different literary choices of equivalent
value.

Interestingly, I think Siouan and other Native American literatures show
that meter - metrical verse, anyway - is also not universal.  This isn't
to say that Native American music doesn't have strict metrical structure.
I'd be astounded if *that* wasn't universal.

"Native American" really isn't the right term here, since the examples are
really just Siouan, and Siouan from the Plains area at that.  Native
American covers a vast amount of physical and culture territory with
enormous diversity.  The Siouan parts of the Plains are a small fragment
of that.  I'm aware that there are studies that analyse the verse
structure of other Native American literatures, and I'm not disputing that
such things exist.  They may even exist in Plains Siouan, though I haven't
been convinced of it yet.

Of course, when I think that poetry in the European (and Euro-American)
sense might not be universal, I imagine myself plopping this data down in
front of my highschool English teachers and exclaiming "I told you so!"
I say "might not be" because, of course, I'm not convinced this is true.
For one thing, song - music with lyrics - is, I think, universal, and
certainly music generally and song specifically are present in Plains
cultures.  In fact, omnipresent and very lively.  Lyrics might be
considered prima facie evidence that there is poetry, i.e., lyrics are
perhaps necessarily poetry, even if they are written in tradition without
meter or some kind of sound echoes or other such potential universals of
poetry.  And maybe there really are meter or sound echoes, too, even
though I haven't yet noticed them.  Maybe I can fairly say "We haven't yet
noticed them."

"Sound echoes" (meaning things like rhyme or alliteration) explains the
references I made to mn-repetitions and such.  These were intended as
annecdotal evidence that Dakota speakers were as sensitive to such things
esthetically as anyone, and in their native language(s), too, even if such
things weren't elevated to literary conventions.  In other words, rhymes
and other sound echoes may well be universally interesting, even if they
aren't universally singled out for conventional use.

Kind of makes me wonder what Dakota et al. have that English et al. lack.
I suppose the absence of simple correlates to the classifiers must feel
like a rather awkward hole.  Francis LaFlesche is rather marked in his use
of adjectives correlating with the classifiers.  He doesn't say anything
general about the importance of not letting this information get lost, but
I've noticed he tends to insist of the extended forms.


From chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu  Thu Dec  2 02:54:09 2004
From: chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu (Wallace Chafe)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 18:54:09 -0800
Subject: OK again
In-Reply-To: <00a901c4d7f4$14b7fa10$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.185409.0800.>

I guess there's no linguistic reason why Caddo ukkih and Choctaw ho:keh
might not be the result of borrowing in one direction or the other. Caddo
has only three vowels, so a correspondence of Caddo i and u with Choctaw o
and e would be expected. There's nothing unusual about ukkih from the point
of view of Caddo phonology. Geminate consonants are very common, whatever
that means.

I agree with Bob about the Oll Korrect explanation, which probably ought to
be put to rest for good, unless somebody finds some really convincing
documentation of its use.

As for 'corn', I tend to be a little skeptical of "boxcar reconstructions".
In any case, I'm pretty sure the last syllable of Caddo kisi? isn't cognate
with the endings of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Wichita words. Those endings
correspond quite regularly to a Caddo noun suffix -?uh, not to -i?.

Wally

>  I wonder of this has any connection with the Choctaw [ho:keh] Pam was
>  discussing?  The Caddo and other Caddoan-speaking groups were certainly
> in
>  Louisiana at the time of the DeSoto expedition (Wally has a nice paper
> in an
>  anthology about the Caddoan place names in the Spanish accounts).  I
> only bring
>  it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan influence in
> Biloxi and
>  Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>
>  Ofo:                        a-c? ki           'corn'
> Biloxi:                     a-y?:ki           'corn'
> Pawnee:                     r?:k  su       'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
> Wichita:                      t?:    s ?       'corn'
> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'
>
> Ofo c (=ch) is a regular reflex of earlier *y, so a Siouan form *a-y?:ki
> can be
>  compared to a possible Caddoan prototype something like *R?:kisu? where
> R is my
>  indeterminate sonorant covering the n/r/t correspondence set. This term
> for
>  'corn' is unique to the southeastern Siouan subgroup.  Tutelo, the other
>  attested language in this Ohio Valley Siouan subgroup, does not share
> the term,
>  reinforcing the notion that the borrowing went from Caddoan to Ofo and
> Biloxi,
>  not the other way around.  In any event, Tutelo, Ofo and Biloxi in the
> South,
>  like Mandan, Crow and Hidatsa in the Northwest, had apparently separated
> from
>  the rest of Siouan well before the in?troduction of any domesticated
> cultigen
>  except the gourd.
>
>  I'm afraid *Re:kisu? is my own Haas-style "boxcar reconstruction" from
> the
>  Caddoan cognate set.  At least various of the pieces seem represented
> across the
>  family!  Biloxi and Ofo initial a- in these items would be the normal
> reflex of
>  the noun prefix *wa- after initial labial resonants had been lost, so it
> is
>  separable.  Caddoan -su? at the end of the term may have been
> interpreted as su
>  'seed' by Siouan speakers.
>
>  So, if Caddoan was in touch directly or indirectly with Biloxi and Ofo,
> could
>  Caddo ukkih be connected with Choctaw hokeh.  (Recall that Choctaw has no
>  distinction between o and u and between e and i.)  The phonemic match is
> awfully
>  close.  As Pam says, the Choctaw form looks as though is it based on the
> verb
>  'be'.  Is the Caddo form made up of native morphology, or is it a stray
> term
>  that could have been borrowed?
>
>  Bob
>
>


From cstelfer at ucalgary.ca  Thu Dec  2 02:55:11 2004
From: cstelfer at ucalgary.ca (Corey Telfer)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:55:11 -0700
Subject: PDF embedded fonts.
In-Reply-To: <087201c4ceab$c1532e40$2fb5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.195511.0700.>

Hi Bob,

   The Ablaut paper looks good.  I haven't gone through it entirely yet, but
the small errors I remember from the first copy seem to be cleaned up.

