From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Mon Oct 2 21:55:59 2006 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 15:55:59 -0600 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this project succeed. Best, David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu DO YOU SPEAK LAKOTA? WOULD YOU LIKE TO EARN AN M. A. DEGREE WHILE HELPING TO STRENGTHEN THE LANGUAGE? The University of Colorado Department of Linguistics will offer full support to three Lakota speakers for three years each, starting in the Fall of 2007, to enable them to study for the Master of Arts in Linguistics and to undertake the video documentation of everyday Lakota conversation. "Full support" means all tuition and fees plus a 50% Student Research Assistant appointment (which includes health insurance), usually enough to live on. The funding for this project is a grant from the National Science Foundation to Prof. David S. Rood. Applicants must (1) be able to speak the Lakota language to some extent; (2) be qualified and willing to become graduate students at the University of Colorado; (3) be enthusiastic about helping to meet the need to document and perpetuate the Lakota language. If you are interested in applying to be one of these three student researchers, please examine the general information about graduate studies in Linguistics available on the internet at: http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/ You will be a regularly enrolled student, taking graduate courses. In addition, you will have daily conversation sessions in Lakota with a fluent elder. In the summers you will make videotapes of people holding conversations in Lakota which you will analyze and translate during the following year. You might finish your M.A. in two years, but whether you do or not, you will still have support for the third year. The project will provide the equipment you need and pay your travel expenses as well as paying fees to those who participate in your videos. You will receive academic help if you want it, and you will be put in touch with Native American social and support groups on campus. We hope you will find a career supporting efforts to keep Lakota alive, but you do not need to promise that to be eligible for the program. The application deadline is January 15, 2007. Please contact Prof. Rood for any kind of questions or assistance with the application: David S. Rood 295 UCB Boulder, Colorado, 80305-0295 telephone 303-492-2747 email rood at colorado.edu From munro at ucla.edu Mon Oct 2 23:05:38 2006 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 16:05:38 -0700 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Wonderful! I don't know any suitable candidates, however. Pam ROOD DAVID S wrote: >Dear Colleagues, > > I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and >spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this project >succeed. > Best, > David > >David S. Rood >Dept. of Linguistics >Univ. of Colorado >295 UCB >Boulder, CO 80309-0295 >USA >rood at colorado.edu > >DO YOU SPEAK LAKOTA? > >WOULD YOU LIKE TO EARN AN M. A. DEGREE WHILE HELPING TO STRENGTHEN THE >LANGUAGE? > > The University of Colorado Department of Linguistics will offer >full support to three Lakota speakers for three years each, starting in >the Fall of 2007, to enable them to study for the Master of Arts in >Linguistics and to undertake the video documentation of everyday Lakota >conversation. "Full support" means all tuition and fees plus a 50% >Student Research Assistant appointment (which includes health insurance), >usually enough to live on. The funding for this project is a grant from >the National Science Foundation to Prof. David S. Rood. > Applicants must (1) be able to speak the Lakota language to some >extent; (2) be qualified and willing to become graduate students at the >University of Colorado; (3) be enthusiastic about helping to meet the need >to document and perpetuate the Lakota language. > If you are interested in applying to be one of these three student >researchers, please examine the general information about graduate studies >in Linguistics available on the internet at: >http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/ > You will be a regularly enrolled student, taking graduate courses. >In addition, you will have daily conversation sessions in Lakota with a >fluent elder. In the summers you will make videotapes of people holding >conversations in Lakota which you will analyze and translate during the >following year. You might finish your M.A. in two years, but whether you >do or not, you will still have support for the third year. The project >will provide the equipment you need and pay your travel expenses as well >as paying fees to those who participate in your videos. > > You will receive academic help if you want it, and you will be put >in touch with Native American social and support groups on campus. We >hope you will find a career supporting efforts to keep Lakota alive, but >you do not need to promise that to be eligible for the program. > > The application deadline is January 15, 2007. Please contact >Prof. Rood for any kind of questions or assistance with the application: > > David S. Rood > 295 UCB > Boulder, Colorado, 80305-0295 > telephone 303-492-2747 > email rood at colorado.edu > > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 03:58:12 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 21:58:12 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > > Apical refers to the tongue tip. > > Good, that's what I thought. In that case, my confusion is over the > apparent contrast between apical and alveolar. It should be apico-dental and apico-alveolar. > I do carefully write tt vs. tH, and not t vs. tH. I learned this > convention from you years ago, and I've been following it pretty > religiously. Me, too. Or rather tt vs. th. I don't see any point in raising the h if the "r" isn't written th, but instead is written dh (i.e., edh, or the curled, crossed d). But the two popular schemes write t vs. tH and write edh mostly as "th". I think one or the other writes l in some contexts, but I've just ignored that. It would be fine, but of course, but th is clearly prefered, and l doesn't contrast with th, so th it is. > I'm entirely convinced that any native speaker of English using loose t > or x to transcribe Omaha will frequently put down t indifferently for tt > or tH, and x indifferently for x^ and g^, and go right on without > realizing anything is amiss. If you force yourself to use only the > marked form, then you seldom make that kind of mistake. This is Bob's argument for the stops. I don't think he would claim it for x vs. gamma, because no linguist is confused about that for long, and no English speaker thinks x is a velar fricative. Omahas (not Poncas, I think) are a special case. However, insofar as I can in email and in lingusitic conscience, I have been sticking to the "Macy Schools Scheme," as I used to call it. (I don't think it came with a name.) That is, I have been doing that mentally and in certain side work. For actual use on the list and lingusitic publication I stick pretty close to Standard Siouan, because I think it's less confusing not to switch back and forth (and less confusing period). > You mean a branch of a river, not the branch of a tree growing by a river, > right? :) Yes. > Would that be gahe' ? (I'm not sure if we ever got the pronunciation of > this word pinned down.) It might be, but I don't think it was just h, so maybe not. > > As for bighoN and bixoN, one was something like 'make a farting noise', > > but I'll have to look this pair up. What, you want meanings, too? > > For elicitation purposes, that would sure help! Bob provided them. I forget which one CS laughed at and said it sounded like I was talking about farting when I said that. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 04:11:52 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 22:11:52 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > I noticed that similarity between 'bird' and 'squirrel' as I was typing > the post, but I don't know of any folk taxonomy in Siouan that commonly > joins mammals with birds in this way. Isn't this the 'flying squirrel' term? From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 04:10:45 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 22:10:45 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > Mmmm, the use of "sophisticated" here reminds me of von Neumann's comment on the use of the term "elegant" in the description of mathematical explanations: "Elegance is something best left to shoe salesmen." (I used to be able to quote it in German.) Actually, my explanation is more "historical", I would say. We know that *tk > kt first because some of the languages preserve that stage, or an obvious reflex of it. Chiwere gives instances. Then, as usual, the second element of the cluster "wins" and you ultimately get *tk > kt > ht > tt. The ht stage is Osage. Compare 'drink' > Lakota yatkaN < tk > Winn. racgaN < tk > Chiwe. rahtaN < kt > Omaha dhattaN < kt > Kaw yattaN < kt That's a better example than I gave, since it's native. The point is that the hd in IO is presuambly from *kt, but the cluster is actually *tk in Dakotan and Winnebago, so that explains why Dh has *ht *or *tt, take your pick) from both *tk and *kt (and *ht). Shifts of *kt to ht are pretty common, linguistically. > Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? Haven't gotten back to this, but I wonder if 'egg' is one? Or 'rib/side'? I thought about 'evening', cf. OP ppaze, but that is *kpas- I think. It's varies between tpaza and kpaza in Dakotan dialects, but *tp and *kp merge as one or the other in Dakotan. Hint, if you're in a hurry: search your Winnebago dicitonary, preferably electronically, for c^w < *tp. Then look for Dakotan forms with kp (Teton) or tp (Santee) - I think! - that match it. Instrumental roots are good places to look, but harder to find than nouns if you have to look things up in paper sources. I almost think that Siouan dictionaries should list things like wethiN and agdhiN or bixoN as -thiN, we-; -gdhiN, a-; -xoN, bi-. If they're electronic you can have your cake and invert it, too. You should definitely list -xoN and then cross-reference all the derivatives in anything ocmprehensive. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 04:20:09 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 22:20:09 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Koontz John E wrote: > Isn't this the 'flying squirrel' term? Not intended to be a joke, by the way. There is such a terminological distinction in some Siouan languages, and, of course, there is such a beast, though I personally have never seen one outside of the Rocky & Bulwinkle Show. They really just glide. As far as using related roots for birds and flying squirrels, we also find this for owls and moths (and bats?), which fly at night, and for owls and tree ducks, which both live in holes in trees. Folk taxonymy is a whole different way of looking at things, if you've been raised to think Linnaean schemes are universal. There are strange examples in Indo-European languages, too. From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Tue Oct 3 15:24:10 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 10:24:10 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: wagaxthoN, I justs downloaded the recording from last night and found only the last section of elicitation starting with "name" izhazhe. So I must not have had the recorder on through the earlier materials. Sorry. I was hoping to examine Alberta's he/hE utterances to "see" if there was a distinction that I could not hear. Auntie called later last night to say she recalled "nits" as hEsoN'. When I asked her about "pale antlers" she confirmed hesoN' but I still could not hear a clear distinction between the two. wagoNze Uthixide Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Anthropology-Geography Ethnic Studies (Native American Studies) University of Nebraska-Lincoln 841 Oldfather Hall Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Office: 402-472-3455 FAX: 402-472-9642 UmoNhoN ie thethudi Omaha Language Spoken Here -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Tue Oct 3 15:48:37 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 10:48:37 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Aloha all, Sorry for the unintended note just posted. That will teach me to examine the "reply to" address a bit more closely. Mark UmoNhoN ie thethudi Omaha Language Spoken Here -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Tue Oct 3 20:08:15 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 15:08:15 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Mark wrote: > Sorry. I was hoping to examine Alberta's he/hE utterances to "see" if there was a distinction that I could not hear. > Auntie called later last night to say she recalled "nits" as hEsoN'. When I asked her about "pale antlers" she confirmed hesoN' but I still could not hear a clear distinction between the two. Well, inadvertant to the list or not, I had been thinking about posting on this anyway. I had suggested a couple of years ago that Omaha might recognize a distinction between /e/ and /E/, based largely on the minimal pair: he, 'horn', vs. hE, 'louse', where to my ear the latter sounded more like the /E/ in "pet". The speakers are apparently able to distinguish these two terms, at least some of the time. The difference of "cot" vs. "caught" in English might be an analogy of how subtle and sporadic it is. Last night, we had our elder speaker pronounce these terms for us again. Most of the time there seemed to be little or no difference. When she pronounced them very carefully, though, it seemed to me that there was a difference, but not necessarily exactly what I had thought before. For he, 'horn', the vowel came out sharp, clear, and short, rather like the vowel in si, 'foot'. For hE, 'louse', the vowel seemed to linger and change a bit, as a diphthong. It could be construed as starting with /he/ and gliding toward the center, as he[A], with the final part of that glide very brief and optional. So now I'm starting to think that there is probably no phonemic difference between /e/ and /E/, but that there is a difference between these two words, such that 'louse' could be spelled he'a, with the final vowel de-emphasized almost to nothing, and only rarely even perceptible. When it can be heard, the shift from /e/ to /A/ passes through the range of /E/, which is why my English ear could parse it that way. If this interpretation is correct, it would appear that the Omaha word for 'louse' is a straight match for the Dakotan term, he'ya. If so, I wonder if we can get this straight from MVS, with *he'a remaining in both language groups, but with epenthetic /y/ being recognized in the spelling for Dakotan, and the final syllable being almost but not quite dropped in Omaha? Or would one language have borrowed it from another in more recent times? Would there be any constraints with what we should expect for the development of epenthetic /y/ in MVS? How would this compare with the 'speech' term, i'e / i'ye ? Do other MVS languages tell us anything? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwd0002 at unt.edu Tue Oct 3 20:28:15 2006 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 15:28:15 -0500 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting ROOD DAVID S : > > Dear Colleagues, > > I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and > spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this project > succeed. > Best, > David > Hi David: The person who comes to mind for me is of course Violet Catches, but you have already done that/been there with her, and she already has a Masters. I wish I could think of somebody else. Maybe Wilhelm Meya knows of some people. Best regards, Willem From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 3 22:16:09 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 17:16:09 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings Message-ID: I don't think a [e] vs. [E] distinction would be helpful until you have a good grasp of what the long/short vowel distinction sounds like in monosyllables. The comparison with Dakotan heya is also a possibility. We should all be aware that, confronted with homonyms, people WILL be willing to make up non-existent distinctions to try to disambiguate them for us. I had that experience in Kaw with ppa 'nose' and ppa 'bitter'. When I played them back a week later without telling Mrs. Rowe which was which, she couldn't tell them apart. All the analysis of Omaha phonetics going on is really interesting nonetheless. Bob ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson Sent: Tue 10/3/2006 3:08 PM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: Re: Monday's recordings Mark wrote: > Sorry. I was hoping to examine Alberta's he/hE utterances to "see" if there was a distinction that I could not hear. > Auntie called later last night to say she recalled "nits" as hEsoN'. When I asked her about "pale antlers" she confirmed hesoN' but I still could not hear a clear distinction between the two. Well, inadvertant to the list or not, I had been thinking about posting on this anyway. I had suggested a couple of years ago that Omaha might recognize a distinction between /e/ and /E/, based largely on the minimal pair: he, 'horn', vs. hE, 'louse', where to my ear the latter sounded more like the /E/ in "pet". The speakers are apparently able to distinguish these two terms, at least some of the time. The difference of "cot" vs. "caught" in English might be an analogy of how subtle and sporadic it is. Last night, we had our elder speaker pronounce these terms for us again. Most of the time there seemed to be little or no difference. When she pronounced them very carefully, though, it seemed to me that there was a difference, but not necessarily exactly what I had thought before. For he, 'horn', the vowel came out sharp, clear, and short, rather like the vowel in si, 'foot'. For hE, 'louse', the vowel seemed to linger and change a bit, as a diphthong. It could be construed as starting with /he/ and gliding toward the center, as he[A], with the final part of that glide very brief and optional. So now I'm starting to think that there is probably no phonemic difference between /e/ and /E/, but that there is a difference between these two words, such that 'louse' could be spelled he'a, with the final vowel de-emphasized almost to nothing, and only rarely even perceptible. When it can be heard, the shift from /e/ to /A/ passes through the range of /E/, which is why my English ear could parse it that way. If this interpretation is correct, it would appear that the Omaha word for 'louse' is a straight match for the Dakotan term, he'ya. If so, I wonder if we can get this straight from MVS, with *he'a remaining in both language groups, but with epenthetic /y/ being recognized in the spelling for Dakotan, and the final syllable being almost but not quite dropped in Omaha? Or would one language have borrowed it from another in more recent times? Would there be any constraints with what we should expect for the development of epenthetic /y/ in MVS? How would this compare with the 'speech' term, i'e / i'ye ? Do other MVS languages tell us anything? Rory From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Tue Oct 3 23:40:25 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 18:40:25 -0500 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement Message-ID: Aaron Gallegos is here in Lawrence. I will try to locate him and share your information. jgt ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 3:28 PM Subject: Re: Lakota documentation project announcement > Quoting ROOD DAVID S : > >> >> Dear Colleagues, >> >> I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and >> spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this >> project >> succeed. >> Best, >> David >> > > Hi David: > > The person who comes to mind for me is of course Violet Catches, but you > have already done that/been there with her, and she already has a Masters. > > I wish I could think of somebody else. Maybe Wilhelm Meya knows of some > people. > > Best regards, > > Willem > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 17 04:44:46 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:44:46 -0600 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > Well, inadvertant to the list or not, I had been thinking about posting on > this anyway. I had suggested a couple of years ago that Omaha might > recognize a distinction between /e/ and /E/, based largely on the minimal > pair: he, 'horn', vs. hE, 'louse', where to my ear the latter sounded more > like the /E/ in "pet". The speakers are apparently able to distinguish > these two terms, at least some of the time. ... > Last night, we had our elder speaker pronounce these terms for us again. > Most of the time there seemed to be little or no difference. When she > pronounced them very carefully, though, it seemed to me that there was a > difference, but not necessarily exactly what I had thought before. For he, > 'horn', the vowel came out sharp, clear, and short, rather like the vowel > in si, 'foot'. For hE, 'louse', the vowel seemed to linger and change a > bit, as a diphthong. It could be construed as starting with /he/ and > gliding toward the center, as he[A], with the final part of that glide very > brief and optional. How about kke 'turtle'? Dakotan has kheya. But OP tte : Dakotan pte, as far as I can recall. It would also be interesting to know if there was any trace of this pattern in the rest of Dhegiha, though nothing would preclude OP being a rule unto itself. How about accentuation? Any difference in various he-compounds? I don't see one in the forms you folks have been citing. I've often wondered about the tendency of the "generic compounds" with tte- or tta- plus body parts, etc., to appear with accent on the body part. I'd expect accent on the "beast" part consistently. The exceptional "accents" in question are in Dorsey. The rule I am thinking should account for accentuation would be something like V => V' / #C__ = C..., or, in English, accent occurs on the second, or first and only syllable of the first element in a compound, so *tta'=he, *tte'=he, etc., though I think that one or more of these is an exception. Perhaps the rule is more like accent occurs on the second mora of a compound (like any other word), so that if the first element is short, the accent should appear on the second element, but if the first element is long, accent occurs on it. This rule might be somewhat irregular in application, due to analogy. But it should tend to result in he 'louse' being accented, while he 'horn' was not, when they were first elements of a compound. Or perhaps something else is at work in the exceptions I've seen, and 'horn' vs. 