Status of "u" in Omaha-Ponca

[ROOD DAVID S]

ho'os means 'nearby in time'.  With future or present tense, it means
'soon'; with past tenses, it means 'recently' or 'shortly before or after
that'.

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

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, ROOD DAVID S wrote:
> > I am intrigued by this information, even though I probably knew it once,
> > because the major difference between Wichita and Pawnee vowels is that
> > Wichita merged [u] and [i] to /i/.  There are traces of the old *u in
> > the morphophonemics.  Some rules that apply before /i/ don't apply
> > before certain /i/s, namely, those that go back to *u.
>
> This is sort of like *<barred i> in Eastern Eskimo.  The historic fourth
> vowel that merges everywhere with *i, *a, or *u on the surface, but tends
> to retain its own consistant pattern of morphophonemics.
>
> > Wichita then had a three vowel system with no front/back distinction:
> > i/e/a.  More recently they have evolved an /o:/ from VwV sequences, but
> > I know of only one word with a short "o" in the whole language, and it's
> > suspect, too, because it's /ho'os/, i.e. has a medial glottal stop and
> > the two instances harmonize. I have no etymology for it, so it stands as
> > a unique instance of that phoneme.
>
> What does ho'os mean?
>
> > I wonder about some sort of areal phenomenon now.  That sound change
> > strikes me as kind of unusual. (I know about conditioned umlaut and
> > unrounding, e.g. foot/feet, of course, but that's not an unconditioned
> > merger.)
>
> I think this sort of unmotivated rounding of *u is not entirely without
> precedent.  For example, what about */u/ > /u"/ in Greek and French?  I
> think in both cases this is essentially unmotivated and accompanied by a
> (preceding? subsequent?) shift of */ou/ > /u/.  I also think, but am not
> sure, that (Ancient) Greek /u"/ becomes Modern /i/, too.  However, these
> are the only similar examples I know of.
>
> Western American English does a sort of unmotivated unrounding and
> centering of <lax u> (=> <barred u> or <barred i>), e.g., in good, book,
> look, etc.  I don't know if this is similar enough to be considered a
> parallel.
>