   My Romanian paper is basically the seed of my master's thesis.  In
looking at Romanian 'palatalization' (the addition of an off-glide [j] to
form plurals and second person singular verbs) I found both palatalization
and assibilation effects.  This is not really surprising, considering both
processes tend to be caused by high front vocoids.  In my paper, I take the
radical position that the coronalization of Romanian velars is due to
assibilation.

   It seems likely that the assibilation of coronals is the result of
audiorily-based substitution.  The narrowing of the oral cavity in the
production of high front vowels seems to cause extra frication in stop
releases.  This frication is then reanalyzed as stridency, and thus the
feature [+strident] is inserted into the feature matrix.  I argued that the
same process could happen in velars, except that adding stridency to a velar
should result in [ks], which is an extremely rare segment (only existing in
Blackfoot as far as I know).  Thus the grammar might choose to alter the
velar to a coronal in order to preserve the stridency.  This explains why
coronalization can result in either [ts] or c^ - both are equally strident,
so either one is an expected outcome of this process.

    Romanian is interesting because it contains both [ts] and c^ in its
inventory, but coronalization results only in c^.  I argue that this is due
to the fact that articulatory palatalization also plays a role in the
language (eg. sj --> s^).  Since palatalization is active, c^ is picked over
[ts] in this case.  So this is the basic idea behind my thesis, which will
probably be titled something like "The interaction of assibilation and
palatalization".  I realize that this analysis might not be very appealing,
and that many people may want to stick with the well-accepted model of
articulatory assimilation.  Of you have any comments or questions, I'd love
to hear them.

Corey.

PS.  As I'm sure you know, American policy and Americans in general are not
too popular up here in Canada right now, but whenever I hear someone make an
anti-American comment I tell them about the great Americans I met this
summer in Nebraska.  I can't thank you enough for making me feel welcome.  I
remain impressed by American hospitality and look forward to visiting (or
even studying there) in the future.


"R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:

> Hi Corey,
>
> Can't remember exactly what I sent or was supposed to send, but here is an
> improved copy of the Ablaut paper.  I tried reading it on my wife's
computer
> which lacks any Siouan fonts and it looks like they embedded OK this time.
> Adobe Acrobat is really pretty lame at getting these things right.  It's
> probably great for straight English prose, but phonetic symbols make it
choke.
>
> I was in Edmonton a couple of weeks ago and noticed you were giving a
paper on
> Romanian at the provincial meeting in Banff.  I used to do Romanian back
in the
> early '70's when i was a Balkanist.  What was your paper about?
>
> Best,
>
> Bob
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Corey Telfer" <cstelfer at ucalgary.ca>
> To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: PDF embedded fonts.
>
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> >    I had a bear of a time making your PDF file come out right Bob, but
> > eventually I made it work.  The first copy I printed out had a lot of
fonts
> > wrong, and I only figured that out because I happened to be familiar with
> > the words in question.  I went back to the computer and eventually made
it
> > better, but I'm still not 100% certain that I have all the right
characters
> > in my copy.  If you could provide it as a word document and provide us
with
> > the fonts, that might work better...
> >
> >    I'm sorry to hear that your house was broken into and I hope nothing
too
> > valuable was lost.
> >
> > Corey Telfer
> > University of Calgary
> >
> >
> >
> > "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:
> >
> > > Yes, ideally and theoretically the necessary fonts are embedded
within .pdf
> > > documents.  However, I have found that this is unfortunately not
always the
> > > case.  Any number of times I have tried to make .pdf files of certain
> > documents,
> > > especially using the IroquoianABC font which includes a lot of
overstrike
> > > characters, and found that the resultant .pdf file did not reproduce
the
> > fonts
> > > properly.  It has also often been the case that material in columns
gets
> > shifted
> > > around.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong.  Nor do I know if there is a
> > > difference between the outcomes using "distiller" and "pdf writer"
choices.
> > > I'll give it my best shot though.
> > >
> > > This is going to take a few days since my home was burglarized Monday
and
> > I'm
> > > having to deal with a lot of unexpected paperwork.  Late next week
> > probably.
> > >
> > > Bob
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> >
>



--


From ahartley at d.umn.edu  Thu Dec  2 03:26:14 2004
From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 21:26:14 -0600
Subject: OK again
In-Reply-To: <C3774397E8A84711866E2F81@[192.168.2.34]>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.212614.0600.>

Wallace Chafe wrote:

> I agree with Bob about the Oll Korrect explanation, which probably ought
> to be put to rest for good, unless somebody finds some really convincing
> documentation of its use.

Apologies for the continued English excursion from the Muskogean/Caddoan
excursion from Siouan, but here (abridged) is what the OED says at the
two O.K. homonyms (to which I certainly can't add anything, not having
had time to read Read):

