From mrichardson at haliwa-saponi.com Fri Sep 1 19:35:38 2006 From: mrichardson at haliwa-saponi.com (Marvin Richardson) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 15:35:38 -0400 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns Message-ID: Is it more proper to use w or m in the case of Tutelo pronouns, such as wi 1sgP vs. mi 1sgP in Tutelo verbs. Could someone explain Oliverio's usage a little. Sorry if I'm not asking the question correctly. Marvin "Marty" Richardson Tribal Planner Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe (252) 586-4017 (Work) (252) 586-3918 (Fax) (252) 883-6357 (Cell) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sat Sep 2 18:25:06 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 13:25:06 -0500 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns Message-ID: I believe that in her analysis she felt that the sounds [m] and [w] were treated as the same sound by Tutelo/Saponi speakers. The single phoneme would have had the pronunciation [m] if it came before a nasal vowel and [w] before an oral vowel. This may not resolve the issue completely, as speakers may simply have vacillated back and forth between the two pronunciations. The two sounds do not seem to actually contrast with each other in Virginia Siouan like they do in English "met" vs. "wet". One of my former students, Cory Spotted Bear, was learning the Mandan language from Edwin Benson. One day he heard Mr. Benson say a particular word but couldn't quite make out the first sound in the word. He asked "was that an "m" or a "w"?? Mr. Benson answered "yes". Just yesterday I was typing some of my Kansa language notes and found that on one page I had heard the word "milk" as [bazeni]. On the very next page (from the following day's recordings) I had written it [mazeni]. Those two little anecdotes may say something about the same sounds in Saponi. My guess is that the 19th century linguists who wrote the words down probably had similar experiences. Giulia Oliverio is probably still using the email address: fngro at uaf.edu. You can try corresponding with her. Good luck, Bob Rankin ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Marvin Richardson Sent: Fri 9/1/2006 2:35 PM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns Is it more proper to use w or m in the case of Tutelo pronouns, such as wi 1sgP vs. mi 1sgP in Tutelo verbs. Could someone explain Oliverio's usage a little. Sorry if I'm not asking the question correctly. Marvin "Marty" Richardson Tribal Planner Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe (252) 586-4017 (Work) (252) 586-3918 (Fax) (252) 883-6357 (Cell) From ahartley at d.umn.edu Sat Sep 2 21:16:58 2006 From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley) Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 16:16:58 -0500 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob Rankin wrote: > I believe that in her analysis she felt that the sounds [m] and [w] > were treated as the same sound by Tutelo/Saponi speakers. Cf. two of Meriwether Lewis's records of Sacagawea's (Hidatsa) name, Sah-cah-gar-we-ah and Sah-ca-gar me-ah (both with silent -r- indicating a "broad" pronunciation of the preceding -a-). John Koontz and Bob Rankin several years ago pointed out to me the w/m alternation in Hidatsa, and Wes Jones explained that "the alternation of w/m (and r/n) is not really free. The nasal forms appear after pause, i.e. word initially in very careful speech and in syllabification." Alan From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 3 00:02:29 2006 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 17:02:29 -0700 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns In-Reply-To: <44F9F4CA.8060103@d.umn.edu> Message-ID: > John Koontz and Bob Rankin several years ago pointed out to me the w/m alternation in Hidatsa > Just for the record, I've found one example (so far only one) of a similar alternation in Biloxi: mahe and wahe, both meaning 'cry out' or 'howl like a wolf.' Dave "Alan H. Hartley" wrote: Bob Rankin wrote: > I believe that in her analysis she felt that the sounds [m] and [w] > were treated as the same sound by Tutelo/Saponi speakers. Cf. two of Meriwether Lewis's records of Sacagawea's (Hidatsa) name, Sah-cah-gar-we-ah and Sah-ca-gar me-ah (both with silent -r- indicating a "broad" pronunciation of the preceding -a-). John Koontz and Bob Rankin several years ago pointed out to me the w/m alternation in Hidatsa, and Wes Jones explained that "the alternation of w/m (and r/n) is not really free. The nasal forms appear after pause, i.e. word initially in very careful speech and in syllabification." Alan --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Sep 5 20:38:13 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 14:38:13 -0600 Subject: PMV *(wa)the 'skirt' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > To which add: > > Lakota: nit�-hepi 'woman's skirt; the kind that stands out from the hip (|nit�|)' (from Eli James) > > Dakota: heyake 'dress' Willamson-54a > > Yankton: hayake 'dress' Wm-54a A little closer to the core semantics, I have to admit! From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Sep 5 20:35:00 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 14:35:00 -0600 Subject: 