Biloxi/Ofo

[R. Rankin]

> -- In the SE there are problems created by notation and also by the
> Southeastern
> areal feature by which some /i/ may be phonetically [e]. Mary Haas's paper on
> "The Last Words of Biloxi" points out that [e] is an allophone of the phoneme
> /i/.... --  I just recently got and read this article, and I think Haas
> mentions that for words ending in -i', it often comes out as -e', i think she
> says when there's silence following.  Or did I misread/miscomprehend that?

I can't remember all of Haas' environments, but they're in the article.  The
Choctaw rule, for those who applied it, was /i/  >  [e] in utterance-final
position.  I can't remember if the speakers who did that were from Oklahoma or
from Mississippi.  My recollection is that the Mobilian Trade Jargon had lots of
examples too -- and that's probably the vehicle by which most of the diffusion
took place in the lower Mississippi Valley and adjacent areas.

> -- Ofo appears to share this trait, and I have a short discussion of it in
> that
> little Ofo pamphlet I prepared for the Siouan Conf. a couple of years back in
> Rapid City.--  Is there some way I can get my hands on a copy of your article?
> Was it published?

Not yet, although a version will presumably appear in the proceedings of last
April's LAVIS meeting in Tuscaloosa.  I can mail a preliminary version of the
Ofo dict. revision with phonemicizations and a morphosyntax summary.  Some of
the words in the dict. are still in the orthographic alphabetical order
established by Swanton, but I added vowel length from his manuscript card file
at the Smithsonian.

Bob