---

O.K.(1) "from the initial letters of Old Kinderhook, the nickname of
Martin Van Buren (1782-1862), president of the United States (1837-41)
(< Kinderhook, the name of Van Buren's hometown in New York State),
after OK a. and OK int.1 Cf. Old Hickory s.v. HICKORY n. 2c.
   The use as an interjection is purely as an electoral slogan and
rapidly comes to overlap with OK int.1 This assimilation is especially
clear late in 1840, during the election proper, when the slogan is used
to signal success in a particular locality (see quots. 18402, 18403 at
sense B.), although the process had begun within a few weeks of the
appearance of the initials:
   1840 Democratic Republican New Era (N.Y.) 27 May 2/6 We acknowledge
the receipt of a very pretty gold Pin,..having upon it the (to the
'Whigs') very frightful letters O.K., significant of the birth-place of
Martin Van Buren, old Kinderhook, as also the rallying word of the
Democracy of the late election, 'all correct'... Those who wear them
should bear in mind that it will require their most strenuous
exertions..to make all things O.K.
   Allen W. Read argues that the widespread use of the slogan was
critical in popularizing the original, usual sense of OK (see Amer.
Speech (1963) 38 83-102)."
A. n.
1. Old Kinderhook, a nickname for Martin Van Buren, United States
president and the Democratic presidential candidate, during the election
of 1840. Chiefly attrib. in O.K. Club, a group in the Democratic party's
central organization in New York which campaigned vigorously for Van
Buren during this election; cf. TAMMANY n.
2. A Democratic campaigner in New York during the presidential election
of 1840; a member of the O.K. Club.
B. int. temporary. Used as an election slogan by the Democratic party
(originally in New York) in the presidential election of 1840. Obs.
Merging almost immediately with OK int.1; see etymological note above.

---

O.K.(2) "see A. W. Read in Amer. Speech (1963) 38, (1964) 39, etc. From
the detailed evidence provided by A. W. Read it seems clear that O.K.
first appeared in 1839 (an instance of a contemporary vogue for humorous
abbreviations of this type), and that in 1840 it became greatly
reinforced by association with the initialism O.K. n1."


From munro at ucla.edu  Thu Dec  2 03:26:49 2004
From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:26:49 -0800
Subject: OK and the OED.
In-Reply-To: <00bf01c4d7f7$2ef0e650$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.192649.0800.>

I agree with everything Bob's said here, except that I think the h
definitely is not etymologically part of this item (maybe, as Bob says,
it is a clitic). The final vowel is not phonetically [i] (I do feel both
vowels are long, per Choctaw -- who knows how English speakers hear them).

Pam

R. Rankin wrote:

>
>> With Pam's permission, I'll send Oxford her Choctaw ho:ke:. Pam, is it,
>> as OED says, a suffix? Can it be, as OED has it, h-less?
>
>
> I'll defer to Pam on this.  The H may or may not be etymologically a
> part of oke.  It is a final consonant on many verb forms but there are
> other instances where it has been reanalysed as the initial consonant
> of a following enclitic. For example, the question particle, oN or aN
> has been reanalysed as -hoN or -haN by some speakers.  Synchronically,
> I'd guess that you could argue for either [hoke] or [oke].  The final
> vowel is definitely not [i] or [ii] in the Choctaw I've heard.  I'm
> remaining neutral on the phonemic value of it, since it doesn't matter
> to a potential English borrowing anyway (English speakers would hear
> it as [ey]).
>
> It might be worth combing literature from the deep South around the
> 1830's to see if maybe it crops up.  I have to admit I've never liked
> the "Oll Korrect" explanation.  It incorporates two
> non-characteristics of American English pronunciation and spelling.
>
> Bob
>

--
Pamela Munro,
Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm


From cstelfer at ucalgary.ca  Thu Dec  2 03:40:02 2004
From: cstelfer at ucalgary.ca (Corey Telfer)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 20:40:02 -0700
Subject: Accidental message
In-Reply-To: <087201c4ceab$c1532e40$2fb5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.1.DEC.2004.204002.0700.>

Sorry everybody,

     That last message was intended for Bob, not the whole list.  I
responded to the message that he accidentally sent to everybody...  If
anybody has comments about my ideas however, I wouldn't mind if you
responded directly to me - it's always good to get feedback.

Corey.



"R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:

> Hi Corey,
>
> Can't remember exactly what I sent or was supposed to send, but here is an
> improved copy of the Ablaut paper.  I tried reading it on my wife's
computer
> which lacks any Siouan fonts and it looks like they embedded OK this time.
> Adobe Acrobat is really pretty lame at getting these things right.  It's
> probably great for straight English prose, but phonetic symbols make it
choke.
>
> I was in Edmonton a couple of weeks ago and noticed you were giving a
paper on
> Romanian at the provincial meeting in Banff.  I used to do Romanian back
in the
> early '70's when i was a Balkanist.  What was your paper about?
>
> Best,
>
> Bob
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Corey Telfer" <cstelfer at ucalgary.ca>
> To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: PDF embedded fonts.
>
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> >    I had a bear of a time making your PDF file come out right Bob, but
> > eventually I made it work.  The first copy I printed out had a lot of
fonts
> > wrong, and I only figured that out because I happened to be familiar with
> > the words in question.  I went back to the computer and eventually made
it
> > better, but I'm still not 100% certain that I have all the right
characters
> > in my copy.  If you could provide it as a word document and provide us
with
> > the fonts, that might work better...
> >
> >    I'm sorry to hear that your house was broken into and I hope nothing
too
> > valuable was lost.
> >
> > Corey Telfer
> > University of Calgary
> >
> >
> >
> > "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu> said:
> >
> > > Yes, ideally and theoretically the necessary fonts are embedded
within .pdf
> > > documents.  However, I have found that this is unfortunately not
always the
> > > case.  Any number of times I have tried to make .pdf files of certain
> > documents,
> > > especially using the IroquoianABC font which includes a lot of
overstrike
> > > characters, and found that the resultant .pdf file did not reproduce
the
> > fonts
> > > properly.  It has also often been the case that material in columns
gets
> > shifted
> > > around.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong.  Nor do I know if there is a
> > > difference between the outcomes using "distiller" and "pdf writer"
choices.
> > > I'll give it my best shot though.
> > >
> > > This is going to take a few days since my home was burglarized Monday
and
> > I'm
> > > having to deal with a lot of unexpected paperwork.  Late next week
> > probably.
> > >
> > > Bob
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> >
> >
> >
>



--


From heike.boedeker at netcologne.de  Thu Dec  2 13:15:37 2004
From: heike.boedeker at netcologne.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Heike_B=F6deker?=)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 14:15:37 +0100
Subject: OK and rhymes
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0412011359100.15212@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.141537.0100.>

Dear John,

> This isn't to say that Native American music doesn't have strict
> metrical structure. I'd be astounded if *that* wasn't universal.