'All' and C + dh Clusters (RE: Osage 'eight') In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Mark J Awakuni-Swetland wrote: > ZhiNtheho John, ShoNgeska is identified as Ellis Blackbird, ... He is > pictured in F&LaF The Omaha Tribe pp. 171-175. They report that the > MoNthiNkagaxe (Earth Makers) did not have subclans, but had "groups" > associated with certain rites. One was the "wolf" or mikasi group. KHagesoNga, thanks for sorting that out! The Wolf Clan reference left me feeling a bit puzzled. I knew it had to be a conventional English equivalent of one of the Omaha terms. These equivalents are perhaps one of the undocumented parts of Omaha culture. The ethnographers tended to be purists, and didn't elaborate on the English handling of things, though here we see that Dorsey knew about them, which is interesting. It occurs to me that somebody should write something up on this English/translational nomenclature, before it gets lost, too. For example, there's a certain scheme for talking about kin in English, and for addressing them, though I have to confess that I fairly ignorant of it. And then, as I think we noticed a long time ago, when we were talking about street signs and such in Macy, a lot of places have distinctly Omaha names - in English! From shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk Wed Sep 6 16:44:03 2006 From: shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk (shokooh Ingham) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 17:44:03 +0100 Subject: Place names of foreign origin in garbled form In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Interesting about the Omaha sounding place names in English. You find that also in the Gulf (Persian not Mexican) countries. A lot of names date from earlier English days when they were learnt orally rather than through writing. In Qatar there is a place called in Arabic saylayn which looks as though it means 'two floods', but in fact comes from English Sea Lane. Also I heard in Abadan of something called Simin Kulub which originated in Seaman's Club. Bruce --- Koontz John E wrote: > On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Mark J Awakuni-Swetland wrote: > > ZhiNtheho John, ShoNgeska is identified as Ellis > Blackbird, ... He is > > pictured in F&LaF The Omaha Tribe pp. 171-175. > They report that the > > MoNthiNkagaxe (Earth Makers) did not have > subclans, but had "groups" > > associated with certain rites. One was the "wolf" > or mikasi group. > > KHagesoNga, thanks for sorting that out! The Wolf > Clan reference left me > feeling a bit puzzled. I knew it had to be a > conventional English > equivalent of one of the Omaha terms. These > equivalents are perhaps one > of the undocumented parts of Omaha culture. The > ethnographers tended to > be purists, and didn't elaborate on the English > handling of things, though > here we see that Dorsey knew about them, which is > interesting. > > It occurs to me that somebody should write something > up on this > English/translational nomenclature, before it gets > lost, too. For > example, there's a certain scheme for talking about > kin in English, and > for addressing them, though I have to confess that I > fairly ignorant of > it. > > And then, as I think we noticed a long time ago, > when we were talking > about street signs and such in Macy, a lot of places > have distinctly Omaha > names - in English! > > ___________________________________________________________ All New Yahoo! Mail – Tired of Vi at gr@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Sep 14 20:58:08 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 14:58:08 -0600 Subject: Place names of foreign origin in garbled form In-Reply-To: <20060906164403.54480.qmail@web26811.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 6 Sep 2006, shokooh Ingham wrote: > Interesting about the Omaha sounding place names in English. You find > that also in the Gulf (Persian not Mexican) countries. ... My language was ambiguous. I was thinking about places like Skunk Hollow Road - namesake of the Skunk Hollow Singers, and a road through Macy named by Omahas - I should even remember the name of the name giver, but I don't. Skunk Hollow Road is named after a locale in Dogpatch of comic pages fame. Or ... uh ... 48 ... Hill? I'm not sure I have the number of the kind of place right there. It's a place named after a dance, I know, and I think the number there changes with time, too. It's a pan-Plains thing, I think. There are various folks explanations, but I once read that it was probably a borrowing from English tent-show nomenclature, e.g., "Review of '48." Or the Million Dollar Hill (grade on the highway outside of town). I just meant that the basis of these English language names was in Omaha culture and history, and often also in the Omaha sense of humor. It was in that sense that I meant that they were characteristically Omaha, though English in form. More venerable and closer to what you understood would be the town of Rosalie. Folks explained that it was named for a lady named Dhuzadhi - a member of the LaFlesche family, I believe, though the details escape me at the moment - and that Rosalie was just the English version of her name. I was a bit skeptical at the time, but