'louse' have nothing to do with them. If you are right about hearing "more stuff" in he 'louse' it should show up in a sonogram, I would think. > So now I'm starting to think that there is probably no phonemic difference > between /e/ and /E/, but that there is a difference between these two > words, such that 'louse' could be spelled he'a, with the final vowel > de-emphasized almost to nothing, and only rarely even perceptible. When it > can be heard, the shift from /e/ to /A/ passes through the range of /E/, > which is why my English ear could parse it that way. It is like ea in weahide or eawa... and so on where there ea is consistently noted? > If this interpretation is correct, it would appear that the Omaha word for > 'louse' is a straight match for the Dakotan term, he'ya. If so, I wonder > if we can get this straight from MVS, with *he'a remaining in both language > groups, but with epenthetic /y/ being recognized in the spelling for > Dakotan, and the final syllable being almost but not quite dropped in > Omaha? The thing to know about Dakotan heya, kheya, etc., is that they are only bisyllabic as independent forms. In compounds they are he-, khe-. Other words in this set are wiNyaN ~ wi(N)- 'female' and iNyaN ~ iN- 'stone'. For the short form, check out Dakotan 'nit', which I recall as hez^aN'z^a=la. (Dakotan mostly shift accent to the second syllable in tight compounds with monosyllabic first elements.) Outside of Dakotan, modulo your OP material, there is no trace of the -ya per se in any of these forms. For example, Winnebago has hee (all monosylalbles are long). But the "definite" in Winnebago is forms with =ra, which is a good match for Dakotan -ya, e.g., hee=ra '(the) louse'. I'd say it was cognate, myself. I've tried to explain these various little -(*r)a and -(*r)e extensions that appear in various contexts in various ways over the years. For the moment I see them as a system of absolute markers in Proto-Siouan, though they seem to act as a sort of generic (*a) : specific (*e) pair in languages where both occur. For example, -e occurs with body parts, kinterms, tha-possessives, and concrete deverbal nouns in Dakotan, while -a occurs in generic body part compounds, animal species terms, and non-concrete deverbal nouns. I argue that the -ya in Dakotan heya 'louse' and the -ye in Dakotan s^ahiye=la 'Cheyenne' or the -we in c^huNwe 'elder sister' are just *a and *e with epenthetic glides separating them from preceding vowels, and parallel to the -a in forms like s^uNk-a 'dog, horse' or the -e in forms like thas^unk-e 'his (personal) mount'. Most of the Siouan languages tend to eliminate all (or nearly all) -a in favor of -e, cf. OP s^aNg-e or IO suNny-e. (It seems unlikely that Da -a : OP -e is a regular vowel correspondence.) In a few cases nouns in final *h, e.g., maybe *wiNh- 'female' and *haNh- 'night' retain the h before a vowel in sporadic contexts, e.g., OP haNhe'wac^hi 'night dancer' and Dakotan haNhe'=tu 'nighttime' or Tutelo mi(N)he 'woman'. Biloxi is particularly prone to retaining 0 ~ di after vowels (< 0 ~ *-r-e) and Mandan has a system of -r- ~ -h-, etc. finals that appears after vowel final roots when various vowel-initial suffixes are added, notably -e, which is sometimes called a definitizer (Kennard?) and sometimes seems to be considered as a sort of absolutive marker - a suffix added to a noun to make a form that can stand alone without a compounding or paradigmatic marker following it (Hollow). > Or would one language have borrowed it from another in more recent > times? Conceivably. Our readiness to allow some "slack" in the regularity of correspondences, plus a certain "early days" status of Siouan comparisons has made us a bit insensitive to the possibility of "inter-dialect" loans. However, I'd have to say that 'louse' is not a good candidate for a loan word. You do get them from other folks, but they are not much of a novelty, anywhere you go. > Would there be any constraints with what we should expect for the > development of epenthetic /y/ in MVS? Well, actually there is a problem there. If it were PMV *hera, you'd get Dakotan heya and OP hedha. If it were PMV *heya, you'd get Dakotan *hec^ha and OP hez^a. > How would this compare with the 'speech' term, i'e / i'ye ? Do other > MVS languages tell us anything? This is essentially *ie. OP (and Dakotan?) workers occasionally write -y- between two vowels where there seems to be nothing historically. I think you'd have to claim it was PMV *hea. But the evidence for that would be essentially your OP recordings. Most of the ea sequences that are firmly attested in OP arise from paradigmatic situations in which we have -a-wa- for 'us' combined with and infixed i-locative or gi-dative (*-a-(g)i-wa-), or from *wa + i + a where i and a are locatives. Without the wa- you get idha < *i-r-a. Adding wa- seems to compress things a bit. In the same way *wa-i-o- yields wiu- while *i-o yields udhu < *idhu < *i-r-o. There are a few where *e 'demonstrative; definite; third person' is proclitic to an initial a- or aN, e.g., eaN 'how' or to a -a- extension before a postposition, e.g., eat(t/h)a (?). From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 17 05:13:14 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 23:13:14 -0600 Subject: First Person Agents in (h)a- < *wa Message-ID: I had an interesting exchange with Mark Donohue, who is working on a north Australian languagfe called Palu'e. In the course of it, I noticed the following: A1 Regular A2 Syncopating (*stop-stems) PMV *wa- *h-C... (?), *p-C... (?), *w-C... (?) Da wa- wa-C... (regularized) OP a- p-C... (ppa- : ba- :: A1 : A3) Os a- h-C... (hpa- : pa- :: A1 : A3) IO ha- C[h]... (p[h]a- : wa :: A1 : A3) Wi (h)a- C... (pa- : wa- :: A1 : A3) In particular, it never before occurred to me to wonder if the change of regular *wa- to (h)a- was connected somehow with the way that *w-C... appears as a preaspirate. The IO aspirates or voiceless stops and the Winnebago initial voiceless stops are reflexes of *hC, just as the OP tense stops and Osage preaspirates are. We know that Dakotan probably had preaspirates here, too, but I won't go into the logic here. It involves the behavior of k-stems with ki-. For what it is worth, a shift of initial p to f or h is not that unusual, and in other contexts *wa- behaves rather like *pa-, e.g., the behavior of *wa with *r-stems, where *wa-r... appears as *p-r... in Dakotan and Dhegiha, but as *R... in Winnebago and IO. Note that initial *p- is fairly rare in Siouan. It is mainly restricted to certain verb stems, mostly formed with *pV-instrumentals, and to *pe 'who' and a few highly irregular sets like 'hill' that smell a lot like loan words. The verbs in question were all irregular (syncopating). For the present, I'm not sure if there's anything in this parallel, really, but I've wondered for a long time why *wa A1 seems to lose its initial w so easily, when *wa(a)- 'idefinite object' sticks to its w like glue (outside of Biloxi-Ofo). From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 17 15:25:12 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:25:12 -0500 Subject: First Person Agents in (h)a- < *wa Message-ID: > Note that initial *p- is fairly rare in Siouan. It is mainly restricted to certain verb stems, mostly formed with *pV-instrumentals, and to *pe 'who' and a few highly irregular sets like 'hill' that smell a lot like loan words. The verbs in question were all irregular (syncopating). If Siouan is related distantly to Caddoan and/or Iroquoian, then the fact that those languages have a paucity of labials may be significant. On the other hand, I recall that in Uto-Aztecan initial */p/ > /w/ in some of the languages, even though in initial one would expect the opposite (w>p). Bob From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Sat Oct 21 01:56:31 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 20:56:31 -0500 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING Message-ID: In IOM, there is: wanda, look at something & wanwanda, go look at (see) s.t. (Words recorded by LWRobinson) I havent checked the stories for examples of use, but I am uncertain of proper conjugation. It seems odd and non-compliant to anticipated compound words. The nasal does not seem to belong here. "anda" = hin- (me) + ada' (see). Mark has for Omaha = donbe / danbe Lafleshe has for Osage (p.38): see, perseive, watch, scrutinize: a'tonbe, ashtonbe, on'gadonba Also LF has: Dondonba (Seen from Time to Time)(name) Wn/Hochnk seem little help here, as all I found was (Miner): -look at/ see = horug^uch' ~horug^u'ich ~~horug^ich' Any thoughts to share here. Jimm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sat Oct 21 17:22:26 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 12:22:26 -0500 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING Message-ID: > In IOM, there is: wanda, look at something & wanwanda, go look at (see) s.t. (Words recorded by LWRobinson) > I havent checked the stories for examples of use, but I am uncertain of proper conjugation. It seems odd and non-compliant to anticipated compound words. The nasal does not seem to belong here. "anda" = hin- (me) + ada' (see). MAndan has í_taro?s 'he peeks', so it looks as though everything before the root, /-ta/ is a "locative" or some other prefix, and the pronominals come right before the /ta/ (= IOM -da). CH[ waaNda, waada, adá 'see, watch' RR WI[ hajá 'see, watch' KM-586 I heard all three forms above in recordings, but I don't have the conjugation. Historically, the pronominals probably came right before the /da/ part, but I can't speak for modern times. The root also is found down in the Southeast. BIloxi: watá 'watch, watch over' DS-286b BIloxi: "watá-ye" 'cause to watch' DS-286b OFo: akthá 'watch' DS-320a > Mark has for Omaha = donbe / danbe. Lafleshe has for Osage (p.38): see, perseive, watch, scrutinize: a'tonbe, ashtonbe, on'gadonba Also LF has: Dondonba (Seen from Time to Time)(name) I think the above root is a completely different one that matches IOM /daNwe/ 'open eyes, wink' and Winnebago /jaaNp/. I'm afraid this probably doesn't help much. Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 25 22:21:09 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:21:09 -0600 Subject: First Person Agents in (h)a- < *wa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > If Siouan is related distantly to Caddoan and/or Iroquoian, then the > fact that those languages have a paucity of labials may be significant. > On the other hand, I recall that in Uto-Aztecan initial */p/ > /w/ in > some of the languages, even though in initial one would expect the > opposite (w>p). I probably should have added that *t and *k are similarly rare. I was getting at the scarcity of unaspirated stops in initial position, barring the quite productive verb-stem-forming instrumentals. I don't know about the comparitive numbers of labials vs. dentals vs. velars per se, with or without restricting matters to unaspirated forms. Actually, I think there might be more *p than *t or *k forms, though I could be wrong. My impression is that it's *p > *k > *t (initially), but that's in line with the numbers of verb stems including instrumental-initial forms, and it might be influenced by it. As far as *p > w, as you can see I have been wondering about that. I wasn't aware of the UA parallel. We definitely have *p > w in Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe, in initial position. I've been wondering if some of the oddities in reconstructed *w-initial sets might also be explained by assuming *p-initial instead, as in the case of the first person *wa- and indefinite object *wa(a)-. Perhaps the first person is *pa- and only the indefinite object for is *wa(a)-. This sort of thinking obviously ties in with Bob's work on characterizing final, sonantized stops in Dakotan. In effect, Bob suggests that in weak (ening) contexts like stem final position and cluster initial position *ptk are sonantized to *bdg, and these have the variety of familiar reflexes in (C)CVC roots in Dakotan, e.g., Teton sab- ~ sapa, xol- ~ xota, ... (anyone remember an oral velar example? ..., blaska, gleska (but no dl...). I'm just wondering if prefix initial position might be another weak position, further back in Siouan prehistory, with syncopated *pa- Agt1 becoming *b in clusters, as in like *p-r... Agt1 of r-stem, etc., but *ba- and eventually wa- and ha- in unsyncopated contexts. In this context w is definitely acting much like f in other language families, e.g., in Germanic or Japanese. This suggestion that *p and some initial *w (as currently reconstructed) might be more or less related is independent of my one time postulate that *W (pronounced "funny" w) might be the intial variant of *p and *R ("funny" r) the initial variant of *t. I believe Bob has argued that *W... and *R... must be *w(a)-w... and *w(a)-r... In that case *wa- behaves much like *pa-, I guess, and I have no good explanation for the different behavior of *wa- Agt1 and *wa(a)- indefintie object elsewhere. In any event *W and *R are far more obligatorily initial-only than *p and *t are scarce in initial position, and there doesn't seem to be any corresponding "funny" initial set for *k. Incidentally, though I christened *W and *R and spent a lot of ink on them, they were known to Dorsey. Kaufman postulates them as sets (*?w and *?r, I think), and though I think Matthews doesn't discuss them as such anywhere they certainly seem to have had an influence on his thinking about *w and *r and related clusters. I may be safe in saying that Wolff missed them, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 25 22:56:41 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:56:41 -0600 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING In-Reply-To: <003a01c6f4b4$4fe42440$7d14133f@JIMM> Message-ID: I don't have anything to add to Bob's comments on cross-branch comparisons. On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote: > In IOM, there is: > wanda, look at something & > wanwanda, go look at (see) s.t. > (Words recorded by LWRobinson) > > I havent checked the stories for examples of use, but I am uncertain of > proper conjugation. It seems odd and non-compliant to anticipated > compound words. The nasal does not seem to belong here. "anda" = hin- > (me) + ada' (see). Agreed on the strangeness of the nasality if this is wa-a-da 'one looks at something indefinite'. Occasionally things are spuriously nasalized or not nasalized here or there in comparisons between Winnebago or IO and other languages. In this case the unexpected nasal might be in a particular inflectional form, if this is just an entry for wa-a-da. Bob seems to have encountered both oral and nasal variants. In OP I seem to recall cases where expected aN-wa- or aN-waN- Agt1 + Indefinite appears as a-waN-. I have never known if this was a rigid feature of the development in OP or just par for the course in producing and hearing an underlying |[aN-waN-]|. The form waNwaNda seems to suggest reduplication of a stem waNda. Maybe this isn't from wa-a-da at all. Maybe it's an special verb waNda? I guess verbs that end in -a are a bit rare, and that tends to reinforce the association with the root a-da < *a...ta, which does behave in Siouan (where it occurs) like a locative verb. The gloss 'go and see' for waNwaNda may provide a hint at the morphology here. It's perfectly possible to form compounds with glosses like that in most Siouan langauges, but what's the formation here? There's a position we in IO that seems to appear where Dhegiha has /he/ or /kHe/. > Wn/Hochnk seem little help here, as all I found was (Miner): > -look at/ see = horug^uch' ~horug^u'ich ~~horug^ich' This looks like a rather different form on the order of *o-ru-ghit-e ~ *o-ru-ghut-e. I guess this might match OP udhighide (LaFlesche Uthixide), someone we know. In Dakotan it would be a hypothetical (?) oyughuta. This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, but the acrolect or whatever it would be is IO instead of French. From rankin at ku.edu Thu Oct 26 00:57:38 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:57:38 -0500 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING Message-ID: > This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, but the acrolect or whatever it would be is IO instead of French. The syllable /hiN-/ is the basis for interjections all across Siouan and extending down into the SE (e.g. Haas's Tunica). I can't rule out a 'we' meaning in the Omaha term, but I'm not sure it's necessary. >>From the CSD: PSi *hiN 'interjection' CR i* 'um...' LA hìN 'whoops, interjection of disappointment' hiná 'woman's interj.of surprise' hinúu ' " " " happiness' hiNyaNka 'wait! hold on, imperative' ìNska 'um...' CH hìN- 'we see...' OP hìNda 'let's see...' KS hiNe 'question marker' OS hiNta 'let me...' BI iNda 'well!' TU ehiN 'now...hortative' Cf. also Tunica hínto, híntu 'come on!!' "Not a Tunica word" in Haas-215. Note also that in this set only t he[hìN] morph usually matches across subgroups. Dhegiha dialects look they have a PDH *-ta which compounds with hiN, but the Biloxi look-alike cannot be made cognate easily, as BI d does not match DH *t. BI d comes from PSi *r and would actually be a better match for LA -ná. From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Oct 26 02:44:48 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:44:48 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is it *W that is involved in the Dhegihan positional ama'/aba'/apa' ? I.e. Dh. *aWa' => OP ama', Ks aba', Os apa' ? Would a single phoneme, if one could be found, be acceptable on other grounds as a reconstruction for the consonant in the above set? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 26 06:58:11 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:58:11 -0600 Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: JEK: > > This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) > > 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da > > 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male > > declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, ... The form that Whitman gives is haN'da from underlying hiN-a-da. I think Jimm actually gave it, too, in his note that prompted this! In regard to the hiN set offered: > The syllable /hiN-/ is the basis for interjections all across Siouan and > extending down into the SE (e.g. Haas's Tunica). I can't rule out a > 'we' meaning in the Omaha term, but I'm not sure it's necessary. > Note also that in this set only the [h�N] morph usually matches across > subgroups. I'd argue that this is precisely because it's not a set, but only a collection of exclamations that begin with (h)i(N). In fact,it seems to be several sets combined bcause of a similar initial. One form is hiN SURPRISE. > LA h�N 'whoops, interjection of disappointment' > hin� 'woman's interj. of surprise' > hin�u ' " " " happiness' The additional Lakota example > hiNyaNka 'wait! hold on, imperative' might be the same form with a positional 'to sit' appended. OP hiN expressing surprise (an unpleasant one?) is attested separately. The next two look like additional uses of hiN 'surprise', but may be a separate evidential use. > KS hiNe 'question marker' > TU ehiN 'now...hortative' Compare OP ahaN ~ ehaN m. vs. f. evidential expressing surprise. The vowel doesn't match, but I'm prepared to compare iN with aN tentatively in evidentials on the theory that I have a lot to learn about them. Next, there's a hesitation form without initial h: > CR i* 'um...' > LA �Nska 'um...' This last is iN + ska, where ska is frequently a marker of doubt or possibility, e.g., OP eska 'perhaps'. Almost the end of the list would be the 'let's see' forms: > CH h(�N)ada 'we see...' > OP h�Nda 'let's see...' > OS hiNta 'let me...' These are the forms I was citing, though the OP form might be more completely represented as (h)iNda(kHe). The h is there more often than not. (These are all from Dorsey.) The Osage form is "hiNda' t.oNbe t.se" or hiNta' htaNpe hce glossed 'now, let me see' in which htaNpe hce is native Os form of 'I will see' (less the positional). LaFlesche is inclined to gloss hiNta' as 'right now', perhaps influenced by iNthaN 'now'. Perhaps the most convicning argument for OP hiNdakhe cf. IO haNda khe in my view is the khe. The IO declarative is pretty distrinctive. > BI iNda 'well!' > BI d does not match DH *t. BI d comes from PSi *r and would actually be > a better match for LA -n�. This looks the same, but as you point out, the d is from *r, not *t unless it is d written by accident for t, which I think happens. If the form is from *hiNra, it is more like the hiN alternatives, and the match with La hina is very close - in form as well as meaning. > Cf. also Tunica h�nto, h�ntu 'come on!!' "Not a Tunica word" in > Haas-215. This seems a better match in form, though the gloss is different. The Tunica form is actually more reminiscent of the Lakota exclamation haNta 'get away, be gone' (I've heard 'scram' as a gloss.) From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 26 07:15:04 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:15:04 -0600 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > Is it *W that is involved in the Dhegihan positional ama'/aba'/apa' ? > I.e. > > Dh. *aWa' => OP ama', Ks aba', Os apa' ? Yes, though this set is restricted to Dhegiha, and involves an unusual position (medial) and context (enclitic). Compare also the OP =ma, Os =pa, etc., set, in which the *W is initial. Both these sets are positional articles (but not positional in nature) with different plural, non-focus readings. > Would a single phoneme, if one could be found, be acceptable on other > grounds as a reconstruction for the consonant in the above set? Certainly, and presumably the same would apply to the various other *W sets. We don't need to have one eplanation for all *W sets. For example, it is clear that many Dh *R sets reflect *pr-, e.g., OP nu(ga) 'male (animal)', Os to(ka), but Teton bloka'. However, continuing with *R, where the evidence is clearer, cases like OP nez^e 'urine', Te lez^e', ... or OP negi' 'mother's brother', Te lek(s^i(t)), show no evidence of *pr in Mississippi Valley. Because some *R sets in some subgroups seem to reflect clusters, it's tempting to assume that all *R are clusters, and I think this explains T. Kaufman's *?r, which is essentially a cluster with a stealth initial element. My *W and *R are just placeholders saying "I don't know what it is, but it's like a w, etc." Finding a single phoneme to propose instead of *?r and *?w, etc., is difficult only because the territory is crowded. The only options I see are m and n, though we have some m and n that behave like w and r before nasal vowels that make better candidates and we generally tend to expect m and n to be conditioned allophones of *w and *r. If we don't rule out clusters, then mb and nd are also possibilities. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 26 07:19:16 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:19:16 -0600 Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel Message-ID: The following struck me as an interesting parallel to the hypothetical development of syncopating first persons in Mississippi Valley Siouan. It's a description from Dr. Mark Donohue of the historical phonology of the first person in Palu'e, an Austronesian language from Flores, in southern Indonesia. My parallel Siouan forms are inserted interlinearly. I have used *tuNp-e 'to see', with theme-formant *-e. This grows out of a post on Language List. I'm indebted to Mark Donohoe for all details of Palu'e and for revising my first attempt at the comparison into something like clarity. On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Mark Donohue wrote: > The language I'm looking at, Palu'e, has something similar going on. > > Historically: ku- '1SG' prefixes to a root like tusu 'milk' to yield > ku-tusu 'I suckle' *wa- Agt1 prefixes to a root like *tuNpe 'see' to yield *wa-tuNpe 'I see'. > then > > *k- > ? Proto-Siouan *w- > Proto-Mississippi Valley *h- > yields > > ?u-tusu PMV *ha-tuNpe *(h)a- is the Mississippi Valley reflex of *wa- Agt1 outside of Dakotan. > and pre-stressed reduction > > ?tusu *h-tuNpe This is what we actually find, outside of Dakotan and the regular verbs. > this is attested in nearby languages such as Sika. Alas, in the Siouan family we only have the reduced form, if we don't count regularized Dakotan watuNwe. > But Palu'e doesn't like ? onsets, so it turned this into > > thusu Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe change *ht to *th and so on with all preaspirates. Their verb 'to see', *a-ta, first person *a-h-ta 'I see', cf. Wi haac^a', IO a(a)'tha 'I see' vs. Wi haj^a', IO ada' 'he sees'. The most common examples involve forms with *pa- 'by pushing', which come out as Wi paa-, IO paa- Agt1 vs. WI wa, IO wa- Agt3 (bare stem *pa- > *wa-, regularly). > which later generalised over the entire paradigm for most verbs; some > generalised the 3sg n- (<*na-), as in *na-alap > **n-ala > nala > (unanalyzable, synchronically). For some roots the aspiration is now > synchronically best thought of as being a verbalising morpheme (as in > tusu 'milk' ~ thusu 'suckle'). The aspiration doesn't generalize in this case in Siouan, but there are other places where paradigms do level on one irregular stem alternant. Comparable to the Palu'e n-inital stems perhaps are the points in Siouan morphology where an initial *r- (or its reflex) may reflect third person *i-, e.g., the *(r)aka 'by striking' instrumental and the similar *(r)iki dative forms, and maybe the third person inalienable nouns with initial *y in Dakotan (cf. c^haNte 'heart') and *r in Dhegiha (cf. OP naNde 'heart'), perhaps from *y-aNt-e ~ *i-(r)aNt-e. In Palu'e the reduction of the *CV-C... first person is from *ku-C... > *?u-C... > *?-C... and developments of that (Ch). In Siouan the reduction is from *wa-C... > *ha-C... (?) > *h-C... and developments of that (CC, Ch). The intermediate *ha-C... stage in Siouan is not usually adduced, though, in fact, in regular verbs *wa- does become ha- or a- in most languages, and it maybe perfectly reasonable to assume the *ha-C... stage. From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Thu Oct 26 16:21:45 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:21:45 -0500 Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Koontz John E" To: Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:58 AM Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) > On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > JEK: >> > This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) >> > 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da >> > 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male >> > declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, ... > > The form that Whitman gives is haN'da from underlying hiN-a-da. I think > Jimm actually gave it, too, in his note that prompted this! > Not quite, John. Perhaps I did not write a clear analysis of the entry: waNda. As I attempted to say and write it, it seemed that the entry could be from: wa (something) + hiN- (me) + ada' (see). I cannot account for the gloss "look at s.t.", which would be more likely to be: wa + ada'. Nor can I account for a nasual in the word. And as is, it appears to be suggesting "something that sees me." ada' (See): I..., a'ta (a+ha+ ta) you..., ara'sda (a+ra+sda) he/she..., ada' we (dual)....,haN'da (hiN+ada) I'm still unclear how you read a "we" into the word or how the declarative male particle "ke" come into consideration here. jimm PS: I do not believe the word to be an exclamation, although in the light that I am still unable to locate any textual context to support usage, I cannot disclaim it. Also a number of the interjections from OP et.al., you mentioned, have eqivalents in IOM. > Almost the end of the list would be the 'let's see' forms: > >> CH h(N)ada 'we see...' >> OP hNda 'let's see...' >> OS hiNta 'let me...' > > These are the forms I was citing, though the OP form might be more > completely represented as (h)iNda(kHe). The h is there more often than > not. (These are all from Dorsey.) The Osage form is "hiNda' t.oNbe t.se" > or hiNta' htaNpe hce glossed 'now, let me see' in which htaNpe hce is > native Os form of 'I will see' (less the positional). LaFlesche is > inclined to gloss hiNta' as 'right now', perhaps influenced by iNthaN > 'now'. > > Perhaps the most convicning argument for OP hiNdakhe cf. IO haNda khe in > my view is the khe. The IO declarative is pretty distrinctive. > >> BI iNda 'well!' > >> BI d does not match DH *t. BI d comes from PSi *r and would actually be >> a better match for LA -n. > > This looks the same, but as you point out, the d is from *r, not *t unless > it is d written by accident for t, which I think happens. If the form is > from *hiNra, it is more like the hiN alternatives, and the match with > La hina is very close - in form as well as meaning. > >> Cf. also Tunica hnto, hntu 'come on!!' "Not a Tunica word" in >> Haas-215. > > This seems a better match in form, though the gloss is different. The > Tunica form is actually more reminiscent of the Lakota exclamation > > haNta 'get away, be gone' (I've heard 'scram' as a gloss.) > > > > From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Thu Oct 26 16:28:50 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:28:50 -0500 Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel Message-ID: This discussion by Mark Donohoe is interesting and begins to offer some explaination. However, it is short of offering how the term, as is (waNda/ waNwaNda) could be conjugated. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Koontz John E" To: "Siouan List" Cc: "Mark Donohue" Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 2:19 AM Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel > The following struck me as an interesting parallel to the hypothetical > development of syncopating first persons in Mississippi Valley Siouan. > It's a description from Dr. Mark Donohue of the historical phonology of > the first person in Palu'e, an Austronesian language from Flores, in > southern Indonesia. My parallel Siouan forms are inserted interlinearly. > I have used *tuNp-e 'to see', with theme-formant *-e. > > This grows out of a post on Language List. I'm indebted to Mark Donohoe > for all details of Palu'e and for revising my first attempt at the > comparison into something like clarity. > > On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Mark Donohue wrote: >> The language I'm looking at, Palu'e, has something similar going on. >> >> Historically: ku- '1SG' prefixes to a root like tusu 'milk' to yield >> ku-tusu 'I suckle' > > *wa- Agt1 prefixes to a root like *tuNpe 'see' to yield *wa-tuNpe 'I see'. > >> then >> >> *k- > ? > > Proto-Siouan *w- > Proto-Mississippi Valley *h- > >> yields >> >> ?u-tusu > > PMV *ha-tuNpe *(h)a- is the Mississippi Valley reflex of *wa- Agt1 > outside of Dakotan. > >> and pre-stressed reduction >> >> ?tusu > > *h-tuNpe This is what we actually find, outside of Dakotan and > the regular verbs. > >> this is attested in nearby languages such as Sika. > > Alas, in the Siouan family we only have the reduced form, if we don't > count regularized Dakotan watuNwe. > >> But Palu'e doesn't like ? onsets, so it turned this into >> >> thusu > > Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe change *ht to *th and so on with all > preaspirates. Their verb 'to see', *a-ta, first person *a-h-ta 'I see', > cf. Wi haac^a', IO a(a)'tha 'I see' vs. Wi haj^a', IO ada' 'he sees'. > The most common examples involve forms with *pa- 'by pushing', which come > out as Wi paa-, IO paa- Agt1 vs. WI wa, IO wa- Agt3 (bare stem *pa- > > *wa-, regularly). > >> which later generalised over the entire paradigm for most verbs; some >> generalised the 3sg n- (<*na-), as in *na-alap > **n-ala > nala >> (unanalyzable, synchronically). For some roots the aspiration is now >> synchronically best thought of as being a verbalising morpheme (as in >> tusu 'milk' ~ thusu 'suckle'). > > The aspiration doesn't generalize in this case in Siouan, but there are > other places where paradigms do level on one irregular stem > alternant. > > Comparable to the Palu'e n-inital stems perhaps are the points in Siouan > morphology where an initial *r- (or its reflex) may reflect third person > *i-, e.g., the *(r)aka 'by striking' instrumental and the similar *(r)iki > dative forms, and maybe the third person inalienable nouns with initial *y > in Dakotan (cf. c^haNte 'heart') and *r in Dhegiha (cf. OP naNde 'heart'), > perhaps from *y-aNt-e ~ *i-(r)aNt-e. > > In Palu'e the reduction of the *CV-C... first person is from *ku-C... > > *?u-C... > *?-C... and developments of that (Ch). In Siouan the reduction > is from *wa-C... > *ha-C... (?) > *h-C... and developments of that (CC, > Ch). The intermediate *ha-C... stage in Siouan is not usually adduced, > though, in fact, in regular verbs *wa- does become ha- or a- in most > languages, and it maybe perfectly reasonable to assume the *ha-C... stage. > > From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Oct 26 17:26:27 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 12:26:27 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thanks, John! That was very informative, and encouraging. The thought that has been floating around in my head for a while is that the *W and *R make up a series that could be defined as full stops that are initially released through the nose rather than through the mouth. These could be considered either single phonemes or clusters. Considered as clusters, we would write them as *W = pm and *R = tn. (Voicing would not be an issue. Actual pronunciation might be anywhere from bm/dn to pm/tn to pm^/tn^, where m^ and n^ are defined as the voiceless equivalents of m and n.) Considered as single phonemes, the effect would be rather like a person with a cold trying to hit m or n, and taking just a moment before sufficient pressure builds up to force a passage through the nasal sinusses. I think this model explains the daughter language reflexes we find more naturally than any other. Postulating any kind of w for the Dhegihan *Wa/*aWa' sets seems a bit out in left field, because all the reflexes involve full labial closure. For other single phonemes, as you say, the territory is crowded. The mb and nd clusters you suggest make the most sense, but if that were the case I should think we would get those epenthetically everywhere a nasal vowel precedes a stop. A nasally released stop set would not conflict with anything else. Phonotactically, it would be very easy to get either ama' or apa'/aba' from *apma'. In the former case, the speakers would simply open the nasal passage a little bit earlier, which would prevent the stop from occurring, yielding ama'. In the latter case, they would open the oral passage earlier, before the nasal passage was opened, to produce an orally released stop preceding an oral vowel, which would eliminate the reason for opening the nasal passage at all. In either case, the resulting consonant would be more quickly and easily rendered than the heavily-marked original, and would immediately merge with a pre-existing consonant phoneme (m or p/b). This would also mesh fairly comfortably with the *pr cluster you mention as being sometimes ancestral to *R. The key here is that we have a stop+sonant cluster, just as pre-existing nasally released stops are stop+sonant clusters. The latter are "clusters" at a single location (labial or alveolar), while *pr is a definite cluster in which the stop is labial and the sonant is alveolar. I would picture the Dhegihan development of this to be: *pr => *pn (r takes on full oral closure along with p, phonotactically equivalent to the double stop sequence pt, but maintains sonant quality by allowing voice to exit through the nose during alveolar closure). Next, double stop sequences are lost. The second stop takes on the stop function of the first stop, as the first stop is reduced to h. Thus, *pt => *htt (both preaspirated and tense), while *pn => *htn (p => h, but forces the following alveolar closure to take on its initial stop function). The *tn part of that is identical to the pre-existing *R, a nasally released alveolar stop, and *htn/*hR eventually merges into *tn/*R in all daughter languages. Finally, if we picture *W and *R as the clusters *pm and *tn, and if the original language had *m and *n (not sure about this) but not eng, then the picture of *W and *R being originally merged phonemes, oral stop + nasal consonant in the same location, would explain why we don't find "funny" consonants in the velar area. I don't know how well this model fits across Siouan, but I think it works pretty well with the Dhegihan and Dakotan cases that you've mentioned. Any thoughts? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Thu Oct 26 20:14:04 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:14:04 -0500 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: Yes, aWa is an example. 'Snow' is another and so are a couple of instrumental prefixes. In a few cases it is clear that W is a result of *w+w, where an intervening vowel underwent syncope. In other instances it is possible that a laryngeal+w sequence collapsed. The sequence *w+r has similar reflexes in one chronological stratum of vocabulary. I have a discussion of "funny" R and W in the Comparative Method article in the Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Bob > Is it *W that is involved in the Dhegihan positional ama'/aba'/apa' ? I.e. Dh. *aWa' => OP ama', Ks aba', Os apa' ? Would a single phoneme, if one could be found, be acceptable on other grounds as a reconstruction for the consonant in the above set? From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Oct 27 01:11:36 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:11:36 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Yes, aWa is an example. 'Snow' is another and so are a couple of instrumental prefixes. In a few cases it is clear that W is a result of *w+w, where an intervening vowel underwent syncope. In other instances it is possible that a laryngeal+w sequence collapsed. The sequence *w+r has similar reflexes in one chronological stratum of vocabulary. I have a discussion of "funny" R and W in the Comparative Method article in the Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Thanks, Bob! I've found and read the section on "funny" R, but I don't see anything on "funny" W. Do you have any examples offhand for the *w+w, laryngeal+w and *w+r cases? So *R is the phoneme behind the Dakhota/Nakhota/Lakhota divide? I.e., *Rakhota ? What about Assiniboine and Stoney? Where do they come out? And *R => d in IOM and Winnebago, n in Crow (-Hidatsa ?), n in Biloxi and Tutelo, l in Ofo, t in Quapaw and Osage, d in Kansa, and of course n in OP. Is Mandan unknown? And *W => w in Dakotan and Winnebago, I believe, which isn't hugely helpful to the model I proposed earlier today. Very nice article, by the way! I'll have to read the whole thing when I get a chance. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 27 05:01:29 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:01:29 -0500 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: > I've found and read the section on "funny" R, but I don't see anything on "funny" W. Sorry 'bout that. I guess I neglected W there. Basically, the idea was that W and R were parallel phenomena with similar conditioning factors apparently often involving laryngeals that had disappeared in all of the languages. This is the same problem that faced Indo-Europeanists who posited laryngeals that influenced vowel development and disappeared. The discovery of Hittite solved that controversy (while creating new ones). Too bad we've no Hittite for Siouan so far. > Do you have any examples offhand for the *w+w, laryngeal+w and *w+r cases? 'Snow' would be an example ('Spring' too,I think) with *wa-wa > *w-wa > *Wa. I believe I said 'Winter' earlier -- I meant 'snow'. Sorry. *w+glottal would be the sort of thing we've discussed before on the list with regard to the verb ?oo 'to wound, shoot at and hit'. In the 1st person you would have *w(a)-?oo. Unfortunately I've never found all the conjugated forms of this verb in most of the languages. In Dakotan, analogy as reintroduced the full wa-prefix. Hi?u is another case that David pointed out, with hibu in the 1st person sg. (b is the allophone of /w/ that occurs preceding /u/ in Dakotan.) *w+r gives all those bl- stems (Omaha bdh-). What is happening is that ordinary [w] and [r] are assimilating a feature from an adjacent consonant or sonorant that is causing them to obstruentize one degree. > So *R is the phoneme behind the Dakhota/Nakhota/Lakhota divide? I.e., *Rakhota ? What about Assiniboine and Stoney? Where do they come out? Yes, *R is responsible for the folk-subgrouping of Dakotan into d/l/n dialects (Assiniboine and Stoney have n). Doug Parks and Ray DeMallie's paper in Anthropological Linguistics back in the '90's clears up the "real", more detailed, subgrouping. > And *R => d in IOM and Winnebago, n in Crow (-Hidatsa ?), n in Biloxi and Tutelo, l in Ofo, t in Quapaw and Osage, d in Kansa, and of course n in OP. Is Mandan unknown? You'd need to check the Mandan word for 'snow'. Off the top of my head, I think Mandan may just have /w/ for all these. There are a lot fewer cases of W to go in than there are of R. Bob From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Oct 27 14:16:11 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:16:11 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Basically, the idea was that W and R were parallel phenomena with similar conditioning factors apparently often involving laryngeals that had disappeared in all of the languages. I've been assuming that they were parallel too, but I'm a little mystified on how *W => w across Dakotan, while *R => Da. d, Na. n, and La. l. By that division, I would have expected *W => Da. b, Na. m, and perhaps La. w. And I think Winnebago also has *W => w, while *R => d, doesn't it? Why laryngeals? > 'Snow' would be an example ('Spring' too,I think) with *wa-wa > *w-wa > *Wa. For Dakotan it's wa, for OP it's ma, and for Osage/Kaw I believe it's pa/ba. Where are we finding the *wa-wa combination? Southeastern? And how do we know it reflects the primitive state, rather than just being a reduplication or something? > *w+glottal would be the sort of thing we've discussed before on the list with regard to the verb ?oo 'to wound, shoot at and hit'. In the 1st person you would have *w(a)-?oo. Unfortunately I've never found all the conjugated forms of this verb in most of the languages. In Dakotan, analogy as reintroduced the full wa-prefix. Hi?u is another case that David pointed out, with hibu in the 1st person sg. (b is the allophone of /w/ that occurs preceding /u/ in Dakotan.) I'm not following. Does this have to do with *W, or are we talking about a separate *w+glottal development here? > *w+r gives all those bl- stems (Omaha bdh-). What is happening is that ordinary [w] and [r] are assimilating a feature from an adjacent consonant or sonorant that is causing them to obstruentize one degree. So *w+r => MVS bl/bdh, and *p+r => Dakotan bl, other MVS *R ? Thanks, Bob! Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 27 14:54:59 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:54:59 -0500 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: > I've been assuming that they were parallel too, but I'm a little mystified on how *W => w across Dakotan, while *R => Da. d, Na. n, and La. l. By that division, I would have expected *W => Da. b, Na. m, and perhaps La. w. And I think Winnebago also has *W => w, while *R => d, doesn't it? It would be nice if parallels were perfect, but the original r/w were typically in different phonological contexts. I suspect that's a good part of it. Doesn't *W turn out as [b] in some Dakotan dialects? (And in LA it's [b] before /u/.) As I recall, you have doublet instrumentals wa/ba and maybe wo/bo?? Check both Buechel and Riggs. > Why laryngeals? Actually more than one kind of consonant can be involved, but h and ? are the ones that pull disappearing acts and remain the most likely candidates in those cases where no other conditioning factor can easily be identified. As I say n the handbook article, one has to be very careful not to use such things as "finagle factors". > 'Snow' would be an example ('Spring' too,I think) with *wa-wa > *w-wa > *Wa. For Dakotan it's wa, for OP it's ma, and for Osage/Kaw I believe it's pa/ba. Where are we finding the *wa-wa combination? Southeastern? And how do we know it reflects the primitive state, rather than just being a reduplication or something? I think the assumption here was that #wa- was the absolutive and formed the nominal as opposed to a verb. It is the absolutive that most strongly tends to undergo syncope (along with the 1st sg. wa-), leaving a [b]. > *w+glottal would be the sort of thing we've discussed before on the list with regard to the verb ?oo 'to wound, shoot at and hit'. In the 1st person you would have *w(a)-?oo. Unfortunately I've never found all the conjugated forms of this verb in most of the languages. In Dakotan, analogy as reintroduced the full wa-prefix. Hi?u is another case that David pointed out, with hibu in the 1st person sg. (b is the allophone of /w/ that occurs preceding /u/ in Dakotan.) > I'm not following. Does this have to do with *W, or are we talking about a separate *w+glottal development here? Hard to say, there are so few cases of W. It may result from Cw or wC, where C includes certain consonants and laryngeals. Someday maybe we'll collect enough examples to be sure. Or maybe Blair's Catawba will elucidate more of the puzzle. > *w+r gives all those bl- stems (Omaha bdh-). What is happening is that ordinary [w] and [r] are assimilating a feature from an adjacent consonant or sonorant that is causing them to obstruentize one degree. > So *w+r => MVS bl/bdh, and *p+r => Dakotan bl, other MVS *R ? My own analysis is that there aren't any *pr sequences. I think there may have been one or two of the 'flat' terms that looked as though they MAY have had a sequence /para-/ or something similar that had collapsed, but I think all the bl clusters go back to *wVr with syncope of the V. In most cases the identity of the wV- is fairly clear with the inanimate *wa- or animate *wi- absolutives being the primary culprits. The other instances are 1st sg. *wa-. The main problem with the putative pr- is that I can't identify the /p/ part as a morpheme. The problem is messy, so there is room for more than one hypothesis, certainly. I'll be in Oklahoma the next coupla days. Cheers, Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 27 20:07:11 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:07:11 -0600 Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel In-Reply-To: <004f01c6f91f$55c3de40$075a133f@JIMM> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote: > This discussion by Mark Donohoe is interesting and begins to offer some > explaination. However, it is short of offering how the term, as is > (waNda/ waNwaNda) could be conjugated. I should probably clarify that this Palu'e : Siouan parallel isn't really intended to have anything to do with Jimm's waNda question. In fact, even the reference to the IO verb a...da 'to see' is a coincidence. I had put this note together before Jimm's request came in, picking a...da because PS *a...ta also starts with a dental (like Palu'e tusu) and also syncopates. It didn't dawn on me that it might seem like part of waNda thread until Jimm remarked on it! From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 27 20:30:16 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:30:16 -0600 Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) In-Reply-To: <004e01c6f91f$54952240$075a133f@JIMM> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote: > > The form that Whitman gives is haN'da from underlying hiN-a-da. I think > > Jimm actually gave it, too, in his note that prompted this! > > Not quite, John. Perhaps I did not write a clear analysis of the entry: > waNda. As I attempted to say and write it, it seemed that the entry could > be from: > > wa (something) + hiN- (me) + ada' (see). Exactly. And when I had looked up hiN + ada and discovered it came out haNda I remembered your comment on ...aNda in waNda and realized you had already mentioned the form. > I cannot account for the gloss "look at s.t.", which would be more likely to > be: > wa + ada'. > Nor can I account for a nasual in the word. And as is, it appears to be > suggesting "something that sees me." Exactly, again. It looks like it should be wada, not waNda, or if it is waNda, then it should be glossed 'we see something'. (Would 'something that sees me' really be possible?) Altenratively, I was wondering if waNda ~ wawaNda might suggest that the form is really a root waNda meaning 'to see something' (like we might write ada 'to see something'). In this hypothetical root, the initial w would be part of the root, not a trace of wa-. Maybe the PS form, if there was one, would be *paNta, or maybe *waNta. It's always a bit disconcerting the way it seems best to translate something like waruj^e as 'he ate something' in a text, but also to include "something" or "someone" in glossing a transitive verb in a dictionary, e.g., ruj^e 'to eat something'. I suppose in the dictionary waruj^e would be 'to eat some unknown or unspecified thing'. English isn't exactly the perfect metalanguage for glossing Siouan languages! > we (dual)....,haN'da (hiN+ada) > > I'm still unclear how you read a "we" into the word or how the declarative > male particle "ke" come into consideration here. > jimm The OP eclamation isn't a perfect match for IO, since it is something like hiNdakhe, not haNdakhe. But haNda is from underlying hiN-a-da. The khe or the initial h can be missing in the OP exclamation. I haven't looked to see if the the variants are random or certain people use one or the other. > PS: I do not believe the word to be an exclamation, although in the light > that I am still unable to locate any textual context to support usage, I > cannot disclaim it. I'll have to give some examples when I get a chance. The way it's used is something like "Let's see, what can he be doing?" It's never a main verb, and there's always some associated expression. I don't think it ever stands alone as "Let's see!" If it did I think "Hmm!" wqould be a better gloss. It's a bit like English patterns like "And, voila, the answer comes out of this little slot here!" Or, if I have the expression right in Spanish, like a bilingual person - or at least my Spanish teacher - saying, "A ver, how will he answer this?" (I should probably check out that expression which surfaces from the dark depths of Spanis II some 30 years ago.) > Also a number of the interjections from OP et.al., you mentioned, have > eqivalents in IOM. Yes - it's pretty amazing how consistent the exclamations are across Siouan. The little list of i and hiN forms fromt eh CSD that Bob cited barely scratches the surface of this. I suppose the similarities might be areal, rather than inherited in a strict sense, but I don't know if anyone has ever looked at this. An explicitly borrowed exclamation in OP in the Dorsey texts is nawa, which I think is the affirmative form in Pawnee. Anyway, the notes indicate that this is a Pawnee form. You have to assume that the narrator explained this to Dorsey, since (J.O.) Dorsey never studied Pawnee that I know. My favorite OP exclamation is wuhu or buhu, which is something like "you don't say!" From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 27 20:40:56 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:40:56 -0600 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > So *R is the phoneme behind the Dakhota/Nakhota/Lakhota divide? I.e., > *Rakhota ? What about Assiniboine and Stoney? Where do they come out? *R > n in Assinboine and Stoney. In fact, since bl (< *p-R < **p-r) is md in Santee and mn in Assiniboine and Stoney, I've wondered if *R was */n/ in Proto-Dakotan. Richard Carter once mentioned to me that he'd had similar thoughts (which would have been earlier than mine!). > And *R => d in IOM and Winnebago, n in Crow (-Hidatsa ?), I'm not sure about Crow-Hidatsa, since in both of them n seems (today) to be a conditioned allophone of /r/. Not the same conditioning in the two cases. In Crow /r/ is [d ~ l ~ n], all written separately in the popular orthography. I think n occurs finally and in geminate sequences. > n in Biloxi and Tutelo, l in Ofo, t in Quapaw and Osage, d in Kansa, and > of course n in OP. In some of these cases the reflex is identical with the reflex of *r or *t. In fact, on reflection, only Dakotan and Winnebago have fairly unique developments: PS Da Wi *r y r *R l d *t t j^ > Is Mandan unknown? I think it's /r/ (like *r), but, of course, /r/ is [n] before nasal vowels. > And *W => w in Dakotan and Winnebago, I believe, which isn't hugely helpful > to the model I proposed earlier today. It's m in Omaha, e.g., in outer instrumentals like mu= 'by shooting' and ma= 'by cutting'. And *R is n, as in na= 'by heat, or spontaneously', vs. the inner instrumental naN- 'by foot'. I'll let Bob supply *W = *w-w data, but I think some of the outer instrumentals have #VwV- in some languages. From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Oct 27 23:23:44 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:23:44 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > I've been assuming that they were parallel too, but I'm a little mystified on how *W => w across Dakotan, while *R => Da. d, Na. n, and La. l. By that division, I would have expected *W => Da. b, Na. m, and perhaps La. w. And I think Winnebago also has *W => w, while *R => d, doesn't it? > It would be nice if parallels were perfect, but the original r/w were typically in different phonological contexts. I suspect that's a good part of it. Doesn't *W turn out as [b] in some Dakotan dialects? (And in LA it's [b] before /u/.) As I recall, you have doublet instrumentals wa/ba and maybe wo/bo?? Check both Buechel and Riggs. You're right! I was just going off the 'snow' term. The "shooting" and "cutting" instrumentals are indeed bo- and ba- in Dakota (Riggs), and wo- and wa- in Lakhota (Buechel). Now if Yankton, Assiniboine and Stoney turn out to be mo- and ma-, the parallel will be satisfyingly close to perfect. > > Why laryngeals? > Actually more than one kind of consonant can be involved, but h and ? are the ones that pull disappearing acts and remain the most likely candidates in those cases where no other conditioning factor can easily be identified. As I say n the handbook article, one has to be very careful not to use such things as "finagle factors". This argument assumes that there is an extra consonant involved. If so, a laryngeal might be most reasonable. But postulating an extra consonant that has since disappeared looks like a finagle to me. If *W and *R were nasally-released stops, then I don't think we need anything extra. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 29 16:59:25 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 10:59:25 -0600 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: >> Actually more than one kind of consonant can be involved, but h and ? are the ones that pull disappearing acts and remain the most likely candidates in those cases where no other conditioning factor can easily be identified. As I say n the handbook article, one has to be very careful not to use such things as "finagle factors". > This argument assumes that there is an extra consonant involved. If so, a laryngeal might be most reasonable. But postulating an extra consonant that has since disappeared looks like a finagle to me. Well, we KNOW that ?/h do have the necessary obstruentizing effect on adjacent w/r. There are good examples of r? > t? and rh > th in several morphemes. This leaves possible pigeon holes for the mirror image sequences *?r and ?w. Both laryngeals have appeared and disappeared numerous times in the various languages over time. No one has ever written the book that would catalog these changes, so we're not on the firmest of ground here. There has been both epenthesis and metathesis of glides in Siouan, not just in the one rule or constraint fits all of synchronic phonology, but multiple times in multiple environments over several millennia. > If *W and *R were nasally-released stops, then I don't think we need anything extra. That's essentially just what we've done in positing *W and *R opposing *w and *r --we've added a feature to differentiate them phonologically. You've picked the feature [nasal] to do that, and I don't think that's unreasonable (some languages have mb and nd as reflexes). Others of us have essentially left that feature "blank", and that is what the upper case letters signify. Additionally, we find that the "consonantizing" feature added to *w/*r is often assimilated from an adjacent consonant in a certain number of cases. This makes us suspect that there was probably some "disappeared" consonant responsible in the unexplained cases, and this leads us back to the laryngeals . . . full circle. What I'm saying is that the reconstructions W/mb/wC/Cw along with R/nd/rC/Cr are all in some ways less than satisfactory and essentially notational variants. Bob From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Mon Oct 30 16:11:32 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:11:32 -0600 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > If *W and *R were nasally-released stops, then I don't think we need anything extra. > That's essentially just what we've done in positing *W and *R opposing *w and *r --we've added a feature to differentiate them phonologically. You've picked the feature [nasal] to do that, and I don't think that's unreasonable (some languages have mb and nd as reflexes). Others of us have essentially left that feature "blank", and that is what the upper case letters signify. Additionally, we find that the "consonantizing" feature added to *w/*r is often assimilated from an adjacent consonant in a certain number of cases. This makes us suspect that there was probably some "disappeared" consonant responsible in the unexplained cases, and this leads us back to the laryngeals . . . full circle. What I'm saying is that the reconstructions W/mb/wC/Cw along with R/nd/rC/Cr are all in some ways less than satisfactory and essentially notational variants. Just to be sure we're clear here, by "nasally-released stop", I mean a full stop that is released as the corresponding nasal consonant, not as one that is preceded by one. Thus, for *W I propose *pm/*bm, not *mb, and for *R I propose *tn/*dn, not *nd. Of course, these might easily have reflexes mb and nd by metathesis, but that's not what I'm proposing for the originals. I also certainly support continuing to use *W and *R in general historical reference to these phonemes or clusters. We can all agree on *W and *R; what actual values they may have had is an optional discussion. If an argument for vanished laryngeals is being made on the assumption that we need some extra obstruentizing consonant to explain all cases of *W and *R, then that discussion needs to occur. What you say above in the two sentences following "Additionally" seems to be: Since we know that some cases of *W and *R arose from clustering of *w or *r with an obstruentizing consonant, we can suppose that they all did: therefore laryngeals. This is a very reasonable hypothesis for research, but it is not solid as an argument. In fact, I think we could just as easily imagine the reverse: that *W and *R were primary single phonemes in the language, and that the "explained cases" where they arose from *w and *r clusters happened because the clusters, or parts of them, sounded similar enough to pre-existent *W and *R to mimic and merge with them. Thus, if r? > t? and rh > th in some cases where both [r] and [t] already exist in the language, why not Cr > CR, where the r > R change is modelled on a known phoneme R and C acts as a catalyst for the conversion? In the remark from the previous posting quoted at the top, I was referring to phonotactic mechanisms with an eye to Occam's razor. The laryngeal cluster model for *W and *R requires something happening in the throat which has since ceased to happen everywhere. The nasally-released stop model can account for all the typical reflexes (*W > p, b, m, w; *R > t, d, n, l) simply by changing the relative timing and intensity of factors (oral closure, nasal opening, voicing) that are present in many of the reflexes. Unlike the laryngeal cluster model, it does not require extra factors. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Mon Oct 30 23:09:40 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:09:40 -0600 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: > Just to be sure we're clear here, by "nasally-released stop", I mean a full stop that is released as the corresponding nasal consonant, not as one that is preceded by one. Thus, for *W I propose *pm/*bm, not *mb, and for *R I propose *tn/*dn, not *nd. Of course, these might easily have reflexes mb and nd by metathesis, but that's not what I'm proposing for the originals. I don't think it matters one way or the other whether we postulate w/rN, Nr/w, or Hr/w, w/rH as long as there are no conflicting correspondence sets. What I'm writing as N or H (=h/?) here are all equally just "features" right now. In favor of your idea of CN with a nasal release, I think you'll find in Riggs a notation that he heard Dakota (D-dialect) words /ob/ and comparable sequences as phonetically [obm] on occasion. I included that in the paper I did at the Chicago SCLC 4 or 5 years ago. > What you say above in the two sentences following "Additionally" seems to be: Since we know that some cases of *W and *R arose from clustering of *w or *r with an obstruentizing consonant, we can suppose that they all did: therefore laryngeals. No, just that we can hypothesize that. > In the remark from the previous posting quoted at the top, I was referring to phonotactic mechanisms with an eye to Occam's razor. The laryngeal cluster model for *W and *R requires something happening in the throat which has since ceased to happen everywhere. The nasally-released stop model can account for all the typical reflexes (*W > p, b, m, w; *R > t, d, n, l) simply by changing the relative timing and intensity of factors (oral closure, nasal opening, voicing) that are present in many of the reflexes. Unlike the laryngeal cluster model, it does not require extra factors. Yes, but voicing IS a laryngeal feature and very much subject to timing changes. [Nasal] and [continuant] apply in other parts of the vocal tract. I still think the "solutions" are all pretty much notational variants and can't really agree that one feature is more "natural" (or economical . . . whatever) in these instances. We really need to look closely at languages like Mandan and Catawba where laryngeals were ignored by early workers to see if potential conditioning factors remain. And I must say that "Occam's razor", so useful as an evaluation metric/procedure in synchronic phonology, is notoriously defective in explaining historical developments. History tends to show a lot of variability and vacillation -- trends and counter-trends before things "shake out". I've seen it tried in the "theory of fewest moves" applied to both articulation and migration (geographically), and the actual facts, when we learn them, contravene it far too often to keep me happy. Bob From rood at spot.Colorado.EDU Mon Oct 2 21:55:59 2006 From: rood at spot.Colorado.EDU (ROOD DAVID S) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 15:55:59 -0600 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement Message-ID: Dear Colleagues, I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this project succeed. Best, David David S. Rood Dept. of Linguistics Univ. of Colorado 295 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0295 USA rood at colorado.edu DO YOU SPEAK LAKOTA? WOULD YOU LIKE TO EARN AN M. A. DEGREE WHILE HELPING TO STRENGTHEN THE LANGUAGE? The University of Colorado Department of Linguistics will offer full support to three Lakota speakers for three years each, starting in the Fall of 2007, to enable them to study for the Master of Arts in Linguistics and to undertake the video documentation of everyday Lakota conversation. "Full support" means all tuition and fees plus a 50% Student Research Assistant appointment (which includes health insurance), usually enough to live on. The funding for this project is a grant from the National Science Foundation to Prof. David S. Rood. Applicants must (1) be able to speak the Lakota language to some extent; (2) be qualified and willing to become graduate students at the University of Colorado; (3) be enthusiastic about helping to meet the need to document and perpetuate the Lakota language. If you are interested in applying to be one of these three student researchers, please examine the general information about graduate studies in Linguistics available on the internet at: http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/ You will be a regularly enrolled student, taking graduate courses. In addition, you will have daily conversation sessions in Lakota with a fluent elder. In the summers you will make videotapes of people holding conversations in Lakota which you will analyze and translate during the following year. You might finish your M.A. in two years, but whether you do or not, you will still have support for the third year. The project will provide the equipment you need and pay your travel expenses as well as paying fees to those who participate in your videos. You will receive academic help if you want it, and you will be put in touch with Native American social and support groups on campus. We hope you will find a career supporting efforts to keep Lakota alive, but you do not need to promise that to be eligible for the program. The application deadline is January 15, 2007. Please contact Prof. Rood for any kind of questions or assistance with the application: David S. Rood 295 UCB Boulder, Colorado, 80305-0295 telephone 303-492-2747 email rood at colorado.edu From munro at ucla.edu Mon Oct 2 23:05:38 2006 From: munro at ucla.edu (Pamela Munro) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 16:05:38 -0700 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Wonderful! I don't know any suitable candidates, however. Pam ROOD DAVID S wrote: >Dear Colleagues, > > I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and >spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this project >succeed. > Best, > David > >David S. Rood >Dept. of Linguistics >Univ. of Colorado >295 UCB >Boulder, CO 80309-0295 >USA >rood at colorado.edu > >DO YOU SPEAK LAKOTA? > >WOULD YOU LIKE TO EARN AN M. A. DEGREE WHILE HELPING TO STRENGTHEN THE >LANGUAGE? > > The University of Colorado Department of Linguistics will offer >full support to three Lakota speakers for three years each, starting in >the Fall of 2007, to enable them to study for the Master of Arts in >Linguistics and to undertake the video documentation of everyday Lakota >conversation. "Full support" means all tuition and fees plus a 50% >Student Research Assistant appointment (which includes health insurance), >usually enough to live on. The funding for this project is a grant from >the National Science Foundation to Prof. David S. Rood. > Applicants must (1) be able to speak the Lakota language to some >extent; (2) be qualified and willing to become graduate students at the >University of Colorado; (3) be enthusiastic about helping to meet the need >to document and perpetuate the Lakota language. > If you are interested in applying to be one of these three student >researchers, please examine the general information about graduate studies >in Linguistics available on the internet at: >http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/ > You will be a regularly enrolled student, taking graduate courses. >In addition, you will have daily conversation sessions in Lakota with a >fluent elder. In the summers you will make videotapes of people holding >conversations in Lakota which you will analyze and translate during the >following year. You might finish your M.A. in two years, but whether you >do or not, you will still have support for the third year. The project >will provide the equipment you need and pay your travel expenses as well >as paying fees to those who participate in your videos. > > You will receive academic help if you want it, and you will be put >in touch with Native American social and support groups on campus. We >hope you will find a career supporting efforts to keep Lakota alive, but >you do not need to promise that to be eligible for the program. > > The application deadline is January 15, 2007. Please contact >Prof. Rood for any kind of questions or assistance with the application: > > David S. Rood > 295 UCB > Boulder, Colorado, 80305-0295 > telephone 303-492-2747 > email rood at colorado.edu > > > > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 03:58:12 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 21:58:12 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > > Apical refers to the tongue tip. > > Good, that's what I thought. In that case, my confusion is over the > apparent contrast between apical and alveolar. It should be apico-dental and apico-alveolar. > I do carefully write tt vs. tH, and not t vs. tH. I learned this > convention from you years ago, and I've been following it pretty > religiously. Me, too. Or rather tt vs. th. I don't see any point in raising the h if the "r" isn't written th, but instead is written dh (i.e., edh, or the curled, crossed d). But the two popular schemes write t vs. tH and write edh mostly as "th". I think one or the other writes l in some contexts, but I've just ignored that. It would be fine, but of course, but th is clearly prefered, and l doesn't contrast with th, so th it is. > I'm entirely convinced that any native speaker of English using loose t > or x to transcribe Omaha will frequently put down t indifferently for tt > or tH, and x indifferently for x^ and g^, and go right on without > realizing anything is amiss. If you force yourself to use only the > marked form, then you seldom make that kind of mistake. This is Bob's argument for the stops. I don't think he would claim it for x vs. gamma, because no linguist is confused about that for long, and no English speaker thinks x is a velar fricative. Omahas (not Poncas, I think) are a special case. However, insofar as I can in email and in lingusitic conscience, I have been sticking to the "Macy Schools Scheme," as I used to call it. (I don't think it came with a name.) That is, I have been doing that mentally and in certain side work. For actual use on the list and lingusitic publication I stick pretty close to Standard Siouan, because I think it's less confusing not to switch back and forth (and less confusing period). > You mean a branch of a river, not the branch of a tree growing by a river, > right? :) Yes. > Would that be gahe' ? (I'm not sure if we ever got the pronunciation of > this word pinned down.) It might be, but I don't think it was just h, so maybe not. > > As for bighoN and bixoN, one was something like 'make a farting noise', > > but I'll have to look this pair up. What, you want meanings, too? > > For elicitation purposes, that would sure help! Bob provided them. I forget which one CS laughed at and said it sounded like I was talking about farting when I said that. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 04:11:52 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 22:11:52 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > I noticed that similarity between 'bird' and 'squirrel' as I was typing > the post, but I don't know of any folk taxonomy in Siouan that commonly > joins mammals with birds in this way. Isn't this the 'flying squirrel' term? From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 04:10:45 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 22:10:45 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > Mmmm, the use of "sophisticated" here reminds me of von Neumann's comment on the use of the term "elegant" in the description of mathematical explanations: "Elegance is something best left to shoe salesmen." (I used to be able to quote it in German.) Actually, my explanation is more "historical", I would say. We know that *tk > kt first because some of the languages preserve that stage, or an obvious reflex of it. Chiwere gives instances. Then, as usual, the second element of the cluster "wins" and you ultimately get *tk > kt > ht > tt. The ht stage is Osage. Compare 'drink' > Lakota yatkaN < tk > Winn. racgaN < tk > Chiwe. rahtaN < kt > Omaha dhattaN < kt > Kaw yattaN < kt That's a better example than I gave, since it's native. The point is that the hd in IO is presuambly from *kt, but the cluster is actually *tk in Dakotan and Winnebago, so that explains why Dh has *ht *or *tt, take your pick) from both *tk and *kt (and *ht). Shifts of *kt to ht are pretty common, linguistically. > Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? Haven't gotten back to this, but I wonder if 'egg' is one? Or 'rib/side'? I thought about 'evening', cf. OP ppaze, but that is *kpas- I think. It's varies between tpaza and kpaza in Dakotan dialects, but *tp and *kp merge as one or the other in Dakotan. Hint, if you're in a hurry: search your Winnebago dicitonary, preferably electronically, for c^w < *tp. Then look for Dakotan forms with kp (Teton) or tp (Santee) - I think! - that match it. Instrumental roots are good places to look, but harder to find than nouns if you have to look things up in paper sources. I almost think that Siouan dictionaries should list things like wethiN and agdhiN or bixoN as -thiN, we-; -gdhiN, a-; -xoN, bi-. If they're electronic you can have your cake and invert it, too. You should definitely list -xoN and then cross-reference all the derivatives in anything ocmprehensive. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 3 04:20:09 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 22:20:09 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Mon, 2 Oct 2006, Koontz John E wrote: > Isn't this the 'flying squirrel' term? Not intended to be a joke, by the way. There is such a terminological distinction in some Siouan languages, and, of course, there is such a beast, though I personally have never seen one outside of the Rocky & Bulwinkle Show. They really just glide. As far as using related roots for birds and flying squirrels, we also find this for owls and moths (and bats?), which fly at night, and for owls and tree ducks, which both live in holes in trees. Folk taxonymy is a whole different way of looking at things, if you've been raised to think Linnaean schemes are universal. There are strange examples in Indo-European languages, too. From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Tue Oct 3 15:24:10 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 10:24:10 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: wagaxthoN, I justs downloaded the recording from last night and found only the last section of elicitation starting with "name" izhazhe. So I must not have had the recorder on through the earlier materials. Sorry. I was hoping to examine Alberta's he/hE utterances to "see" if there was a distinction that I could not hear. Auntie called later last night to say she recalled "nits" as hEsoN'. When I asked her about "pale antlers" she confirmed hesoN' but I still could not hear a clear distinction between the two. wagoNze Uthixide Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Anthropology-Geography Ethnic Studies (Native American Studies) University of Nebraska-Lincoln 841 Oldfather Hall Lincoln, NE 68588-0368 mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Office: 402-472-3455 FAX: 402-472-9642 UmoNhoN ie thethudi Omaha Language Spoken Here -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Tue Oct 3 15:48:37 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 10:48:37 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Aloha all, Sorry for the unintended note just posted. That will teach me to examine the "reply to" address a bit more closely. Mark UmoNhoN ie thethudi Omaha Language Spoken Here -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Tue Oct 3 20:08:15 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 15:08:15 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Mark wrote: > Sorry. I was hoping to examine Alberta's he/hE utterances to "see" if there was a distinction that I could not hear. > Auntie called later last night to say she recalled "nits" as hEsoN'. When I asked her about "pale antlers" she confirmed hesoN' but I still could not hear a clear distinction between the two. Well, inadvertant to the list or not, I had been thinking about posting on this anyway. I had suggested a couple of years ago that Omaha might recognize a distinction between /e/ and /E/, based largely on the minimal pair: he, 'horn', vs. hE, 'louse', where to my ear the latter sounded more like the /E/ in "pet". The speakers are apparently able to distinguish these two terms, at least some of the time. The difference of "cot" vs. "caught" in English might be an analogy of how subtle and sporadic it is. Last night, we had our elder speaker pronounce these terms for us again. Most of the time there seemed to be little or no difference. When she pronounced them very carefully, though, it seemed to me that there was a difference, but not necessarily exactly what I had thought before. For he, 'horn', the vowel came out sharp, clear, and short, rather like the vowel in si, 'foot'. For hE, 'louse', the vowel seemed to linger and change a bit, as a diphthong. It could be construed as starting with /he/ and gliding toward the center, as he[A], with the final part of that glide very brief and optional. So now I'm starting to think that there is probably no phonemic difference between /e/ and /E/, but that there is a difference between these two words, such that 'louse' could be spelled he'a, with the final vowel de-emphasized almost to nothing, and only rarely even perceptible. When it can be heard, the shift from /e/ to /A/ passes through the range of /E/, which is why my English ear could parse it that way. If this interpretation is correct, it would appear that the Omaha word for 'louse' is a straight match for the Dakotan term, he'ya. If so, I wonder if we can get this straight from MVS, with *he'a remaining in both language groups, but with epenthetic /y/ being recognized in the spelling for Dakotan, and the final syllable being almost but not quite dropped in Omaha? Or would one language have borrowed it from another in more recent times? Would there be any constraints with what we should expect for the development of epenthetic /y/ in MVS? How would this compare with the 'speech' term, i'e / i'ye ? Do other MVS languages tell us anything? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rwd0002 at unt.edu Tue Oct 3 20:28:15 2006 From: rwd0002 at unt.edu (rwd0002 at unt.edu) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 15:28:15 -0500 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Quoting ROOD DAVID S : > > Dear Colleagues, > > I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and > spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this project > succeed. > Best, > David > Hi David: The person who comes to mind for me is of course Violet Catches, but you have already done that/been there with her, and she already has a Masters. I wish I could think of somebody else. Maybe Wilhelm Meya knows of some people. Best regards, Willem From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 3 22:16:09 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 17:16:09 -0500 Subject: Monday's recordings Message-ID: I don't think a [e] vs. [E] distinction would be helpful until you have a good grasp of what the long/short vowel distinction sounds like in monosyllables. The comparison with Dakotan heya is also a possibility. We should all be aware that, confronted with homonyms, people WILL be willing to make up non-existent distinctions to try to disambiguate them for us. I had that experience in Kaw with ppa 'nose' and ppa 'bitter'. When I played them back a week later without telling Mrs. Rowe which was which, she couldn't tell them apart. All the analysis of Omaha phonetics going on is really interesting nonetheless. Bob ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson Sent: Tue 10/3/2006 3:08 PM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: Re: Monday's recordings Mark wrote: > Sorry. I was hoping to examine Alberta's he/hE utterances to "see" if there was a distinction that I could not hear. > Auntie called later last night to say she recalled "nits" as hEsoN'. When I asked her about "pale antlers" she confirmed hesoN' but I still could not hear a clear distinction between the two. Well, inadvertant to the list or not, I had been thinking about posting on this anyway. I had suggested a couple of years ago that Omaha might recognize a distinction between /e/ and /E/, based largely on the minimal pair: he, 'horn', vs. hE, 'louse', where to my ear the latter sounded more like the /E/ in "pet". The speakers are apparently able to distinguish these two terms, at least some of the time. The difference of "cot" vs. "caught" in English might be an analogy of how subtle and sporadic it is. Last night, we had our elder speaker pronounce these terms for us again. Most of the time there seemed to be little or no difference. When she pronounced them very carefully, though, it seemed to me that there was a difference, but not necessarily exactly what I had thought before. For he, 'horn', the vowel came out sharp, clear, and short, rather like the vowel in si, 'foot'. For hE, 'louse', the vowel seemed to linger and change a bit, as a diphthong. It could be construed as starting with /he/ and gliding toward the center, as he[A], with the final part of that glide very brief and optional. So now I'm starting to think that there is probably no phonemic difference between /e/ and /E/, but that there is a difference between these two words, such that 'louse' could be spelled he'a, with the final vowel de-emphasized almost to nothing, and only rarely even perceptible. When it can be heard, the shift from /e/ to /A/ passes through the range of /E/, which is why my English ear could parse it that way. If this interpretation is correct, it would appear that the Omaha word for 'louse' is a straight match for the Dakotan term, he'ya. If so, I wonder if we can get this straight from MVS, with *he'a remaining in both language groups, but with epenthetic /y/ being recognized in the spelling for Dakotan, and the final syllable being almost but not quite dropped in Omaha? Or would one language have borrowed it from another in more recent times? Would there be any constraints with what we should expect for the development of epenthetic /y/ in MVS? How would this compare with the 'speech' term, i'e / i'ye ? Do other MVS languages tell us anything? Rory From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Tue Oct 3 23:40:25 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 18:40:25 -0500 Subject: Lakota documentation project announcement Message-ID: Aaron Gallegos is here in Lawrence. I will try to locate him and share your information. jgt ----- Original Message ----- From: To: Sent: Tuesday, October 03, 2006 3:28 PM Subject: Re: Lakota documentation project announcement > Quoting ROOD DAVID S : > >> >> Dear Colleagues, >> >> I am recruiting. Please see the announcement pasted below, and >> spread the word as far as you can: I would really like to see this >> project >> succeed. >> Best, >> David >> > > Hi David: > > The person who comes to mind for me is of course Violet Catches, but you > have already done that/been there with her, and she already has a Masters. > > I wish I could think of somebody else. Maybe Wilhelm Meya knows of some > people. > > Best regards, > > Willem > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 17 04:44:46 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:44:46 -0600 Subject: Monday's recordings In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > Well, inadvertant to the list or not, I had been thinking about posting on > this anyway. I had suggested a couple of years ago that Omaha might > recognize a distinction between /e/ and /E/, based largely on the minimal > pair: he, 'horn', vs. hE, 'louse', where to my ear the latter sounded more > like the /E/ in "pet". The speakers are apparently able to distinguish > these two terms, at least some of the time. ... > Last night, we had our elder speaker pronounce these terms for us again. > Most of the time there seemed to be little or no difference. When she > pronounced them very carefully, though, it seemed to me that there was a > difference, but not necessarily exactly what I had thought before. For he, > 'horn', the vowel came out sharp, clear, and short, rather like the vowel > in si, 'foot'. For hE, 'louse', the vowel seemed to linger and change a > bit, as a diphthong. It could be construed as starting with /he/ and > gliding toward the center, as he[A], with the final part of that glide very > brief and optional. How about kke 'turtle'? Dakotan has kheya. But OP tte : Dakotan pte, as far as I can recall. It would also be interesting to know if there was any trace of this pattern in the rest of Dhegiha, though nothing would preclude OP being a rule unto itself. How about accentuation? Any difference in various he-compounds? I don't see one in the forms you folks have been citing. I've often wondered about the tendency of the "generic compounds" with tte- or tta- plus body parts, etc., to appear with accent on the body part. I'd expect accent on the "beast" part consistently. The exceptional "accents" in question are in Dorsey. The rule I am thinking should account for accentuation would be something like V => V' / #C__ = C..., or, in English, accent occurs on the second, or first and only syllable of the first element in a compound, so *tta'=he, *tte'=he, etc., though I think that one or more of these is an exception. Perhaps the rule is more like accent occurs on the second mora of a compound (like any other word), so that if the first element is short, the accent should appear on the second element, but if the first element is long, accent occurs on it. This rule might be somewhat irregular in application, due to analogy. But it should tend to result in he 'louse' being accented, while he 'horn' was not, when they were first elements of a compound. Or perhaps something else is at work in the exceptions I've seen, and 'horn' vs. 