Actually, this is another item to add to our collection of non-
universals :-) There indeed are types of performances (e.g. in Arabo-
Irano-Turkic and South Asian musics) that are rhythmically, but not
metrically organized...

> Interestingly, I think Siouan and other Native American literatures
> show that meter - metrical verse, anyway - is also not universal.

... interestingly, Ancient Near Eastern poetry was like that, too,
c.f.:

Izre'el, Shlomo (2001): Adapa and the South Wind: Language has the
Power of Life and Death. (Mesopotamian Civilizations, 10) Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns

[esp. p. 99: "While the poetic structure of this myth in all of its
recensions has been acknowledged by most scholars, whether or not the
rhythmic pattern that has been observed can be termed *meter* is
another matter."]

All the best,

Heike


--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.289 / Virus Database: 265.4.4 - Release Date: 30.11.04


From jmcbride at kawnation.com  Thu Dec  2 15:18:29 2004
From: jmcbride at kawnation.com (Justin McBride)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 09:18:29 -0600
Subject: Ofo, Choctaw, &  Rhymes
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.091829.0600.>

This is completely unrelated to Siouan linguistics, but I figured I'd share it with you anyhow.

In a strange turn of Jungian synchronicity, most of the big Siouan List topics this week seem to me to center around an old professor of mine from the University of Oklahoma.  Geary Hobson, who wrote the novella "The Last Ofos", also wrote the foreword to an R. A. Lafferty book called "Okla Hannali" about a fictional Choctaw character.  Now, I know only two or three Choctaws, so this book was really the first introduction I ever had to anything like unto Choctaw culture.  Nowadays I always think of this book and subsequently Professor Hobson whenever I think of the Choctaws.  Furthermore, for one of his Native American Literature classes back in the day, I had to read from a book called "The Sky Clears: Poetry of the American Indian," wherein traditional Native songs, counts, recitations, and stories were translated into English (often from another intercessory European language), and arranged in verse form.  If I recall correctly, some of these "poems" were even made to rhyme in English.  I remember him talking in class about how such literary devices are less than universal, and how our seemingly fundamental notion of rhyming is absent in some if not all the Native languages that he knew of.  This is of course no earth-shattering revelation, but I'd never really considered it before, and so it stuck with me.  Oh, and Professor Hobson was a Quapaw, so he coincidentally hails from Siouan stock.

I'll leave you with a silly memory from the same time.  One old Native song in this poetry book had been translated first into a Scandinavian language, where it had obviously been embellished with some Nordic imagery.  This song must have been discovered during the compilation process, translated into English, and then arranged to look more familiar to the book's anglophonic readers.  It was such a strange thing for me to read a very modern looking song about fjords, skiffs, and the sea-faring life attributed a Native from a Northeast Woodlands culture!

-jtm
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From Granta at edgehill.ac.uk  Thu Dec  2 19:57:33 2004
From: Granta at edgehill.ac.uk (Anthony Grant)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 19:57:33 +0000
Subject: Caddoan 'corn'
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.195733.0000.>

And don't forget Adai <ocasuck> 'corn', one of the few Caddoan-looking
words in the Adai list.....

Anthony

>>> rankin at ku.edu 02/12/2004 19:43:15 >>>
I certainly would never presume to have any command of Caddoan
historical phonology, but whether or not the final syllable is
reconstructible from the set, I'm quite convinced of a Caddoan source,
either direct or indirect, for the Biloxi and Ofo words for 'corn'.

> As for 'corn', I tend to be a little skeptical of "boxcar
reconstructions".
In any case, I'm pretty sure the last syllable of Caddo kisi? isn't
cognate
with the endings of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Wichita words. Those
endings
correspond quite regularly to a Caddo noun suffix -?uh, not to -i?.



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From rankin at ku.edu  Thu Dec  2 19:43:15 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 13:43:15 -0600
Subject: Caddoan 'corn'
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.134315.0600.>

I certainly would never presume to have any command of Caddoan historical phonology, but whether or not the final syllable is reconstructible from the set, I'm quite convinced of a Caddoan source, either direct or indirect, for the Biloxi and Ofo words for 'corn'.  

> As for 'corn', I tend to be a little skeptical of "boxcar reconstructions".
In any case, I'm pretty sure the last syllable of Caddo kisi? isn't cognate
with the endings of the Pawnee, Arikara, and Wichita words. Those endings
correspond quite regularly to a Caddo noun suffix -?uh, not to -i?.




From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU  Thu Dec  2 21:34:39 2004
From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S)
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 14:34:39 -0700
Subject: Rhymes
In-Reply-To: <002c01c4d882$2df2c710$6000a8c0@Language>
Message-ID: <THU.2.DEC.2004.143439.0700.>

May I remind us of Del Hymes' extensive work with what he calls
"ethnopoetics"?  His claim is that many, many of the texts that are
recorded in Native American languages as straight prose are really much
more like epic poems.  The clues are in the repeated use of conjunctions
or other kinds of discourse particles.  Richard Lungstrum's dissertation
was an attempt to apply the idea to Lakhota texts -- with some success, I
think.  The "poetry" lies, then, not in the structure of the lines or in
rhythm or sound effects, but in the timing of the report of events and
ideas.  See Hymes' book "In vain I tried to tell you..." for a place to
start.