I think they were right. I hadn't realized at that point that certain French names - mostly with common English equivalents to confuse matters - had become Omaha personal names through the merger of the Omaha metis population with the Omaha tribe. I actually suspect now that this may account for the lack of attested Omaha names for some of the better known metis figures. Very likely that had Omaha names in most cases, but these were displaced by their metis names, which were, essentially, perceived as Omaha. From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 15 12:44:43 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:44:43 -0500 Subject: Place names and personal names In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John, you're a dollar short. It is called "49 hill" named after a popular dance type. Most 49s take place in out of the way places and often after dark. Singers stand in the middle holding the drum and sing while surrounded by a relatively tight circle of inward facing dancers. If you've every seen domestic turkeys huddled into a closely pack circle dancing you will get the idea. The dance step is similar to a round dance. Male and female dancers are paired, or at least intermixed. It is an opportunity to sing and dance to love songs and other humorous ditties while trying to snag a partner for an ongoing relationship. This is an adult dance, after all. On the other topic: Omaha have quite a few so called "half breed" names for family members who may be mixed blood and no clan affiliation/name. Most are Omaha renderings of the English name. Grandma Elizabeth Saunsoci Stabler (1905-1985) had no clan due to her paternal lineage back to Louis Saunsoci, the french trader. Her Indian name was "Thi'sabet". Other names include Julia=> Juthi', Jenny=> JEniwiN', Mary=> Mathe', or Methe' (similar to the Hawaiian renderings for Mary and Marie). I cannot call to mind male examples but I know I've heard them. There were also half-breed names that were descriptive in some fashion similar to the clan names. All of these names have never been gathered and analyzed to my knowledge. Perhaps an interesting little project for someone, enit? For a time on the Omaha Reservation at Macy the name "Bedrock" was being applied to one of the tribal housing projects...taken from the Flintstones genre. Sunrise Village, the oldest tribal housing venture north of the tribal offices is still known by that name. Omaha Lodges is the housing project due east of Macy. Oakleaf is the name applied to a housing project between Macy and Walthill. I believe the name originates from the early 20th century country school and township at that location. Million dollar hill gets it name from the speculated cost of improving that section of highway 75 back in the early 20th century. It is a several miles long grade rising from south to north along the east side of Macy. Grandpa Charles Stabler (1900-1992) recalled how he worked on the grading because he had a team of horses available for the job. Uthixide Mark Awakuni-Swetland UmoNhoN ie thethudi Omaha Language Spoken Here Koontz John E Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu 09/14/2006 03:58 PM Please respond to siouan at lists.colorado.edu To siouan at lists.colorado.edu cc Subject Re: Place names of foreign origin in garbled form On Wed, 6 Sep 2006, shokooh Ingham wrote: > Interesting about the Omaha sounding place names in English. You find > that also in the Gulf (Persian not Mexican) countries. ... My language was ambiguous. I was thinking about places like Skunk Hollow Road - namesake of the Skunk Hollow Singers, and a road through Macy named by Omahas - I should even remember the name of the name giver, but I don't. Skunk Hollow Road is named after a locale in Dogpatch of comic pages fame. Or ... uh ... 48 ... Hill? I'm not sure I have the number of the kind of place right there. It's a place named after a dance, I know, and I think the number there changes with time, too. It's a pan-Plains thing, I think. There are various folks explanations, but I once read that it was probably a borrowing from English tent-show nomenclature, e.g., "Review of '48." Or the Million Dollar Hill (grade on the highway outside of town). I just meant that the basis of these English language names was in Omaha culture and history, and often also in the Omaha sense of humor. It was in that sense that I meant that they were characteristically Omaha, though English in form. More venerable and closer to what you understood would be the town of Rosalie. Folks explained that it was named for a lady named Dhuzadhi - a member of the LaFlesche family, I believe, though the details escape me at the moment - and that Rosalie was just the English version of her name. I was a bit skeptical at the time, but I think they were right. I hadn't realized at that point that certain French names - mostly with common English equivalents to confuse matters - had become Omaha personal names through the merger of the Omaha metis population with the Omaha tribe. I actually suspect now that this may account for the lack of attested Omaha names for some of the better known metis figures. Very likely that had Omaha names in most cases, but these were displaced by their metis names, which were, essentially, perceived as Omaha. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 03:40:31 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:40:31 -0600 Subject: Woman's Friend Message-ID: Here's another interesting Dakota term that I haven't seen a parallel for elsewhere in Mississippi Valley Siouan. tha'was^e 'a woman's female friend' tha'was^etku 'her friend, a female's friend' It's not clear why tha- is accented here. I would assume that the underlying form was awa's^e, but it seems to be was^e' 'a woman's female friend, corresponding to kho'la [i.e., for a man]; a woman's sister-in-law, thus a word used if persons are not on very good terms'. Buechel compares mas^e' 'a brother-in-law'. Buechel's comment on not being on good tgerms is not clear. I think he means that one might call a sister-in-law this if one wasn't on good terms with her, instead of 'sister-in-law'. s^c^ephaN'ku 'her sister-in-law' However, maybe it's the other way around, because he explains mas^e' as mas^e' 'a man's brother-in-law. It is used if they are on very good terms' And that leads to ma's^ke 'a friend. It is usedd by women as men say kho'la. thama's^keku 'her female friend' This time the accent is not initial in the tha-form, but it is in the simple stem. Incidentally, the term for 'man's brother-in-law' is different from this, too: thaNhaN'ku 'his wife's brother; his sister's husband' John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Mon Sep 18 03:06:35 2006 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:06:35 -0600 Subject: Co-Wife In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This has nothing to do with contemporary Dakota culture, as far as I know, but in looking at Siouan kinship terms, I've been struck by this Dakota term. the'yaku 'her co-wife' I think this might be tha-iya'-ku or tha-eya'-ku, historically, from iya 'to speak' or eya' 'to say', i.e., perhaps 'her-(co)-speaker', 'her someone she talks to'. The initial accent suggests a contraction or elision. Buechel also says that the'ya means 'one who has more than one wife', an interesting additional application of the term. I think, however, that this is a result of misinterpreting the definition in Riggs, which is 'when a man has more than one wife, one calls the other teya'. I think Buechel's additional definition is the result of taking the two clasues as alternatives. I haven't run into a recorded term for 'co-wife' elsewhere, but I assume that most Siouan groups must have had such terms. I suppose in the context of many situations 'sister' might have worked. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 06:27:27 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:27:27 -0600 Subject: Woman's Brother/Sister-in-Law Message-ID: The foregoing led me to this messy set: s^ic^?e'ku 'her husband's brother; her sister's husband' sc^e'phaNku ~ s^c^e'phaNku 'her husband's sister; her brother's wife' Note correction in accent. Also note that Buechel seems to get as confused by these in-law terms as I do. I think he's not always right about his definitions. These are from Lesser! Note that in most cases in Mississippi Valley Siouan conception it would be ideal for brothers to marry sisters. (Also for a polygynous man to marry sisters.) So, 'her sister's husband = her husband's brother' is something of a potential identity as well as having a nice terminological symmetry. And, of course, 'her brother's wife = her husband's sister' is the other side of the coin. Imagine the world is divided into two descent groups, exchanging spouses. Of course, it would get awkward in the next generation, if there were only two descent groups. Lesser gives the corresponding Yankton terms as s^ic^?e'ku c^e'phaNku Actually, he gives s^e'phaNku, but I think it's a notational problem. Santee (Lesser has more notational problems here) has s^ic^?e'ku ic^e'phaNku 'her husband's sister' For Assiniboine Lesser gives first persons only: mis^ii'j^e mis^ii'j^ep[h]aN >>From these, it looks like the forms for Proto-Dakotan might be *s^ic^?e'=ku 'her husband's brother; her sister's husband' *s^ic^(?)e'-phaN=ku 'her husband's sister; her brother's wife' The feminine is formed by adding -phaN. I'm not sure where phaN comes from - probably not phaN 'woman's work bag'! - but it might be connected with the Santee cardinal names *ha'phaN 'second daughter' and *he'phaN 'second son'. It's not clear if the p in these forms is aspirated, however. The initial sequence *s^ic?e is considerably modified in the feminine forms. Teton reduces it to s^c^e' ~ sc^e' - contraction explains the anomalous accent and the cluster probably accounts for the loss of ejection - and Yankton has c^e'- and Santee ic^e'-. Assinboine alone has s^ij^e' < *s^ic^?e' in both forms. I think the loss of ejection is regular, but this is a point where I need some help from one of the Assiniboine-Stoney experts! In the rest of Mississippi Valley the terms reconstructable seem to be: *s^ik?e' 'her husband's brother; her sister's husband' *s^ikhaN' 'her husband's sister; her brother's wife' I'm guessing aspiration of the k in Dhegiha from the weirdness in Lesser's sets. Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe have g < *kh, of course, and Ioway-Otoe seems to lack the nasalization. Comparing the Dakotan and other forms: PDa *s^ic^?e : POMV *s^ik?e' PDa *s^ic^?e-phaN : POMV *s^ikhaN reveals that Dakotan has c^? < *k? after i. There seems likely to be some sort of connection between the PDa *-phaN and the *-haN found in the rest of MV Siouan. The best I can do at present is: PMV *s^ik ?e > *s^ik#?e *s^ik (?e=pi) haN > *s^ik#?ep#haN ~ *s^ik#haN This is based primarily upon (a) the knowledge that many longer compounds in Siouan are derived from phrases, and (b) a knowledge of phrase structure in modern MV. Asside from the possibility that *s^ik might 'be 'bad' (perhaps 'forbidden'?) and that -p(i) might be a plural, I haven't any idea what the forms might mean. !!! Note to those who hate kinship stuff and like morphology and also to those who understand kinship systems a lot better than I do: My apologies and skip ahead to point A. One further observation, somewhat complicated: in Omaha-Ponca, taking that as an example of patrilineal usage within Mississippi Valley, the mother's clan at the level below mother's parents consists of "uncles and mothers down the line" i.e., all the male descendents of mother's father are ine'gi 'one's mother's brother' and all the female ones are ihaN 'one's mother'. Not just mother's brothers (and sisters), and mother's father's brother's sons (and daughters), etc., but also mother's brother's sons (and daughters), etc. Not mother's sister's sons (and daughters), they'd be in mother's sister's husband's clan, quite possibly your own, if mother and her sister had married brothers as expected. The emphasis here - conveyed by the parentheses around the women - is on lineal descent in the male line. Men and women both have children, but only men convey clan membership to their children. Men's children are members of the man's clan; women's children are members of their husband's clan. Men's sons produce more clan members; men's daughters produce children for other clans. Looking the other directioon, fatgher's a memb er of the clan, but mother is not. In some sense women produce children, but men produce descendents. Anyway, the descendents of an uncle (mother's brother) are uncles and mothers. In contrast, Dakotan kinship is bilateral, like European systems, rather than patrilineal, so the further extensions of terms beyond the immediate family are often quite different from those in Omaha-Ponca. I'm not sure I fully understand them, but, essentially, males of mother's generation on her side of the family are leks^itku 'his/her mother's brother; his/her uncle', while the females are huNku 'his/her mother'. On father's side, the males of his genration are atku'ku (or ateku) 'his/her father', while the females are thuNwiNc^u 'his/her father's sister; his/her aunt' The children of a leks^i are s^ic^?e-s^i(tku), if male, and c^e'phaN-s^i(tku), if female, and the same applies to the children of thuNwiN'. The anthropological term is "cross-cousins" - children of mother's brother and father's sisters, as opposed to "parallel cousins" - children of mother's sister or father's brother. One way the Dakotan system does differ from European systems is that the same-sex siblings of parents are counted as parents, and the parallel cousins are counted as siblings. Siouan patrilineal and matrilineal systems lack cross-cousin terms. !!! Point A. Safe to resume reading. Anyway, the Dakota women's cross-cousin terms (in Teton, anyway) are: s^ic^?e'-s^itku 'her male cross-cousin' c^e'phaN-s^itku 'her female cross-cousin' Notice that the Dakotan terms for women's male and female kin in these "cross cousin" lineages are the terms for their male and female siblings-in-law with the element -s^i(t)- added. As Dick Carter observed somewhere, this element is probably *-s^ic^- < *-s^ik- 'bad', losing the final consonant if nothing follows, and dissimilating it to t before the third person possessive enclitic =ku. !!! Skippers resume skipping. Right to the next letter. So the terms for 'woman's (male/female) sibling by marriage' are extended to 'woman's (male/female) cousin', which is sort of what you'd expect if your mother's brother had done the normal thing and married your father's sister. But, even if he hadn't, everybody in sight in your generation who wasn't a 'bother' or 'sister' (part of the family) would be a *s^ic^?e' or *s^ic^?e'-phaN, except that the 'bad' ones would be relatives by blood, and not eligible spouses. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 11:22:52 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 05:22:52 -0600 Subject: Place names and personal names In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Mark J Awakuni-Swetland wrote: > John, you're a dollar short. And a day late, as usual! Thanks for the details! I seem to recall a discussion of the general phenomenon somewhere by Powers or maybe Howard? As far as remembering numbers, I'm infamous for not, so I need all the help there I can get! > On the other topic: > Omaha have quite a few so called "half breed" names for family members who > may be mixed blood and no clan affiliation/name. Most are Omaha renderings > of the English name. Grandma Elizabeth Saunsoci Stabler (1905-1985) had no > clan due to her paternal lineage back to Louis Saunsoci, the