'louse' have nothing to do with them. If you are right about hearing "more stuff" in he 'louse' it should show up in a sonogram, I would think. > So now I'm starting to think that there is probably no phonemic difference > between /e/ and /E/, but that there is a difference between these two > words, such that 'louse' could be spelled he'a, with the final vowel > de-emphasized almost to nothing, and only rarely even perceptible. When it > can be heard, the shift from /e/ to /A/ passes through the range of /E/, > which is why my English ear could parse it that way. It is like ea in weahide or eawa... and so on where there ea is consistently noted? > If this interpretation is correct, it would appear that the Omaha word for > 'louse' is a straight match for the Dakotan term, he'ya. If so, I wonder > if we can get this straight from MVS, with *he'a remaining in both language > groups, but with epenthetic /y/ being recognized in the spelling for > Dakotan, and the final syllable being almost but not quite dropped in > Omaha? The thing to know about Dakotan heya, kheya, etc., is that they are only bisyllabic as independent forms. In compounds they are he-, khe-. Other words in this set are wiNyaN ~ wi(N)- 'female' and iNyaN ~ iN- 'stone'. For the short form, check out Dakotan 'nit', which I recall as hez^aN'z^a=la. (Dakotan mostly shift accent to the second syllable in tight compounds with monosyllabic first elements.) Outside of Dakotan, modulo your OP material, there is no trace of the -ya per se in any of these forms. For example, Winnebago has hee (all monosylalbles are long). But the "definite" in Winnebago is forms with =ra, which is a good match for Dakotan -ya, e.g., hee=ra '(the) louse'. I'd say it was cognate, myself. I've tried to explain these various little -(*r)a and -(*r)e extensions that appear in various contexts in various ways over the years. For the moment I see them as a system of absolute markers in Proto-Siouan, though they seem to act as a sort of generic (*a) : specific (*e) pair in languages where both occur. For example, -e occurs with body parts, kinterms, tha-possessives, and concrete deverbal nouns in Dakotan, while -a occurs in generic body part compounds, animal species terms, and non-concrete deverbal nouns. I argue that the -ya in Dakotan heya 'louse' and the -ye in Dakotan s^ahiye=la 'Cheyenne' or the -we in c^huNwe 'elder sister' are just *a and *e with epenthetic glides separating them from preceding vowels, and parallel to the -a in forms like s^uNk-a 'dog, horse' or the -e in forms like thas^unk-e 'his (personal) mount'. Most of the Siouan languages tend to eliminate all (or nearly all) -a in favor of -e, cf. OP s^aNg-e or IO suNny-e. (It seems unlikely that Da -a : OP -e is a regular vowel correspondence.) In a few cases nouns in final *h, e.g., maybe *wiNh- 'female' and *haNh- 'night' retain the h before a vowel in sporadic contexts, e.g., OP haNhe'wac^hi 'night dancer' and Dakotan haNhe'=tu 'nighttime' or Tutelo mi(N)he 'woman'. Biloxi is particularly prone to retaining 0 ~ di after vowels (< 0 ~ *-r-e) and Mandan has a system of -r- ~ -h-, etc. finals that appears after vowel final roots when various vowel-initial suffixes are added, notably -e, which is sometimes called a definitizer (Kennard?) and sometimes seems to be considered as a sort of absolutive marker - a suffix added to a noun to make a form that can stand alone without a compounding or paradigmatic marker following it (Hollow). > Or would one language have borrowed it from another in more recent > times? Conceivably. Our readiness to allow some "slack" in the regularity of correspondences, plus a certain "early days" status of Siouan comparisons has made us a bit insensitive to the possibility of "inter-dialect" loans. However, I'd have to say that 'louse' is not a good candidate for a loan word. You do get them from other folks, but they are not much of a novelty, anywhere you go. > Would there be any constraints with what we should expect for the > development of epenthetic /y/ in MVS? Well, actually there is a problem there. If it were PMV *hera, you'd get Dakotan heya and OP hedha. If it were PMV *heya, you'd get Dakotan *hec^ha and OP hez^a. > How would this compare with the 'speech' term, i'e / i'ye ? Do other > MVS languages tell us anything? This is essentially *ie. OP (and Dakotan?) workers occasionally write -y- between two vowels where there seems to be nothing historically. I think you'd have to claim it was PMV *hea. But the evidence for that would be essentially your OP recordings. Most of the ea sequences that are firmly attested in OP arise from paradigmatic situations in which we have -a-wa- for 'us' combined with and infixed i-locative or gi-dative (*-a-(g)i-wa-), or from *wa + i + a where i and a are locatives. Without the wa- you get idha < *i-r-a. Adding wa- seems to compress things a bit. In the same way *wa-i-o- yields wiu- while *i-o yields udhu < *idhu < *i-r-o. There are a few where *e 'demonstrative; definite; third person' is proclitic to an initial a- or aN, e.g., eaN 'how' or to a -a- extension before a postposition, e.g., eat(t/h)a (?). From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Oct 17 05:13:14 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 23:13:14 -0600 Subject: First Person Agents in (h)a- < *wa Message-ID: I had an interesting exchange with Mark Donohue, who is working on a north Australian languagfe called Palu'e. In the course of it, I noticed the following: A1 Regular A2 Syncopating (*stop-stems) PMV *wa- *h-C... (?), *p-C... (?), *w-C... (?) Da wa- wa-C... (regularized) OP a- p-C... (ppa- : ba- :: A1 : A3) Os a- h-C... (hpa- : pa- :: A1 : A3) IO ha- C[h]... (p[h]a- : wa :: A1 : A3) Wi (h)a- C... (pa- : wa- :: A1 : A3) In particular, it never before occurred to me to wonder if the change of regular *wa- to (h)a- was connected somehow with the way that *w-C... appears as a preaspirate. The IO aspirates or voiceless stops and the Winnebago initial voiceless stops are reflexes of *hC, just as the OP tense stops and Osage preaspirates are. We know that Dakotan probably had preaspirates here, too, but I won't go into the logic here. It involves the behavior of k-stems with ki-. For what it is worth, a shift of initial p to f or h is not that unusual, and in other contexts *wa- behaves rather like *pa-, e.g., the behavior of *wa with *r-stems, where *wa-r... appears as *p-r... in Dakotan and Dhegiha, but as *R... in Winnebago and IO. Note that initial *p- is fairly rare in Siouan. It is mainly restricted to certain verb stems, mostly formed with *pV-instrumentals, and to *pe 'who' and a few highly irregular sets like 'hill' that smell a lot like loan words. The verbs in question were all irregular (syncopating). For the present, I'm not sure if there's anything in this parallel, really, but I've wondered for a long time why *wa A1 seems to lose its initial w so easily, when *wa(a)- 'idefinite object' sticks to its w like glue (outside of Biloxi-Ofo). From rankin at ku.edu Tue Oct 17 15:25:12 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:25:12 -0500 Subject: First Person Agents in (h)a- < *wa Message-ID: > Note that initial *p- is fairly rare in Siouan. It is mainly restricted to certain verb stems, mostly formed with *pV-instrumentals, and to *pe 'who' and a few highly irregular sets like 'hill' that smell a lot like loan words. The verbs in question were all irregular (syncopating). If Siouan is related distantly to Caddoan and/or Iroquoian, then the fact that those languages have a paucity of labials may be significant. On the other hand, I recall that in Uto-Aztecan initial */p/ > /w/ in some of the languages, even though in initial one would expect the opposite (w>p). Bob From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Sat Oct 21 01:56:31 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 20:56:31 -0500 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING Message-ID: In IOM, there is: wanda, look at something & wanwanda, go look at (see) s.t. (Words recorded by LWRobinson) I havent checked the stories for examples of use, but I am uncertain of proper conjugation. It seems odd and non-compliant to anticipated compound words. The nasal does not seem to belong here. "anda" = hin- (me) + ada' (see). Mark has for Omaha = donbe / danbe Lafleshe has for Osage (p.38): see, perseive, watch, scrutinize: a'tonbe, ashtonbe, on'gadonba Also LF has: Dondonba (Seen from Time to Time)(name) Wn/Hochnk seem little help here, as all I found was (Miner): -look at/ see = horug^uch' ~horug^u'ich ~~horug^ich' Any thoughts to share here. Jimm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sat Oct 21 17:22:26 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 12:22:26 -0500 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING Message-ID: > In IOM, there is: wanda, look at something & wanwanda, go look at (see) s.t. (Words recorded by LWRobinson) > I havent checked the stories for examples of use, but I am uncertain of proper conjugation. It seems odd and non-compliant to anticipated compound words. The nasal does not seem to belong here. "anda" = hin- (me) + ada' (see). MAndan has ?_taro?s 'he peeks', so it looks as though everything before the root, /-ta/ is a "locative" or some other prefix, and the pronominals come right before the /ta/ (= IOM -da). CH[ waaNda, waada, ad? 'see, watch' RR WI[ haj? 'see, watch' KM-586 I heard all three forms above in recordings, but I don't have the conjugation. Historically, the pronominals probably came right before the /da/ part, but I can't speak for modern times. The root also is found down in the Southeast. BIloxi: wat? 'watch, watch over' DS-286b BIloxi: "wat?-ye" 'cause to watch' DS-286b OFo: akth? 'watch' DS-320a > Mark has for Omaha = donbe / danbe. Lafleshe has for Osage (p.38): see, perseive, watch, scrutinize: a'tonbe, ashtonbe, on'gadonba Also LF has: Dondonba (Seen from Time to Time)(name) I think the above root is a completely different one that matches IOM /daNwe/ 'open eyes, wink' and Winnebago /jaaNp/. I'm afraid this probably doesn't help much. Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 25 22:21:09 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:21:09 -0600 Subject: First Person Agents in (h)a- < *wa In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > If Siouan is related distantly to Caddoan and/or Iroquoian, then the > fact that those languages have a paucity of labials may be significant. > On the other hand, I recall that in Uto-Aztecan initial */p/ > /w/ in > some of the languages, even though in initial one would expect the > opposite (w>p). I probably should have added that *t and *k are similarly rare. I was getting at the scarcity of unaspirated stops in initial position, barring the quite productive verb-stem-forming instrumentals. I don't know about the comparitive numbers of labials vs. dentals vs. velars per se, with or without restricting matters to unaspirated forms. Actually, I think there might be more *p than *t or *k forms, though I could be wrong. My impression is that it's *p > *k > *t (initially), but that's in line with the numbers of verb stems including instrumental-initial forms, and it might be influenced by it. As far as *p > w, as you can see I have been wondering about that. I wasn't aware of the UA parallel. We definitely have *p > w in Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe, in initial position. I've been wondering if some of the oddities in reconstructed *w-initial sets might also be explained by assuming *p-initial instead, as in the case of the first person *wa- and indefinite object *wa(a)-. Perhaps the first person is *pa- and only the indefinite object for is *wa(a)-. This sort of thinking obviously ties in with Bob's work on characterizing final, sonantized stops in Dakotan. In effect, Bob suggests that in weak (ening) contexts like stem final position and cluster initial position *ptk are sonantized to *bdg, and these have the variety of familiar reflexes in (C)CVC roots in Dakotan, e.g., Teton sab- ~ sapa, xol- ~ xota, ... (anyone remember an oral velar example? ..., blaska, gleska (but no dl...). I'm just wondering if prefix initial position might be another weak position, further back in Siouan prehistory, with syncopated *pa- Agt1 becoming *b in clusters, as in like *p-r... Agt1 of r-stem, etc., but *ba- and eventually wa- and ha- in unsyncopated contexts. In this context w is definitely acting much like f in other language families, e.g., in Germanic or Japanese. This suggestion that *p and some initial *w (as currently reconstructed) might be more or less related is independent of my one time postulate that *W (pronounced "funny" w) might be the intial variant of *p and *R ("funny" r) the initial variant of *t. I believe Bob has argued that *W... and *R... must be *w(a)-w... and *w(a)-r... In that case *wa- behaves much like *pa-, I guess, and I have no good explanation for the different behavior of *wa- Agt1 and *wa(a)- indefintie object elsewhere. In any event *W and *R are far more obligatorily initial-only than *p and *t are scarce in initial position, and there doesn't seem to be any corresponding "funny" initial set for *k. Incidentally, though I christened *W and *R and spent a lot of ink on them, they were known to Dorsey. Kaufman postulates them as sets (*?w and *?r, I think), and though I think Matthews doesn't discuss them as such anywhere they certainly seem to have had an influence on his thinking about *w and *r and related clusters. I may be safe in saying that Wolff missed them, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Wed Oct 25 22:56:41 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:56:41 -0600 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING In-Reply-To: <003a01c6f4b4$4fe42440$7d14133f@JIMM> Message-ID: I don't have anything to add to Bob's comments on cross-branch comparisons. On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote: > In IOM, there is: > wanda, look at something & > wanwanda, go look at (see) s.t. > (Words recorded by LWRobinson) > > I havent checked the stories for examples of use, but I am uncertain of > proper conjugation. It seems odd and non-compliant to anticipated > compound words. The nasal does not seem to belong here. "anda" = hin- > (me) + ada' (see). Agreed on the strangeness of the nasality if this is wa-a-da 'one looks at something indefinite'. Occasionally things are spuriously nasalized or not nasalized here or there in comparisons between Winnebago or IO and other languages. In this case the unexpected nasal might be in a particular inflectional form, if this is just an entry for wa-a-da. Bob seems to have encountered both oral and nasal variants. In OP I seem to recall cases where expected aN-wa- or aN-waN- Agt1 + Indefinite appears as a-waN-. I have never known if this was a rigid feature of the development in OP or just par for the course in producing and hearing an underlying |[aN-waN-]|. The form waNwaNda seems to suggest reduplication of a stem waNda. Maybe this isn't from wa-a-da at all. Maybe it's an special verb waNda? I guess verbs that end in -a are a bit rare, and that tends to reinforce the association with the root a-da < *a...ta, which does behave in Siouan (where it occurs) like a locative verb. The gloss 'go and see' for waNwaNda may provide a hint at the morphology here. It's perfectly possible to form compounds with glosses like that in most Siouan langauges, but what's the formation here? There's a position we in IO that seems to appear where Dhegiha has /he/ or /kHe/. > Wn/Hochnk seem little help here, as all I found was (Miner): > -look at/ see = horug^uch' ~horug^u'ich ~~horug^ich' This looks like a rather different form on the order of *o-ru-ghit-e ~ *o-ru-ghut-e. I guess this might match OP udhighide (LaFlesche Uthixide), someone we know. In Dakotan it would be a hypothetical (?) oyughuta. This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, but the acrolect or whatever it would be is IO instead of French. From rankin at ku.edu Thu Oct 26 00:57:38 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:57:38 -0500 Subject: LOOKING AT SOMETHING Message-ID: > This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, but the acrolect or whatever it would be is IO instead of French. The syllable /hiN-/ is the basis for interjections all across Siouan and extending down into the SE (e.g. Haas's Tunica). I can't rule out a 'we' meaning in the Omaha term, but I'm not sure it's necessary. >>From the CSD: PSi *hiN 'interjection' CR i* 'um...' LA h?N 'whoops, interjection of disappointment' hin? 'woman's interj.of surprise' hin?u ' " " " happiness' hiNyaNka 'wait! hold on, imperative' ?Nska 'um...' CH h?N- 'we see...' OP h?Nda 'let's see...' KS hiNe 'question marker' OS hiNta 'let me...' BI iNda 'well!' TU ehiN 'now...hortative' Cf. also Tunica h?nto, h?ntu 'come on!!' "Not a Tunica word" in Haas-215. Note also that in this set only t he[h?N] morph usually matches across subgroups. Dhegiha dialects look they have a PDH *-ta which compounds with hiN, but the Biloxi look-alike cannot be made cognate easily, as BI d does not match DH *t. BI d comes from PSi *r and would actually be a better match for LA -n?. From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Oct 26 02:44:48 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2006 21:44:48 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Is it *W that is involved in the Dhegihan positional ama'/aba'/apa' ? I.e. Dh. *aWa' => OP ama', Ks aba', Os apa' ? Would a single phoneme, if one could be found, be acceptable on other grounds as a reconstruction for the consonant in the above set? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 26 06:58:11 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:58:11 -0600 Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: JEK: > > This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) > > 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da > > 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male > > declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, ... The form that Whitman gives is haN'da from underlying hiN-a-da. I think Jimm actually gave it, too, in his note that prompted this! In regard to the hiN set offered: > The syllable /hiN-/ is the basis for interjections all across Siouan and > extending down into the SE (e.g. Haas's Tunica). I can't rule out a > 'we' meaning in the Omaha term, but I'm not sure it's necessary. > Note also that in this set only the [h?N] morph usually matches across > subgroups. I'd argue that this is precisely because it's not a set, but only a collection of exclamations that begin with (h)i(N). In fact,it seems to be several sets combined bcause of a similar initial. One form is hiN SURPRISE. > LA h?N 'whoops, interjection of disappointment' > hin? 