David

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu


From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Fri Dec  3 08:00:05 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 09:00:05 +0100
Subject: lack of rhymes
Message-ID: <FRI.3.DEC.2004.090005.0100.>

 >>Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"

Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka
i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

Buechel gives _i'yotakA_ (to sit down) different from _yaNkA_ (to sit/be
sitting). So the famous chief's name obviously describes a buffalo in
the movement of sitting down (with the forelegs still standing on the
ground).<<<<

 >  Alfred W. T?ting wrote:
Both forms are found for 'Sitting Bull"
Tatanka Iyotake [txataN'ka i'yotake] or
Tatanka Iyotanka [txataN'ka i'yotaNka] - and also: ~ yotanka etc.

I am not sure where the Tatanka Iyotanka form - common in popular
literature - originates from. I have reasons to believe that the correct
form is ThathaN'ka I'yotake, pronounced ThathaN'kiyotake in fast speech.
Jan <<

Sorry for my (consequent!) typos in misspelling the pronunciation :( (it
should've been [txatxaN'ka] of course.

BTW, what over and over is puzzling to me is the use of umlaut change in
proper names, which seems to be pretty arbitrary (cf. the differing
versions here: - iyotake/iyotaka).



Alfred


From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Fri Dec  3 08:23:30 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 09:23:30 +0100
Subject: Romanian: palatalization/assibilation
Message-ID: <FRI.3.DEC.2004.092330.0100.>

 > (Corey) My Romanian paper is basically the seed of my master's
thesis.  In
looking at Romanian 'palatalization' (the addition of an off-glide [j] to
form plurals and second person singular verbs) I found both palatalization
and assibilation effects.  This is not really surprising, considering both
processes tend to be caused by high front vocoids.  In my paper, I take the
radical position that the coronalization of Romanian velars is due to
assibilation... <<


 From my point of view as a (linguistically aware) speaker for about 40
years this thesis seems very convincing to me. (BTW, palatalization
seems to affect different consonants in different ways, e.g. with  [z]
in _vezi_ , palatalization is hardly perceivable.)

The title of an old movie (1965?), back in Bukarest, is coming on my
mind, which was "Un cartof - doi cartofi" :-)


Alfred


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Thu Dec  9 06:48:36 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 23:48:36 -0700
Subject: Sitting Bull (RE: lack of rhymes) (fwd)
Message-ID: <WED.8.DEC.2004.234836.0700.>

I see I misdirected this.  Jan's mail has one of those header arrangements
that overrides the default response of "reply to list."  I tend not to
notice that my assumptions are wrong.  That tendency may not be limited to
email.

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Jan Ullrich wrote:
> I am not sure where the Tatanka Iyotanka form - common in popular
> literature - originates from. I have reasons to believe that the correct
> form is ThathaN'ka I'yotake, pronounced ThathaN'kiyotake in fast speech.

Whether it's widespread in the popular literature or simply a nonce form,
ThathaN'ka I'yotaNke might arise from European sensibilities - something
that almost rhymes being adjusted by the memory so that it does.  I use
European here in its cultural sense, not its geographical one.  That is
Anglo-American sensibilities are perhaps responsible.  [And it may have
been me who produced this form, making it my Anglo-American sensibilities
specifically.]


From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Fri Dec 10 19:49:11 2004
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty)
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 14:49:11 -0500
Subject: Saint Louis
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0410191653010.17818@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.10.DEC.2004.144911.0500.>

Does anyone have any records of Native names for the French town of St.
Louis on the Mississippi?

Thank you,

Michael


From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu  Fri Dec 10 21:32:35 2004
From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson)
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 15:32:35 -0600
Subject: Saint Louis
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1041210144822.19959Y-100000@ariel.ucs.indiana.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.10.DEC.2004.153235.0600.>

Michael wrote:
> Does anyone have any records of Native names for the French town of St.
> Louis on the Mississippi?

We had a discussion on this around the beginning of this year.
I think the only Siouan ones we could come up with were the
OP forms noted below.

>>From the Dorsey dictionary, not specified whether Omaha or Ponka,
we have:

    Ppa'hi-z^ii'de              "Red Neck"

And from Fletcher and La Flesche, p. 101, for the Omaha, we have:

    Ppahi'(N) z^iide ttaNwaN    "Red Hair Town"
                                "(Referring to the color
                                  of Governor Clark's hair.)"

I believe it was my request for the very information that
Michael is asking for that started the Short Bread Thread.

Rory


From Louis_Garcia at littlehoop.cc  Fri Dec 10 21:33:22 2004
From: Louis_Garcia at littlehoop.cc (Louis Garcia)
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 15:33:22 -0600
Subject: Saint Louis
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.96.1041210144822.19959Y-100000@ariel.ucs.indiana.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.10.DEC.2004.153322.0600.>

Michael:
I don't have my place names here at work.
St. Louis was named something like Pasa Taotonwe. Red heads'Town referring
to Clark of Lewis and Clark.
He was the Indian Agent (Ateyapi) and received many delegations at that
city.
My two cents,
Louie

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu
[mailto:owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu]On Behalf Of Michael Mccafferty
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 1:49 PM
To: Siouan List
Subject: Saint Louis



Does anyone have any records of Native names for the French town of St.
Louis on the Mississippi?

Thank you,

Michael


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec 15 15:55:43 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:55:43 -0700
Subject: Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP (Re: Biloxi/Ofo)
In-Reply-To: <00b901c4d730$40e666e0$2ab5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.085543.0700.>

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a quality
> distinction.  No one has had the courage to undertake a complete
> analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics (it would
> be a massive undertaking).

