Rory's Mysterious Omaha-Ponca Fragment

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2004 Rgraczyk at aol.com wrote:
> What's interesting about tennise'ete is that it is not simply a matter of
> code-switching; 'ten cents' has been refashioned into a phonologically normal
> Crow expression: ...

It's like that with the "French-origin" names in Omaha, the refashioning
being often rather unpredictable, but the numbers, etc., are typically not
adapted that I recall, though they are presumably in Omaha English, which
is a bit different from eastern Nebraska English.  Truthfully I don't
recall the specific forms of the English used in the examples I noticed.

Omaha English is also something I didn't really look at carefully, but I
noticed that it was intonationally different and among the elders who were
fluent in Omaha it had some treatments of clusters and finals in common
with Omaha, e.g., [I<ng>g<schwa>lIs^] or maybe it was [I<ng>g<schwa>lis^V]
(with I for lax I and V for some undetected voiceless vowel).  A different
intonational quality was also noticeable in the speech of younger
children, though I couldn't say exactly what was different.  Presumably
the kids weren't fluent in Omaha at all, but they may have been less aware
of non-Omaha patterns.