'woman's interj. of surprise' > hin?u ' " " " happiness' The additional Lakota example > hiNyaNka 'wait! hold on, imperative' might be the same form with a positional 'to sit' appended. OP hiN expressing surprise (an unpleasant one?) is attested separately. The next two look like additional uses of hiN 'surprise', but may be a separate evidential use. > KS hiNe 'question marker' > TU ehiN 'now...hortative' Compare OP ahaN ~ ehaN m. vs. f. evidential expressing surprise. The vowel doesn't match, but I'm prepared to compare iN with aN tentatively in evidentials on the theory that I have a lot to learn about them. Next, there's a hesitation form without initial h: > CR i* 'um...' > LA ?Nska 'um...' This last is iN + ska, where ska is frequently a marker of doubt or possibility, e.g., OP eska 'perhaps'. Almost the end of the list would be the 'let's see' forms: > CH h(?N)ada 'we see...' > OP h?Nda 'let's see...' > OS hiNta 'let me...' These are the forms I was citing, though the OP form might be more completely represented as (h)iNda(kHe). The h is there more often than not. (These are all from Dorsey.) The Osage form is "hiNda' t.oNbe t.se" or hiNta' htaNpe hce glossed 'now, let me see' in which htaNpe hce is native Os form of 'I will see' (less the positional). LaFlesche is inclined to gloss hiNta' as 'right now', perhaps influenced by iNthaN 'now'. Perhaps the most convicning argument for OP hiNdakhe cf. IO haNda khe in my view is the khe. The IO declarative is pretty distrinctive. > BI iNda 'well!' > BI d does not match DH *t. BI d comes from PSi *r and would actually be > a better match for LA -n?. This looks the same, but as you point out, the d is from *r, not *t unless it is d written by accident for t, which I think happens. If the form is from *hiNra, it is more like the hiN alternatives, and the match with La hina is very close - in form as well as meaning. > Cf. also Tunica h?nto, h?ntu 'come on!!' "Not a Tunica word" in > Haas-215. This seems a better match in form, though the gloss is different. The Tunica form is actually more reminiscent of the Lakota exclamation haNta 'get away, be gone' (I've heard 'scram' as a gloss.) From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 26 07:15:04 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:15:04 -0600 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > Is it *W that is involved in the Dhegihan positional ama'/aba'/apa' ? > I.e. > > Dh. *aWa' => OP ama', Ks aba', Os apa' ? Yes, though this set is restricted to Dhegiha, and involves an unusual position (medial) and context (enclitic). Compare also the OP =ma, Os =pa, etc., set, in which the *W is initial. Both these sets are positional articles (but not positional in nature) with different plural, non-focus readings. > Would a single phoneme, if one could be found, be acceptable on other > grounds as a reconstruction for the consonant in the above set? Certainly, and presumably the same would apply to the various other *W sets. We don't need to have one eplanation for all *W sets. For example, it is clear that many Dh *R sets reflect *pr-, e.g., OP nu(ga) 'male (animal)', Os to(ka), but Teton bloka'. However, continuing with *R, where the evidence is clearer, cases like OP nez^e 'urine', Te lez^e', ... or OP negi' 'mother's brother', Te lek(s^i(t)), show no evidence of *pr in Mississippi Valley. Because some *R sets in some subgroups seem to reflect clusters, it's tempting to assume that all *R are clusters, and I think this explains T. Kaufman's *?r, which is essentially a cluster with a stealth initial element. My *W and *R are just placeholders saying "I don't know what it is, but it's like a w, etc." Finding a single phoneme to propose instead of *?r and *?w, etc., is difficult only because the territory is crowded. The only options I see are m and n, though we have some m and n that behave like w and r before nasal vowels that make better candidates and we generally tend to expect m and n to be conditioned allophones of *w and *r. If we don't rule out clusters, then mb and nd are also possibilities. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Oct 26 07:19:16 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:19:16 -0600 Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel Message-ID: The following struck me as an interesting parallel to the hypothetical development of syncopating first persons in Mississippi Valley Siouan. It's a description from Dr. Mark Donohue of the historical phonology of the first person in Palu'e, an Austronesian language from Flores, in southern Indonesia. My parallel Siouan forms are inserted interlinearly. I have used *tuNp-e 'to see', with theme-formant *-e. This grows out of a post on Language List. I'm indebted to Mark Donohoe for all details of Palu'e and for revising my first attempt at the comparison into something like clarity. On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Mark Donohue wrote: > The language I'm looking at, Palu'e, has something similar going on. > > Historically: ku- '1SG' prefixes to a root like tusu 'milk' to yield > ku-tusu 'I suckle' *wa- Agt1 prefixes to a root like *tuNpe 'see' to yield *wa-tuNpe 'I see'. > then > > *k- > ? Proto-Siouan *w- > Proto-Mississippi Valley *h- > yields > > ?u-tusu PMV *ha-tuNpe *(h)a- is the Mississippi Valley reflex of *wa- Agt1 outside of Dakotan. > and pre-stressed reduction > > ?tusu *h-tuNpe This is what we actually find, outside of Dakotan and the regular verbs. > this is attested in nearby languages such as Sika. Alas, in the Siouan family we only have the reduced form, if we don't count regularized Dakotan watuNwe. > But Palu'e doesn't like ? onsets, so it turned this into > > thusu Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe change *ht to *th and so on with all preaspirates. Their verb 'to see', *a-ta, first person *a-h-ta 'I see', cf. Wi haac^a', IO a(a)'tha 'I see' vs. Wi haj^a', IO ada' 'he sees'. The most common examples involve forms with *pa- 'by pushing', which come out as Wi paa-, IO paa- Agt1 vs. WI wa, IO wa- Agt3 (bare stem *pa- > *wa-, regularly). > which later generalised over the entire paradigm for most verbs; some > generalised the 3sg n- (<*na-), as in *na-alap > **n-ala > nala > (unanalyzable, synchronically). For some roots the aspiration is now > synchronically best thought of as being a verbalising morpheme (as in > tusu 'milk' ~ thusu 'suckle'). The aspiration doesn't generalize in this case in Siouan, but there are other places where paradigms do level on one irregular stem alternant. Comparable to the Palu'e n-inital stems perhaps are the points in Siouan morphology where an initial *r- (or its reflex) may reflect third person *i-, e.g., the *(r)aka 'by striking' instrumental and the similar *(r)iki dative forms, and maybe the third person inalienable nouns with initial *y in Dakotan (cf. c^haNte 'heart') and *r in Dhegiha (cf. OP naNde 'heart'), perhaps from *y-aNt-e ~ *i-(r)aNt-e. In Palu'e the reduction of the *CV-C... first person is from *ku-C... > *?u-C... > *?-C... and developments of that (Ch). In Siouan the reduction is from *wa-C... > *ha-C... (?) > *h-C... and developments of that (CC, Ch). The intermediate *ha-C... stage in Siouan is not usually adduced, though, in fact, in regular verbs *wa- does become ha- or a- in most languages, and it maybe perfectly reasonable to assume the *ha-C... stage. From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Thu Oct 26 16:21:45 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:21:45 -0500 Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- From: "Koontz John E" To: Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:58 AM Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) > On Wed, 25 Oct 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > JEK: >> > This might be a good place to recall the OP interjection (h)iNda(kHe) >> > 'let's see' which looks to me flat out like a borrowing of IO hiN-a-da >> > 'we see it' (not sure of the surface form) plus the IO male >> > declarative kHe. A bit like saying 'voi-la' in English, ... > > The form that Whitman gives is haN'da from underlying hiN-a-da. I think > Jimm actually gave it, too, in his note that prompted this! > Not quite, John. Perhaps I did not write a clear analysis of the entry: waNda. As I attempted to say and write it, it seemed that the entry could be from: wa (something) + hiN- (me) + ada' (see). I cannot account for the gloss "look at s.t.", which would be more likely to be: wa + ada'. Nor can I account for a nasual in the word. And as is, it appears to be suggesting "something that sees me." ada' (See): I..., a'ta (a+ha+ ta) you..., ara'sda (a+ra+sda) he/she..., ada' we (dual)....,haN'da (hiN+ada) I'm still unclear how you read a "we" into the word or how the declarative male particle "ke" come into consideration here. jimm PS: I do not believe the word to be an exclamation, although in the light that I am still unable to locate any textual context to support usage, I cannot disclaim it. Also a number of the interjections from OP et.al., you mentioned, have eqivalents in IOM. > Almost the end of the list would be the 'let's see' forms: > >> CH h(N)ada 'we see...' >> OP hNda 'let's see...' >> OS hiNta 'let me...' > > These are the forms I was citing, though the OP form might be more > completely represented as (h)iNda(kHe). The h is there more often than > not. (These are all from Dorsey.) The Osage form is "hiNda' t.oNbe t.se" > or hiNta' htaNpe hce glossed 'now, let me see' in which htaNpe hce is > native Os form of 'I will see' (less the positional). LaFlesche is > inclined to gloss hiNta' as 'right now', perhaps influenced by iNthaN > 'now'. > > Perhaps the most convicning argument for OP hiNdakhe cf. IO haNda khe in > my view is the khe. The IO declarative is pretty distrinctive. > >> BI iNda 'well!' > >> BI d does not match DH *t. BI d comes from PSi *r and would actually be >> a better match for LA -n. > > This looks the same, but as you point out, the d is from *r, not *t unless > it is d written by accident for t, which I think happens. If the form is > from *hiNra, it is more like the hiN alternatives, and the match with > La hina is very close - in form as well as meaning. > >> Cf. also Tunica hnto, hntu 'come on!!' "Not a Tunica word" in >> Haas-215. > > This seems a better match in form, though the gloss is different. The > Tunica form is actually more reminiscent of the Lakota exclamation > > haNta 'get away, be gone' (I've heard 'scram' as a gloss.) > > > > From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Thu Oct 26 16:28:50 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:28:50 -0500 Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel Message-ID: This discussion by Mark Donohoe is interesting and begins to offer some explaination. However, it is short of offering how the term, as is (waNda/ waNwaNda) could be conjugated. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Koontz John E" To: "Siouan List" Cc: "Mark Donohue" Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 2:19 AM Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel > The following struck me as an interesting parallel to the hypothetical > development of syncopating first persons in Mississippi Valley Siouan. > It's a description from Dr. Mark Donohue of the historical phonology of > the first person in Palu'e, an Austronesian language from Flores, in > southern Indonesia. My parallel Siouan forms are inserted interlinearly. > I have used *tuNp-e 'to see', with theme-formant *-e. > > This grows out of a post on Language List. I'm indebted to Mark Donohoe > for all details of Palu'e and for revising my first attempt at the > comparison into something like clarity. > > On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Mark Donohue wrote: >> The language I'm looking at, Palu'e, has something similar going on. >> >> Historically: ku- '1SG' prefixes to a root like tusu 'milk' to yield >> ku-tusu 'I suckle' > > *wa- Agt1 prefixes to a root like *tuNpe 'see' to yield *wa-tuNpe 'I see'. > >> then >> >> *k- > ? > > Proto-Siouan *w- > Proto-Mississippi Valley *h- > >> yields >> >> ?u-tusu > > PMV *ha-tuNpe *(h)a- is the Mississippi Valley reflex of *wa- Agt1 > outside of Dakotan. > >> and pre-stressed reduction >> >> ?tusu > > *h-tuNpe This is what we actually find, outside of Dakotan and > the regular verbs. > >> this is attested in nearby languages such as Sika. > > Alas, in the Siouan family we only have the reduced form, if we don't > count regularized Dakotan watuNwe. > >> But Palu'e doesn't like ? onsets, so it turned this into >> >> thusu > > Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe change *ht to *th and so on with all > preaspirates. Their verb 'to see', *a-ta, first person *a-h-ta 'I see', > cf. Wi haac^a', IO a(a)'tha 'I see' vs. Wi haj^a', IO ada' 'he sees'. > The most common examples involve forms with *pa- 'by pushing', which come > out as Wi paa-, IO paa- Agt1 vs. WI wa, IO wa- Agt3 (bare stem *pa- > > *wa-, regularly). > >> which later generalised over the entire paradigm for most verbs; some >> generalised the 3sg n- (<*na-), as in *na-alap > **n-ala > nala >> (unanalyzable, synchronically). For some roots the aspiration is now >> synchronically best thought of as being a verbalising morpheme (as in >> tusu 'milk' ~ thusu 'suckle'). > > The aspiration doesn't generalize in this case in Siouan, but there are > other places where paradigms do level on one irregular stem > alternant. > > Comparable to the Palu'e n-inital stems perhaps are the points in Siouan > morphology where an initial *r- (or its reflex) may reflect third person > *i-, e.g., the *(r)aka 'by striking' instrumental and the similar *(r)iki > dative forms, and maybe the third person inalienable nouns with initial *y > in Dakotan (cf. c^haNte 'heart') and *r in Dhegiha (cf. OP naNde 'heart'), > perhaps from *y-aNt-e ~ *i-(r)aNt-e. > > In Palu'e the reduction of the *CV-C... first person is from *ku-C... > > *?u-C... > *?-C... and developments of that (Ch). In Siouan the reduction > is from *wa-C... > *ha-C... (?) > *h-C... and developments of that (CC, > Ch). The intermediate *ha-C... stage in Siouan is not usually adduced, > though, in fact, in regular verbs *wa- does become ha- or a- in most > languages, and it maybe perfectly reasonable to assume the *ha-C... stage. > > From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Oct 26 17:26:27 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 12:26:27 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thanks, John! That was very informative, and encouraging. The thought that has been floating around in my head for a while is that the *W and *R make up a series that could be defined as full stops that are initially released through the nose rather than through the mouth. These could be considered either single phonemes or clusters. Considered as clusters, we would write them as *W = pm and *R = tn. (Voicing would not be an issue. Actual pronunciation might be anywhere from bm/dn to pm/tn to pm^/tn^, where m^ and n^ are defined as the voiceless equivalents of m and n.) Considered as single phonemes, the effect would be rather like a person with a cold trying to hit m or n, and taking just a moment before sufficient pressure builds up to force a passage through the nasal sinusses. I think this model explains the daughter language reflexes we find more naturally than any other. Postulating any kind of w for the Dhegihan *Wa/*aWa' sets seems a bit out in left field, because all the reflexes involve full labial closure. For other single phonemes, as you say, the territory is crowded. The mb and nd clusters you suggest make the most sense, but if that were the case I should think we would get those epenthetically everywhere a nasal vowel precedes a stop. A nasally released stop set would not conflict with anything else. Phonotactically, it would be very easy to get either ama' or apa'/aba' from *apma'. In the former case, the speakers would simply open the nasal passage a little bit earlier, which would prevent the stop from occurring, yielding ama'. In the latter case, they would open the oral passage earlier, before the nasal passage was opened, to produce an orally released stop preceding an oral vowel, which would eliminate the reason for opening the nasal passage at all. In either case, the resulting consonant would be more quickly and easily rendered than the heavily-marked original, and would immediately merge with a pre-existing consonant phoneme (m or p/b). This would also mesh fairly comfortably with the *pr cluster you mention as being sometimes ancestral to *R. The key here is that we have a stop+sonant cluster, just as pre-existing nasally released stops are stop+sonant clusters. The latter are "clusters" at a single location (labial or alveolar), while *pr is a definite cluster in which the stop is labial and the sonant is alveolar. I would picture the Dhegihan development of this to be: *pr => *pn (r takes on full oral closure along with p, phonotactically equivalent to the double stop sequence pt, but maintains sonant quality by allowing voice to exit through the nose during alveolar closure). Next, double stop sequences are lost. The second stop takes on the stop function of the first stop, as the first stop is reduced to h. Thus, *pt => *htt (both preaspirated and tense), while *pn => *htn (p => h, but forces the following alveolar closure to take on its initial stop function). The *tn part of that is identical to the pre-existing *R, a nasally released alveolar stop, and *htn/*hR eventually merges into *tn/*R in all daughter languages. Finally, if we picture *W and *R as the clusters *pm and *tn, and if the original language had *m and *n (not sure about this) but not eng, then the picture of *W and *R being originally merged phonemes, oral stop + nasal consonant in the same location, would explain why we don't find "funny" consonants in the velar area. I don't know how well this model fits across Siouan, but I think it works pretty well with the Dhegihan and Dakotan cases that you've mentioned. Any thoughts? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Thu Oct 26 20:14:04 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 15:14:04 -0500 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: Yes, aWa is an example. 'Snow' is another and so are a couple of instrumental prefixes. In a few cases it is clear that W is a result of *w+w, where an intervening vowel underwent syncope. In other instances it is possible that a laryngeal+w sequence collapsed. The sequence *w+r has similar reflexes in one chronological stratum of vocabulary. I have a discussion of "funny" R and W in the Comparative Method article in the Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Bob > Is it *W that is involved in the Dhegihan positional ama'/aba'/apa' ? I.e. Dh. *aWa' => OP ama', Ks aba', Os apa' ? Would a single phoneme, if one could be found, be acceptable on other grounds as a reconstruction for the consonant in the above set? From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Oct 27 01:11:36 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 20:11:36 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Yes, aWa is an example. 'Snow' is another and so are a couple of instrumental prefixes. In a few cases it is clear that W is a result of *w+w, where an intervening vowel underwent syncope. In other instances it is possible that a laryngeal+w sequence collapsed. The sequence *w+r has similar reflexes in one chronological stratum of vocabulary. I have a discussion of "funny" R and W in the Comparative Method article in the Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Thanks, Bob! I've found and read the section on "funny" R, but I don't see anything on "funny" W. Do you have any examples offhand for the *w+w, laryngeal+w and *w+r cases? So *R is the phoneme behind the Dakhota/Nakhota/Lakhota divide? I.e., *Rakhota ? What about Assiniboine and Stoney? Where do they come out? And *R => d in IOM and Winnebago, n in Crow (-Hidatsa ?), n in Biloxi and Tutelo, l in Ofo, t in Quapaw and Osage, d in Kansa, and of course n in OP. Is Mandan unknown? And *W => w in Dakotan and Winnebago, I believe, which isn't hugely helpful to the model I proposed earlier today. Very nice article, by the way! I'll have to read the whole thing when I get a chance. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 27 05:01:29 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:01:29 -0500 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: > I've found and read the section on "funny" R, but I don't see anything on "funny" W. Sorry 'bout that. I guess I neglected W there. Basically, the idea was that W and R were parallel phenomena with similar conditioning factors apparently often involving laryngeals that had disappeared in all of the languages. This is the same problem that faced Indo-Europeanists who posited laryngeals that influenced vowel development and disappeared. The discovery of Hittite solved that controversy (while creating new ones). Too bad we've no Hittite for Siouan so far. > Do you have any examples offhand for the *w+w, laryngeal+w and *w+r cases? 'Snow' would be an example ('Spring' too,I think) with *wa-wa > *w-wa > *Wa. I believe I said 'Winter' earlier -- I meant 'snow'. Sorry. *w+glottal would be the sort of thing we've discussed before on the list with regard to the verb ?oo 'to wound, shoot at and hit'. In the 1st person you would have *w(a)-?oo. Unfortunately I've never found all the conjugated forms of this verb in most of the languages. In Dakotan, analogy as reintroduced the full wa-prefix. Hi?u is another case that David pointed out, with hibu in the 1st person sg. (b is the allophone of /w/ that occurs preceding /u/ in Dakotan.) *w+r gives all those bl- stems (Omaha bdh-). What is happening is that ordinary [w] and [r] are assimilating a feature from an adjacent consonant or sonorant that is causing them to obstruentize one degree. > So *R is the phoneme behind the Dakhota/Nakhota/Lakhota divide? I.e., *Rakhota ? What about Assiniboine and Stoney? Where do they come out? Yes, *R is responsible for the folk-subgrouping of Dakotan into d/l/n dialects (Assiniboine and Stoney have n). Doug Parks and Ray DeMallie's paper in Anthropological Linguistics back in the '90's clears up the "real", more detailed, subgrouping. > And *R => d in IOM and Winnebago, n in Crow (-Hidatsa ?), n in Biloxi and Tutelo, l in Ofo, t in Quapaw and Osage, d in Kansa, and of course n in OP. Is Mandan unknown? You'd need to check the Mandan word for 'snow'. Off the top of my head, I think Mandan may just have /w/ for all these. There are a lot fewer cases of W to go in than there are of R. Bob From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Oct 27 14:16:11 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:16:11 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Basically, the idea was that W and R were parallel phenomena with similar conditioning factors apparently often involving laryngeals that had disappeared in all of the languages. I've been assuming that they were parallel too, but I'm a little mystified on how *W => w across Dakotan, while *R => Da. d, Na. n, and La. l. By that division, I would have expected *W => Da. b, Na. m, and perhaps La. w. And I think Winnebago also has *W => w, while *R => d, doesn't it? Why laryngeals? > 'Snow' would be an example ('Spring' too,I think) with *wa-wa > *w-wa > *Wa. For Dakotan it's wa, for OP it's ma, and for Osage/Kaw I believe it's pa/ba. Where are we finding the *wa-wa combination? Southeastern? And how do we know it reflects the primitive state, rather than just being a reduplication or something? > *w+glottal would be the sort of thing we've discussed before on the list with regard to the verb ?oo 'to wound, shoot at and hit'. In the 1st person you would have *w(a)-?oo. Unfortunately I've never found all the conjugated forms of this verb in most of the languages. In Dakotan, analogy as reintroduced the full wa-prefix. Hi?u is another case that David pointed out, with hibu in the 1st person sg. (b is the allophone of /w/ that occurs preceding /u/ in Dakotan.) I'm not following. Does this have to do with *W, or are we talking about a separate *w+glottal development here? > *w+r gives all those bl- stems (Omaha bdh-). What is happening is that ordinary [w] and [r] are assimilating a feature from an adjacent consonant or sonorant that is causing them to obstruentize one degree. So *w+r => MVS bl/bdh, and *p+r => Dakotan bl, other MVS *R ? Thanks, Bob! Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Oct 27 14:54:59 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:54:59 -0500 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: > I've been assuming that they were parallel too, but I'm a little mystified on how *W => w across Dakotan, while *R => Da. d, Na. n, and La. l. By that division, I would have expected *W => Da. b, Na. m, and perhaps La. w. And I think Winnebago also has *W => w, while *R => d, doesn't it? It would be nice if parallels were perfect, but the original r/w were typically in different phonological contexts. I suspect that's a good part of it. Doesn't *W turn out as [b] in some Dakotan dialects? (And in LA it's [b] before /u/.) As I recall, you have doublet instrumentals wa/ba and maybe wo/bo?? Check both Buechel and Riggs. > Why laryngeals? Actually more than one kind of consonant can be involved, but h and ? are the ones that pull disappearing acts and remain the most likely candidates in those cases where no other conditioning factor can easily be identified. As I say n the handbook article, one has to be very careful not to use such things as "finagle factors". > 'Snow' would be an example ('Spring' too,I think) with *wa-wa > *w-wa > *Wa. For Dakotan it's wa, for OP it's ma, and for Osage/Kaw I believe it's pa/ba. Where are we finding the *wa-wa combination? Southeastern? And how do we know it reflects the primitive state, rather than just being a reduplication or something? I think the assumption here was that #wa- was the absolutive and formed the nominal as opposed to a verb. It is the absolutive that most strongly tends to undergo syncope (along with the 1st sg. wa-), leaving a [b]. > *w+glottal would be the sort of thing we've discussed before on the list with regard to the verb ?oo 'to wound, shoot at and hit'. In the 1st person you would have *w(a)-?oo. Unfortunately I've never found all the conjugated forms of this verb in most of the languages. In Dakotan, analogy as reintroduced the full wa-prefix. Hi?u is another case that David pointed out, with hibu in the 1st person sg. (b is the allophone of /w/ that occurs preceding /u/ in Dakotan.) > I'm not following. Does this have to do with *W, or are we talking about a separate *w+glottal development here? Hard to say, there are so few cases of W. It may result from Cw or wC, where C includes certain consonants and laryngeals. Someday maybe we'll collect enough examples to be sure. Or maybe Blair's Catawba will elucidate more of the puzzle. > *w+r gives all those bl- stems (Omaha bdh-). What is happening is that ordinary [w] and [r] are assimilating a feature from an adjacent consonant or sonorant that is causing them to obstruentize one degree. > So *w+r => MVS bl/bdh, and *p+r => Dakotan bl, other MVS *R ? My own analysis is that there aren't any *pr sequences. I think there may have been one or two of the 'flat' terms that looked as though they MAY have had a sequence /para-/ or something similar that had collapsed, but I think all the bl clusters go back to *wVr with syncope of the V. In most cases the identity of the wV- is fairly clear with the inanimate *wa- or animate *wi- absolutives being the primary culprits. The other instances are 1st sg. *wa-. The main problem with the putative pr- is that I can't identify the /p/ part as a morpheme. The problem is messy, so there is room for more than one hypothesis, certainly. I'll be in Oklahoma the next coupla days. Cheers, Bob From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 27 20:07:11 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:07:11 -0600 Subject: Palu'e - Siouan Parallel In-Reply-To: <004f01c6f91f$55c3de40$075a133f@JIMM> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote: > This discussion by Mark Donohoe is interesting and begins to offer some > explaination. However, it is short of offering how the term, as is > (waNda/ waNwaNda) could be conjugated. I should probably clarify that this Palu'e : Siouan parallel isn't really intended to have anything to do with Jimm's waNda question. In fact, even the reference to the IO verb a...da 'to see' is a coincidence. I had put this note together before Jimm's request came in, picking a...da because PS *a...ta also starts with a dental (like Palu'e tusu) and also syncopates. It didn't dawn on me that it might seem like part of waNda thread until Jimm remarked on it! From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 27 20:30:16 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:30:16 -0600 Subject: "Let's See" (RE: LOOKING AT SOMETHING) In-Reply-To: <004e01c6f91f$54952240$075a133f@JIMM> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote: > > The form that Whitman gives is haN'da from underlying hiN-a-da. I think > > Jimm actually gave it, too, in his note that prompted this! > > Not quite, John. Perhaps I did not write a clear analysis of the entry: > waNda. As I attempted to say and write it, it seemed that the entry could > be from: > > wa (something) + hiN- (me) + ada' (see). Exactly. And when I had looked up hiN + ada and discovered it came out haNda I remembered your comment on ...aNda in waNda and realized you had already mentioned the form. > I cannot account for the gloss "look at s.t.", which would be more likely to > be: > wa + ada'. > Nor can I account for a nasual in the word. And as is, it appears to be > suggesting "something that sees me." Exactly, again. It looks like it should be wada, not waNda, or if it is waNda, then it should be glossed 'we see something'. (Would 'something that sees me' really be possible?) Altenratively, I was wondering if waNda ~ wawaNda might suggest that the form is really a root waNda meaning 'to see something' (like we might write ada 'to see something'). In this hypothetical root, the initial w would be part of the root, not a trace of wa-. Maybe the PS form, if there was one, would be *paNta, or maybe *waNta. It's always a bit disconcerting the way it seems best to translate something like waruj^e as 'he ate something' in a text, but also to include "something" or "someone" in glossing a transitive verb in a dictionary, e.g., ruj^e 'to eat something'. I suppose in the dictionary waruj^e would be 'to eat some unknown or unspecified thing'. English isn't exactly the perfect metalanguage for glossing Siouan languages! > we (dual)....,haN'da (hiN+ada) > > I'm still unclear how you read a "we" into the word or how the declarative > male particle "ke" come into consideration here. > jimm The OP eclamation isn't a perfect match for IO, since it is something like hiNdakhe, not haNdakhe. But haNda is from underlying hiN-a-da. The khe or the initial h can be missing in the OP exclamation. I haven't looked to see if the the variants are random or certain people use one or the other. > PS: I do not believe the word to be an exclamation, although in the light > that I am still unable to locate any textual context to support usage, I > cannot disclaim it. I'll have to give some examples when I get a chance. The way it's used is something like "Let's see, what can he be doing?" It's never a main verb, and there's always some associated expression. I don't think it ever stands alone as "Let's see!" If it did I think "Hmm!" wqould be a better gloss. It's a bit like English patterns like "And, voila, the answer comes out of this little slot here!" Or, if I have the expression right in Spanish, like a bilingual person - or at least my Spanish teacher - saying, "A ver, how will he answer this?" (I should probably check out that expression which surfaces from the dark depths of Spanis II some 30 years ago.) > Also a number of the interjections from OP et.al., you mentioned, have > eqivalents in IOM. Yes - it's pretty amazing how consistent the exclamations are across Siouan. The little list of i and hiN forms fromt eh CSD that Bob cited barely scratches the surface of this. I suppose the similarities might be areal, rather than inherited in a strict sense, but I don't know if anyone has ever looked at this. An explicitly borrowed exclamation in OP in the Dorsey texts is nawa, which I think is the affirmative form in Pawnee. Anyway, the notes indicate that this is a Pawnee form. You have to assume that the narrator explained this to Dorsey, since (J.O.) Dorsey never studied Pawnee that I know. My favorite OP exclamation is wuhu or buhu, which is something like "you don't say!" From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Oct 27 20:40:56 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:40:56 -0600 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > So *R is the phoneme behind the Dakhota/Nakhota/Lakhota divide? I.e., > *Rakhota ? What about Assiniboine and Stoney? Where do they come out? *R > n in Assinboine and Stoney. In fact, since bl (< *p-R < **p-r) is md in Santee and mn in Assiniboine and Stoney, I've wondered if *R was */n/ in Proto-Dakotan. Richard Carter once mentioned to me that he'd had similar thoughts (which would have been earlier than mine!). > And *R => d in IOM and Winnebago, n in Crow (-Hidatsa ?), I'm not sure about Crow-Hidatsa, since in both of them n seems (today) to be a conditioned allophone of /r/. Not the same conditioning in the two cases. In Crow /r/ is [d ~ l ~ n], all written separately in the popular orthography. I think n occurs finally and in geminate sequences. > n in Biloxi and Tutelo, l in Ofo, t in Quapaw and Osage, d in Kansa, and > of course n in OP. In some of these cases the reflex is identical with the reflex of *r or *t. In fact, on reflection, only Dakotan and Winnebago have fairly unique developments: PS Da Wi *r y r *R l d *t t j^ > Is Mandan unknown? I think it's /r/ (like *r), but, of course, /r/ is [n] before nasal vowels. > And *W => w in Dakotan and Winnebago, I believe, which isn't hugely helpful > to the model I proposed earlier today. It's m in Omaha, e.g., in outer instrumentals like mu= 'by shooting' and ma= 'by cutting'. And *R is n, as in na= 'by heat, or spontaneously', vs. the inner instrumental naN- 'by foot'. I'll let Bob supply *W = *w-w data, but I think some of the outer instrumentals have #VwV- in some languages. From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Oct 27 23:23:44 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:23:44 -0500 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > I've been assuming that they were parallel too, but I'm a little mystified on how *W => w across Dakotan, while *R => Da. d, Na. n, and La. l. By that division, I would have expected *W => Da. b, Na. m, and perhaps La. w. And I think Winnebago also has *W => w, while *R => d, doesn't it? > It would be nice if parallels were perfect, but the original r/w were typically in different phonological contexts. I suspect that's a good part of it. Doesn't *W turn out as [b] in some Dakotan dialects? (And in LA it's [b] before /u/.) As I recall, you have doublet instrumentals wa/ba and maybe wo/bo?? Check both Buechel and Riggs. You're right! I was just going off the 'snow' term. The "shooting" and "cutting" instrumentals are indeed bo- and ba- in Dakota (Riggs), and wo- and wa- in Lakhota (Buechel). Now if Yankton, Assiniboine and Stoney turn out to be mo- and ma-, the parallel will be satisfyingly close to perfect. > > Why laryngeals? > Actually more than one kind of consonant can be involved, but h and ? are the ones that pull disappearing acts and remain the most likely candidates in those cases where no other conditioning factor can easily be identified. As I say n the handbook article, one has to be very careful not to use such things as "finagle factors". This argument assumes that there is an extra consonant involved. If so, a laryngeal might be most reasonable. But postulating an extra consonant that has since disappeared looks like a finagle to me. If *W and *R were nasally-released stops, then I don't think we need anything extra. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sun Oct 29 16:59:25 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 10:59:25 -0600 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: >> Actually more than one kind of consonant can be involved, but h and ? are the ones that pull disappearing acts and remain the most likely candidates in those cases where no other conditioning factor can easily be identified. As I say n the handbook article, one has to be very careful not to use such things as "finagle factors". > This argument assumes that there is an extra consonant involved. If so, a laryngeal might be most reasonable. But postulating an extra consonant that has since disappeared looks like a finagle to me. Well, we KNOW that ?/h do have the necessary obstruentizing effect on adjacent w/r. There are good examples of r? > t? and rh > th in several morphemes. This leaves possible pigeon holes for the mirror image sequences *?r and ?w. Both laryngeals have appeared and disappeared numerous times in the various languages over time. No one has ever written the book that would catalog these changes, so we're not on the firmest of ground here. There has been both epenthesis and metathesis of glides in Siouan, not just in the one rule or constraint fits all of synchronic phonology, but multiple times in multiple environments over several millennia. > If *W and *R were nasally-released stops, then I don't think we need anything extra. That's essentially just what we've done in positing *W and *R opposing *w and *r --we've added a feature to differentiate them phonologically. You've picked the feature [nasal] to do that, and I don't think that's unreasonable (some languages have mb and nd as reflexes). Others of us have essentially left that feature "blank", and that is what the upper case letters signify. Additionally, we find that the "consonantizing" feature added to *w/*r is often assimilated from an adjacent consonant in a certain number of cases. This makes us suspect that there was probably some "disappeared" consonant responsible in the unexplained cases, and this leads us back to the laryngeals . . . full circle. What I'm saying is that the reconstructions W/mb/wC/Cw along with R/nd/rC/Cr are all in some ways less than satisfactory and essentially notational variants. Bob From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Mon Oct 30 16:11:32 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:11:32 -0600 Subject: Funny W In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > > If *W and *R were nasally-released stops, then I don't think we need anything extra. > That's essentially just what we've done in positing *W and *R opposing *w and *r --we've added a feature to differentiate them phonologically. You've picked the feature [nasal] to do that, and I don't think that's unreasonable (some languages have mb and nd as reflexes). Others of us have essentially left that feature "blank", and that is what the upper case letters signify. Additionally, we find that the "consonantizing" feature added to *w/*r is often assimilated from an adjacent consonant in a certain number of cases. This makes us suspect that there was probably some "disappeared" consonant responsible in the unexplained cases, and this leads us back to the laryngeals . . . full circle. What I'm saying is that the reconstructions W/mb/wC/Cw along with R/nd/rC/Cr are all in some ways less than satisfactory and essentially notational variants. Just to be sure we're clear here, by "nasally-released stop", I mean a full stop that is released as the corresponding nasal consonant, not as one that is preceded by one. Thus, for *W I propose *pm/*bm, not *mb, and for *R I propose *tn/*dn, not *nd. Of course, these might easily have reflexes mb and nd by metathesis, but that's not what I'm proposing for the originals. I also certainly support continuing to use *W and *R in general historical reference to these phonemes or clusters. We can all agree on *W and *R; what actual values they may have had is an optional discussion. If an argument for vanished laryngeals is being made on the assumption that we need some extra obstruentizing consonant to explain all cases of *W and *R, then that discussion needs to occur. What you say above in the two sentences following "Additionally" seems to be: Since we know that some cases of *W and *R arose from clustering of *w or *r with an obstruentizing consonant, we can suppose that they all did: therefore laryngeals. This is a very reasonable hypothesis for research, but it is not solid as an argument. In fact, I think we could just as easily imagine the reverse: that *W and *R were primary single phonemes in the language, and that the "explained cases" where they arose from *w and *r clusters happened because the clusters, or parts of them, sounded similar enough to pre-existent *W and *R to mimic and merge with them. Thus, if r? > t? and rh > th in some cases where both [r] and [t] already exist in the language, why not Cr > CR, where the r > R change is modelled on a known phoneme R and C acts as a catalyst for the conversion? In the remark from the previous posting quoted at the top, I was referring to phonotactic mechanisms with an eye to Occam's razor. The laryngeal cluster model for *W and *R requires something happening in the throat which has since ceased to happen everywhere. The nasally-released stop model can account for all the typical reflexes (*W > p, b, m, w; *R > t, d, n, l) simply by changing the relative timing and intensity of factors (oral closure, nasal opening, voicing) that are present in many of the reflexes. Unlike the laryngeal cluster model, it does not require extra factors. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Mon Oct 30 23:09:40 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:09:40 -0600 Subject: Funny W Message-ID: > Just to be sure we're clear here, by "nasally-released stop", I mean a full stop that is released as the corresponding nasal consonant, not as one that is preceded by one. Thus, for *W I propose *pm/*bm, not *mb, and for *R I propose *tn/*dn, not *nd. Of course, these might easily have reflexes mb and nd by metathesis, but that's not what I'm proposing for the originals. I don't think it matters one way or the other whether we postulate w/rN, Nr/w, or Hr/w, w/rH as long as there are no conflicting correspondence sets. What I'm writing as N or H (=h/?) here are all equally just "features" right now. In favor of your idea of CN with a nasal release, I think you'll find in Riggs a notation that he heard Dakota (D-dialect) words /ob/ and comparable sequences as phonetically [obm] on occasion. I included that in the paper I did at the Chicago SCLC 4 or 5 years ago. > What you say above in the two sentences following "Additionally" seems to be: Since we know that some cases of *W and *R arose from clustering of *w or *r with an obstruentizing consonant, we can suppose that they all did: therefore laryngeals. No, just that we can hypothesize that. > In the remark from the previous posting quoted at the top, I was referring to phonotactic mechanisms with an eye to Occam's razor. The laryngeal cluster model for *W and *R requires something happening in the throat which has since ceased to happen everywhere. The nasally-released stop model can account for all the typical reflexes (*W > p, b, m, w; *R > t, d, n, l) simply by changing the relative timing and intensity of factors (oral closure, nasal opening, voicing) that are present in many of the reflexes. Unlike the laryngeal cluster model, it does not require extra factors. Yes, but voicing IS a laryngeal feature and very much subject to timing changes. [Nasal] and [continuant] apply in other parts of the vocal tract. I still think the "solutions" are all pretty much notational variants and can't really agree that one feature is more "natural" (or economical . . . whatever) in these instances. We really need to look closely at languages like Mandan and Catawba where laryngeals were ignored by early workers to see if potential conditioning factors remain. And I must say that "Occam's razor", so useful as an evaluation metric/procedure in synchronic phonology, is notoriously defective in explaining historical developments. History tends to show a lot of variability and vacillation -- trends and counter-trends before things "shake out". I've seen it tried in the "theory of fewest moves" applied to both articulation and migration (geographically), and the actual facts, when we learn them, contravene it far too often to keep me happy. Bob