Agreed.  I did look at this to some extent in the OP texts and came to the
conclusion that e-breve is pretty closely associated with the context
Ch__#, e.g., =the, =khe, =dhiNkhe 'the', but also e'be 'who' (first e),
e'di 'there (demonstrative)', edi' 'there was (existential predicative)',
e'gidhe 'it came to pass that ...; as expected ...', he' 'female
declarative'.  Various longer forms have -<e-breve>, like t?e=dhe 'kill',
we'ahide 'far away', and so on. I-breve was in variation with i and also
mostly final.

Typical cases of i-breve in Dorsey are kki 'if, when', -z^i NEG, Kki
(khi?) 'And ...', =s^ti 'too', s^i 'also', and so on.

Typical cases of a-breve are =ga 'male imperative', =a 'female
imperative', =a 'interrogative', ha' 'well', ha' 'male declarative'.

Typical cases of u-breve are exclamations, huN, wu, wuNh.

It looks to me as if it could be argued that e-breve, i-breve, and a-breve
are indications of a short vowel, but that lack of a breve would not be
conclusive evidence of a long vowel.

This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey writes
with final i, but LaFlesche with final e.

The only form I have been able to come up with quickly is:

ppaN'ghi 'parsnip' (JOD 90:653.11) :  ppaNghe 'radish' (Swetland 91:144)

- ppaN'ghe is the form in in Ks and Os
- there's no breve on this form in Dorsey

Possibly relevant are cases like

dhe'ze 'tongue', but cf. Da c^e'z^i', Wi reezi'

In this case PSi seems to have -i, but Dh has -e.

wathaN'zi 'corn plant' (all sources), but cf. Qu wathaN'se
idha'di 'father' (all sources), but cf. Qu ida'tte
ine'gi 'mother's brother' (all sources), but cf. Qu itte'ke
sagi' 'hard' (all sources), but cf. Ks  da'sage 'harden in wind'
-ppu'kki instrumental sound root, but cf. Ks -ppokki ~ -ppokke ditto

In these cases some Dh has -e, but most -i.

Not participating in this pattern are forms that seem to end in hi from
PDh *hu in the sense of 'plant', e.g., bu(u)'de hi 'oak' or hazi 'grape'
(probably from haz-hi); body parts like nu(u)'si 'armpits', ppi'zi 'gall',
i'kki 'chin'; kinterms like itti'mi 'father's sister'; verbs like uaN'si
'jump', c^hi' 'to copulate', tte'xi 'difficult'.  Also ma(a)'si 'hail'.

A number of these OP -i are from *-u, but not all, e.g., not ppi'zi or
itti'mi.


From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Wed Dec 15 16:24:44 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 09:24:44 -0700
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
In-Reply-To: <00a901c4d7f4$14b7fa10$08b5ed81@Rankin>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.092444.0700.>

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
>I only bring it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan
>influence in Biloxi and Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>
>  Ofo:                        a-c? ki           'corn'
> Biloxi:                     a-y?:ki           'corn'
> Pawnee:                     r?:k  su       'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
> Wichita:                      t?:    s ?       'corn'
> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'

Doug Parks lists an absolutive (independent noun forming) suffix -u for
Pawnee.  The comparable element in Wichita seems to be ?a, though I don't
mean to suggest that this is cognate.  Even douvting it was cognate would
be overreaching myself in Caddoan!  I believe that in both cases these
elements occur with some nouns, but not with others with no conditioning
factor known.  The critical element is that the suffix occurs with an
affected noun in its independent form, but is lost when the noun is
combined with something else (presumably following).

I suppose that since in this corn set Pawnee has -s, Arikara has -su?, and
Wichita -s? that isn't a factor here.


From rankin at ku.edu  Wed Dec 15 17:09:16 2004
From: rankin at ku.edu (R. Rankin)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:09:16 -0600
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.110916.0600.>

> And Adai <ocasuck>, however that was pronounced (? /okesak/)

It's hard for me to judge exactly which Caddoan forms are cognates within that
family.  I only included those that pretty clearly shared the *Re:k or *Re:ki
portion of the word that turns up in Biloxi and Ofo.  There were probably quite
a few Caddoan dialects spoken in Louisiana and thereabouts around the time of
DeSoto.  Nor do I know whether 'corn' is actually cognate in Caddoan or whether
the term represents borrowings.  It's certainly far from cognate in Siouan,
where there are 3 or 4 different sources for the word in different subgroups (or
crosscutting subgroups).

Bob


From pankihtamwa at earthlink.net  Wed Dec 15 16:45:57 2004
From: pankihtamwa at earthlink.net (David Costa)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:45:57 -0800
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.084557.0800.>

One might as well include Kitsai /kotai/ 'corn' as well (HNAI 13: 64), tho
it doesn't match the word in any of the sister languages. A loan word from
who knows where?

David C

> On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:

>>I only bring it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan
>>influence in Biloxi and Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>>
>> Ofo:                        a-c? ki           'corn'
>> Biloxi:                     a-y?:ki           'corn'
>> Pawnee:                     r?:k  su       'corn'
>> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
>> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
>> Wichita:                      t?:    s ?       'corn'
>> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'
>
> Doug Parks lists an absolutive (independent noun forming) suffix -u for
> Pawnee.  The comparable element in Wichita seems to be ?a, though I don't
> mean to suggest that this is cognate.  Even doubting it was cognate would
> be overreaching myself in Caddoan!  I believe that in both cases these
> elements occur with some nouns, but not with others with no conditioning
> factor known.  The critical element is that the suffix occurs with an
> affected noun in its independent form, but is lost when the noun is
> combined with something else (presumably following).
>
> I suppose that since in this corn set Pawnee has -s, Arikara has -su?, and
> Wichita -s? that isn't a factor here.
>