french > trader. Her Indian name was "Thi'sabet". Other names include Julia=> > Juthi', Jenny=> JEniwiN', Mary=> Mathe', or Methe' (similar to the > Hawaiian renderings for Mary and Marie). Wow! You know a lot of these! I remember hearing Mary Clay addressed as Me'dhi (or so I thought it was at the time). I've assumed that in some of these cases the original is perhaps French, e.g., Marie. With many names it would be hard to tell, e.g., Dhizabet, Medhe ~ Medhi, Dhuzadhi, once it had been through the wringer of Omaha, since the English forms are derived from the French, and very similar in detail, but perhaps Judhi' is Julie, not Julia, and though JeniwiN might have 'woman' appended, I'd guess Genevieve might be in its pedigree. > I cannot call to mind male examples but I know I've heard them. I think the Dorsey texts have HaNdhi, which I assume is Henri, though it is translated Henry. Otherwise I've seen (but never heard) Sasu (?Francois) and Bac^[]i (Abadie) and J^o. > There were also half-breed names that were descriptive in some fashion > similar to the clan names. Haven't heard of any of these, specifically. Are there any you can repeat? > All of these names have never been gathered and analyzed to my > knowledge. Perhaps an interesting little project for someone, enit? Yes! > For a time on the Omaha Reservation at Macy the name "Bedrock" was being > applied to one of the tribal housing projects...taken from the Flintstones > genre. > > Sunrise Village, the oldest tribal housing venture north of the tribal > offices is still known by that name. > > Omaha Lodges is the housing project due east of Macy. > > Oakleaf is the name applied to a housing project between Macy and > Walthill. I believe the name originates from the early 20th century > country school and township at that location. > > Million dollar hill gets it name from the speculated cost of improving > that section of highway 75 back in the early 20th century. It is a several > miles long grade rising from south to north along the east side of Macy. > Grandpa Charles Stabler (1900-1992) recalled how he worked on the grading > because he had a team of horses available for the job. A number of my ancestors supported homesteads along the Sappa Creek (Sapa Wakpala?) in Kansas grading railroad beds in that area! They also had teams available and probably not much else. It was about a generation earlier, but I think the principles were the same. From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Mon Sep 18 17:19:46 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:19:46 -0500 Subject: Ponca 19 century Birdhead inquiry Message-ID: Aloha All, A colleague at the University of Omaha Native American Studies program posed the following inquiry. ...Looking for a late 19th or early 20th century manuscript or article identified as The Oratory of Chief Birdhead (Northern Ponca). Perhaps collected by someone named Bell. Does this sound familiar to anyone? wibthahoN 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 John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 22:33:48 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:33:48 -0600 Subject: Omaha-Ponca 'Ought' Message-ID: In the Dorsey texts the modal sense 'must, ought, apparently' is represented by an enclitic following the future and plural slots, wsith the form as^e. jod 1890:119.17 dhi' ha's^i=daN wahna'the=tt=as^e (NetSiouan) thi' ha'shidoN wana'tHetashe (Popular, Net Adapted) you afterward you must eat (word for word) jod 1890:144.14 hni'?a=b=as^e ni'?abashe you must fail jod 1890:210.12 aNwaN'kkide=hnaN=tta=b=as^e oNwoN'kidenoN tabashe we must shoot at them regularly Rory Larson reports that the =as^e form is no longer recognized. > I don't recall ever seeing [kkude] in Dorsey either. There, I think the > word for 'should/ought to' is something like ttas^e or tHas^e, but [the > ladies working with the Omaha class at UN] don't seem to recognize that. > They gave us kku'de/kku'de tte instead, and we've been using it pretty > freely ever since, without them objecting. The kku'de is apparently a > verb, but it's used impersonally and doesn't seem to conjugate. The same pattern of impersonal usage applies, of course, to =as^e. It occurs to me that there might be a chance of an etymology for kkude in terms consistent with Dorsey, if it is =kkud[schwa] or has some other heavily reduced vowel where e is written. It could be =kk[i] udaN 'it would be good if' ~ =kk[i] udaN=tte 'it would be good if'. This pattern is used for the imeprative in Northwestern languages, I understand. In my experience u'daN is a good example of the strong tendency of final aN to reduce to schwa, also exhibited in umaNhaN 'Omaha' and gdhebaN 'ten'. And the verb u'daN is used impersonally. It is also inflected in the dative as an experiencer verb 'to like, to enjoy; lit. 'to be pleasureable for', e.g., niN[iN]'niN gi[i]'ud(aN)= att(A)=s^(AN) tobacco she likes (to her it is good) very (completely to it) She likes smoking too much. ... naN[aN]'de iN[iN]'udaN ... heart to me is good "I'm glad that ..." Here V[V] => probably a long V (V) => elided (cap V) => elided or voiceless However, this is just a sudden inspiration, and it might have no bearing at all on =kkude. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From mary.marino at usask.ca Sat Sep 23 19:44:23 2006 From: mary.marino at usask.ca (Marino) Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:44:23 -0600 Subject: SCLA 2007 Message-ID: Dear colleagues, >Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is a possible venue for the 2007 SCLC >Conference. The Canadian Linguistics Association will be meeting here >from 26 to 29 May, and there will also be a half-day session on the >aboriginal languages in the Canadian Indigenous and Native Studies >Association (CINSA) meeting. I would suggest either the week of 21 May >(Monday) or the week beginning Wednesday, 30 May, following the CLA >conference. I am told that there would be some funding available for a >joint session with the CLA, if that seems like an attractive >option. Please let me know your thoughts on this. There may also be the >option of Norman, OK as a 2007 venue. For further information about this, >please contact Linda Cumberland. Best regards to all, Mary Marino From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Sun Sep 24 22:52:34 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 17:52:34 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: <6.1.2.0.0.20060923134202.01f39e28@sask.usask.ca> Message-ID: Mark and I have just had a session with three of our speakers to try to hammer out the phonology of Omaha fricatives. We came to some tentative conclusions, which I present below. Any comments or critiques would be welcome. In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: s s^ x^ z z^ g^ We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. I seem to recall somebody mentioning on the Siouanist list some time back, perhaps a year or so ago, that some Siouan language(s) made [s] with the tip of the tongue pressed against the lower front teeth, rather than just under the alveolar ridge, as in English. In other words, the [s] hiss would be made between the top of the tongue (convex upwards) and the alveolar ridge, rather than between the leading edge of the tongue (curled up so the top of the tongue is concave upwards) and the alveolar ridge. After some uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth. [z] is made the same way, and with less confidence it seems that [s^] is also made with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth, rather than against the back of the alveolar ridge as in English. The difference between the Omaha [s] and the English [s] is hard to detect by hearing. Not only have we native English speakers been using our version of [s] when speaking Omaha, but apparently our Omaha informants still use their version of [s] when speaking English. Our eldest speaker remarked that English words spoken with the English version of [s] didn't sound right to her. Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal triplet of words in the s series: si 'foot' ( From shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk Mon Sep 25 14:46:14 2006 From: shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk (shokooh Ingham) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:46:14 +0100 Subject: SCLA 2007 In-Reply-To: <6.1.2.0.0.20060923134202.01f39e28@sask.usask.ca> Message-ID: My vote goes to Saskatoon. The later date would be better for me, as exams come up over here at that time Yours Bruce --- Marino wrote: > Dear colleagues, > > > >Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is a possible venue for the > 2007 SCLC > >Conference. The Canadian Linguistics Association > will be meeting here > >from 26 to 29 May, and there will also be a > half-day session on the > >aboriginal languages in the Canadian Indigenous and > Native Studies > >Association (CINSA) meeting. I would suggest > either the week of 21 May > >(Monday) or the week beginning Wednesday, 30 May, > following the CLA > >conference. I am told that there would be some > funding available for a > >joint session with the CLA, if that seems like an > attractive > >option. Please let me know your thoughts on this. > There may also be the > >option of Norman, OK as a 2007 venue. For further > information about this, > >please contact Linda Cumberland. > > > Best regards to all, > Mary Marino > > > ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - with free PC-PC calling and photo sharing. http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com From linguista at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 15:47:55 2006 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan Gordon) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:47:55 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rory - Much of what you've said matches some of my impressions on hearing spoken Ponca. I would offer that what you're describing as /s/-series pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the lower teeth are probably simple laminal /s/. Laminal (or "distributed" in some phonological theory) are articulated with the part of the tongue behind the tip. Where the tip goes is therefore not very important, and it doesn't make much of a difference whether the tip remains raised or is totally lowered. Dutch and Finnish both have widespread laminal /s/ and this is why the /s/ in those languages sounds "dark" or like a