Ponca - pathanike?

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Jonathan Holmes wrote:
> "This song, he's calling his friend. He had gone on the war path. At the
> beginning of the second part, 'pathanike', that we don't know. It's an
> ancient word which we have never learned as to what it means. But the
> first two words is 'kotha nuda he tha', it means 'friend had been on the
> war path.'

Songs can be very difficult, as I've learned just from a casual
examination of the examples in Fletcher & LaFlsche and similar sources.
The question of vocables, and of distinguishing simple euphonic
interjections and syllable or final vowel repetitions from "sentence final
particles" seems quite complex.  Plainly Fletcher & LaFlesche, presumably
the latter being the one speaking, don't distinguish these things, but
then I think that they may not really have distinguished sentence final
particles from euphonic interjections in regular speech either.

I think some of the complications in songs stem from them being passed
readily from one linguistic community to another, with only modest
adaptations to the new linguistic context.  Thus some songs in Fletcher &
LaFlesch struck me as using, e.g., Kaw sentence finals, or something more
like that than Omaha-Ponca sentence finals.  In some cases, perhaps the
final particles might reflect archaic patterns or even dialects/languages
no longer extant.

Of course, what can be said of particles can be said of other lexical
elements, too.  The commentator on this song lumps the various
possibilities under the headings of "ancient words," but I think we can
take this to mean any sort of textual obscurity, whether it refers to some
actual archaic usage or simply to the usage of, say, Osage.

I don't really know what to make of pathanike, but clutching at straws one
possibility might be something more or less equivalent to spoken OP ppa
dhaN dhiNge 'lacking the head' or maybe even ppa dhadhiNge, if that could
mean 'spoken of as lacking (a) head'.  I've seen the dha-insrumental used
in the sense of 'spoken of as', e.g., dhaxube 'to praise, to speak of as
holy'.  The final element could also be dhiNkhe 'the (sitting animate)' or
niNkhe, the second person of the same.  There might be some more exotic
variant of the expression ppahaNga 'first', which seems to be
etymologically 'head-lead(ing)' or, equivalently, 'head-ancest(e)r(al)'.
I've seen one or more of those, but don't recall them at the moment.

Obviously one problem here is not knowing what to make of the
transcription, combined for another with the possibility that the
phonology of the song text may not be Omaha-Ponca.  A third possibility is
that the text has been arbitrarily mangled at some point or points by
singers not knowing that the second factor applies or trying to make some
sense of an otherwise obscure original, what one might call the "donuts
make my brown eyes blue" phenomenon.  (Or have you ever been caught in the
crossfire during an attempt to parse "No, woman, no cry."?)

As far as kotha nuda he tha

kkudha = 'friend'

Not the usual modern word, but kkodha (or hhodha) is 'friend' in Osage,
and I've seen iNdakkudha '(my?) friend' in several places in Omaha-Ponca
songs.  Check the LinguistList archives, because I think we discussed this
form extensively during the Kaw Chair Affair.

nudaN = 'war, war path; to go to war'

As far as he tha, it depends on whether this represents hi dhe or he dha
or something else.  The possibility he dha would be a reasonable sort of
line terminator for a song, somewhere between a sentence terminator and a
more "euphonic" string on the order of "Frog he went a courting, o ho, o
ho" or "It was the same old song with the melancholy sound Uh uh uh, uh uh
uh uh uh."  But hidhe could be 'he was sent'.

If it were a text I'd say to give me the rest of the sentence for context,
but songs can be pretty oblique!  There might not be anymore context than
you've mentioned, or it might not be very helpful.