From Granta at edgehill.ac.uk  Wed Dec 15 16:53:13 2004
From: Granta at edgehill.ac.uk (Anthony Grant)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:53:13 +0000
Subject: Caddoan Corn (Re: Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi)
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.165313.0000.>

And Adai <ocasuck>, however that was pronounced (? /okesak/)

Anthony

>>> John.Koontz at colorado.edu 15/12/2004 16:24:44 >>>
On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
>I only bring it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan
>influence in Biloxi and Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.
>
>  Ofo:                        a-c? ki           'corn'
> Biloxi:                     a-y?:ki           'corn'
> Pawnee:                     r?:k  su       'corn'
> Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
> Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
> Wichita:                      t?:    s ?       'corn'
> Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'

Doug Parks lists an absolutive (independent noun forming) suffix -u for
Pawnee.  The comparable element in Wichita seems to be ?a, though I don't
mean to suggest that this is cognate.  Even douvting it was cognate would
be overreaching myself in Caddoan!  I believe that in both cases these
elements occur with some nouns, but not with others with no conditioning
factor known.  The critical element is that the suffix occurs with an
affected noun in its independent form, but is lost when the noun is
combined with something else (presumably following).

I suppose that since in this corn set Pawnee has -s, Arikara has -su?, and
Wichita -s? that isn't a factor here.


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From are2 at buffalo.edu  Wed Dec 15 17:24:00 2004
From: are2 at buffalo.edu (are2 at buffalo.edu)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:24:00 -0500
Subject: Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP (Re: Biloxi/Ofo)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0411301943230.25616@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.122400.0500.>

/i/ word finally in Omaha frequently sounds like /e/ in rapid speech.
GasaNdhi 'tomorrow' for example sounds like gasaNdhe very often.
-Ardis


Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> > No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a
> quality
> > distinction.  No one has had the courage to undertake a complete
> > analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics (it
> would
> > be a massive undertaking).
>
> Agreed.  I did look at this to some extent in the OP texts and came
> to the
> conclusion that e-breve is pretty closely associated with the
> context
> Ch__#, e.g., =the, =khe, =dhiNkhe 'the', but also e'be 'who' (first
> e),
> e'di 'there (demonstrative)', edi' 'there was (existential
> predicative)',
> e'gidhe 'it came to pass that ...; as expected ...', he' 'female
> declarative'.  Various longer forms have -<e-breve>, like t?e=dhe
> 'kill',
> we'ahide 'far away', and so on. I-breve was in variation with i and
> also
> mostly final.
>
> Typical cases of i-breve in Dorsey are kki 'if, when', -z^i NEG, Kki
> (khi?) 'And ...', =s^ti 'too', s^i 'also', and so on.
>
> Typical cases of a-breve are =ga 'male imperative', =a 'female
> imperative', =a 'interrogative', ha' 'well', ha' 'male declarative'.
>
> Typical cases of u-breve are exclamations, huN, wu, wuNh.
>
> It looks to me as if it could be argued that e-breve, i-breve, and
> a-breve
> are indications of a short vowel, but that lack of a breve would not
> be
> conclusive evidence of a long vowel.
>
> This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey
> writes
> with final i, but LaFlesche with final e.
>
> The only form I have been able to come up with quickly is:
>
> ppaN'ghi 'parsnip' (JOD 90:653.11) :  ppaNghe 'radish' (Swetland
> 91:144)
>
> - ppaN'ghe is the form in in Ks and Os
> - there's no breve on this form in Dorsey
>
> Possibly relevant are cases like
>
> dhe'ze 'tongue', but cf. Da c^e'z^i', Wi reezi'
>
> In this case PSi seems to have -i, but Dh has -e.
>
> wathaN'zi 'corn plant' (all sources), but cf. Qu wathaN'se
> idha'di 'father' (all sources), but cf. Qu ida'tte
> ine'gi 'mother's brother' (all sources), but cf. Qu itte'ke
> sagi' 'hard' (all sources), but cf. Ks  da'sage 'harden in wind'
> -ppu'kki instrumental sound root, but cf. Ks -ppokki ~ -ppokke ditto
>
> In these cases some Dh has -e, but most -i.
>
> Not participating in this pattern are forms that seem to end in hi
> from
> PDh *hu in the sense of 'plant', e.g., bu(u)'de hi 'oak' or hazi
> 'grape'
> (probably from haz-hi); body parts like nu(u)'si 'armpits', ppi'zi
> 'gall',
> i'kki 'chin'; kinterms like itti'mi 'father's sister'; verbs like
> uaN'si
> 'jump', c^hi' 'to copulate', tte'xi 'difficult'.  Also ma(a)'si
> 'hail'.
>
> A number of these OP -i are from *-u, but not all, e.g., not ppi'zi
> or
> itti'mi.
>
>
>


From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com  Wed Dec 15 18:05:12 2004
From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:05:12 -0800
Subject: Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP (Re: Biloxi/Ofo)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0411301943230.25616@spot.colorado.edu>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.100512.0800.>

-- This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey writes
with final i, but LaFlesche with final e. --

This same phenomenon also seems to have occurred in Biloxi, where it seems Dorsey wrote many words with final -i (1890s) that Haas and Swadesh (1930s) later recorded as ending in final -e, + glottal stop.

For instance, Dorsey's "fire" is peti vs. Haas's pe?te? (with ? representing glottal stops).  And since you were talking about "corn", Dorsey writes yek, yeki, or ayeki vs. Haas's yeke? and ayeke? (again ? representing glottal stop).  (Note that the form ayeki or ayeke seems to be shortened by dropping the initial a- on several occasions.)

