Funny W

[Rankin, Robert L]

> 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