OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]

[Koontz John E]

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.