Dave


Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu> wrote:
On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> No, Dorsey always writes the length distinction as if it were a quality
> distinction. No one has had the courage to undertake a complete
> analysis of JOD's use of the breve and other vowel diacritics (it would
> be a massive undertaking).

Agreed. I did look at this to some extent in the OP texts and came to the
conclusion that e-breve is pretty closely associated with the context
Ch__#, e.g., =the, =khe, =dhiNkhe 'the', but also e'be 'who' (first e),
e'di 'there (demonstrative)', edi' 'there was (existential predicative)',
e'gidhe 'it came to pass that ...; as expected ...', he' 'female
declarative'. Various longer forms have -, like t?e=dhe 'kill',
we'ahide 'far away', and so on. I-breve was in variation with i and also
mostly final.

Typical cases of i-breve in Dorsey are kki 'if, when', -z^i NEG, Kki
(khi?) 'And ...', =s^ti 'too', s^i 'also', and so on.

Typical cases of a-breve are =ga 'male imperative', =a 'female
imperative', =a 'interrogative', ha' 'well', ha' 'male declarative'.

Typical cases of u-breve are exclamations, huN, wu, wuNh.

It looks to me as if it could be argued that e-breve, i-breve, and a-breve
are indications of a short vowel, but that lack of a breve would not be
conclusive evidence of a long vowel.

This reminds me that there are a number of OP words that Dorsey writes
with final i, but LaFlesche with final e.

The only form I have been able to come up with quickly is:

ppaN'ghi 'parsnip' (JOD 90:653.11) : ppaNghe 'radish' (Swetland 91:144)

- ppaN'ghe is the form in in Ks and Os
- there's no breve on this form in Dorsey

Possibly relevant are cases like

dhe'ze 'tongue', but cf. Da c^e'z^i', Wi reezi'

In this case PSi seems to have -i, but Dh has -e.

wathaN'zi 'corn plant' (all sources), but cf. Qu wathaN'se
idha'di 'father' (all sources), but cf. Qu ida'tte
ine'gi 'mother's brother' (all sources), but cf. Qu itte'ke
sagi' 'hard' (all sources), but cf. Ks da'sage 'harden in wind'
-ppu'kki instrumental sound root, but cf. Ks -ppokki ~ -ppokke ditto

In these cases some Dh has -e, but most -i.

Not participating in this pattern are forms that seem to end in hi from
PDh *hu in the sense of 'plant', e.g., bu(u)'de hi 'oak' or hazi 'grape'
(probably from haz-hi); body parts like nu(u)'si 'armpits', ppi'zi 'gall',
i'kki 'chin'; kinterms like itti'mi 'father's sister'; verbs like uaN'si
'jump', c^hi' 'to copulate', tte'xi 'difficult'. Also ma(a)'si 'hail'.

A number of these OP -i are from *-u, but not all, e.g., not ppi'zi or
itti'mi.


		
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From John.Koontz at colorado.edu  Thu Dec 16 02:01:44 2004
From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E)
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 19:01:44 -0700
Subject: Biloxi ayeke?/ayeki (Dorsey's Breves; e vs. i in OP)
In-Reply-To: <20041215180512.97602.qmail@web53802.mail.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <WED.15.DEC.2004.190144.0700.>

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, David Kaufman wrote:
> And since you were talking about "corn", Dorsey writes yek, yeki, or
> ayeki vs. Haas's yeke? and ayeke? (again ? representing glottal stop).
> (Note that the form ayeki or ayeke seems to be shortened by dropping the
> initial a- on several occasions.)

Bob actually mentioned this in his corn comment, but for some reason his
text seems to have come through with most of the vowels missing, including
the e in this one.

I think that Bob's also mentioned that Biloxi has #a- < *wa-.  In Dhegiha
and in Mississippi Valley generally "crop" terms seem to have wa-
initially, e.g., OP wathaNzi 'corn (plant)' and wahaba 'corn (seed, ear)'.
I think my glosses here are somewhat off.  I seem to recall wahaba hi
specifically as 'ear of corn', so maybe wahaba alone is more like 'corn
seed'.  Think of hi here as 'stalk'.  It's a bit like oak and acorn in
English, perhaps, the plant as the plant and the plant as its fruit.

I think of this wa- as 'unpossessed' by analogy with a form like wahi
'bone', but I may be wrong in both cases.  I think Bob thinks of things
like this as fossilized classifiers from a Pre-Siouan period.


From goodtracks at GBRonline.com  Fri Dec 24 03:26:27 2004
From: goodtracks at GBRonline.com (Jimm GoodTracks)
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 21:26:27 -0600
Subject: Fw: BLESSED HOLIDAYS
Message-ID: <THU.23.DEC.2004.212627.0600.>

Clear Day


Kig??e G?rokihina B??i Ch?gerokan 

Happy Holidays and Blessed New Year

&

May you have three spiritual gifts of the Season

 

M?yannPi             Spirit of Christmas                   PEACE

Wak?da   Gladness of Cristmas        HOPE

WaP?kikihi                 Heart of Christmas                     GOOD-WILL

 

 

Jimm and Grandsons, David and Joseph


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From ti at fa-kuan.muc.de  Fri Dec 24 14:17:00 2004
From: ti at fa-kuan.muc.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Alfred_W=2E_T=FCting=22?=)
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 15:17:00 +0100
Subject: Wanikiya Tun
Message-ID: <FRI.24.DEC.2004.151700.0100.>

Wanikiya Tunpi Taanpetu Waste nahan Omaka Teca iyuskinyanpi ye !

(wani'kxiya txuN'pi txa?aN'petu was^te' nahaN' o'makxa txe'ca
iyus^'kiNyaNpi ye!)


Alfred
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