cross between /s/ and /s^/. I believe Nepali also pronounces /s/ with a lowered tongue tip in certain contexts. Anyway, "laminal" is a very concise way to describe the sound, and it's a word most people who know IPA are familiar with. As far as the /x, g^/ thing goes, your analysis fits what I've noticed also. I do believe /x/ is, as you said, pronounced much farther forward on the velum than we traditionally have said. The word for something pronounced against "the back of the tongue and the velum or tonsils" would probably be "uvular." A laryngeal would be something like /h/ or a glottal stop; while a pharyngeal would be something pronounced by the root of the tongue in the throat itself, and I don't believe this is what's happening in OP. Uvular pronunciation, on the other hand, is very common in many Plains languages, including as an allophone for /k/ or even a separate phoneme. - Bryan Gordon On 9/24/06, Rory M Larson wrote: > > > Mark and I have just had a session with three of our speakers to try to > hammer out the phonology of Omaha fricatives. We came to some tentative > conclusions, which I present below. Any comments or critiques would be > welcome. > > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ > > We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., > which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. > > I seem to recall somebody mentioning on the Siouanist list some time back, > perhaps a year or so ago, that some Siouan language(s) made [s] with the tip > of the tongue pressed against the lower front teeth, rather than just under > the alveolar ridge, as in English. In other words, the [s] hiss would be > made between the top of the tongue (convex upwards) and the alveolar ridge, > rather than between the leading edge of the tongue (curled up so the top of > the tongue is concave upwards) and the alveolar ridge. After some > uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made with the tip > of the tongue against the lower front teeth. [z] is made the same way, and > with less confidence it seems that [s^] is also made with the tip of the > tongue against the lower front teeth, rather than against the back of the > alveolar ridge as in English. The difference between the Omaha [s] and the > English [s] is hard to detect by hearing. Not only have we native English > speakers been using our version of [s] when speaking Omaha, but apparently > our Omaha informants still use their version of [s] when speaking English. > Our eldest speaker remarked that English words spoken with the English > version of [s] didn't sound right to her. > > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > > si 'foot' ( s.i 'seed' ( zi 'yellow' ( > The word for 'turkey' is problematic. When Mark elicited the word from one > speaker last Monday, and from another today, asking them to repeat it three > times, both speakers pronounced it s.izi'kka all three times, with the > initial sound a muted s ([s.]). Then he asked the third speaker, the > youngest, and she gave zizi'kka. The others (or her older sister at least) > agreed with her staunchly, insisting that the right way to pronounce it was > in fact zizi'kka. > > The "muted" form seems to be indifferently voiced. Typically the voicing > for the following vowel or n begins in the middle of the fricative, so it > starts out unvoiced and shifts to voiced in the middle of producing it. > More importantly, I think the traditional "voiceless" version is marked by a > greater forcefulness in pushing the air through the gap. So the "muted" > form might be the basal unmarked form, with forcefulness being added to mark > the "voiceless" series, and voicing being added to mark the voiced series. > For the s and s^ locations we should have: > > forced (+forcing; -voicing) s s^ > muted (-forcing; -voicing) s. s^. > voiced (-forcing; +voicing) z z^ > > Finally, we come to our ever problematic x^/g^ sounds. These in fact to > not seem to be alternates in a single series. They are made at different > articulation points. [x^] is more forward, I think between the top of the > tongue and the back of the hard palate. > [g^] is farther back, I believe between the back of the tongue and the > velum or tonsils or something. (A laryngeal?) Somebody who knows Arabic > would probably be able to describe it better. (Bruce??) > > Also, the [x^] seems to be clearly voiceless and forced. I've never felt > comfortable describing the Omaha [g^] as voiced, although voicing sometimes > comes in on the trailing end of it. Nor is it at all forceful. It seems to > belong to the muted series, with indifferent or marginal voicing and > non-forceful production. > > The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: > > alveolo- > alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal > > forced s s^ x^ h > > muted s. s^. g^ > > voiced z z^ > > > Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another > symbol, say [x.]. > > Does this understanding of the Omaha fricative set seem reasonable to > everyone who has opinions? > > Thanks for any input, > > Rory > From okibjonathan at yahoo.com Mon Sep 25 15:59:35 2006 From: okibjonathan at yahoo.com (Jonathan Holmes) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:59:35 -0700 Subject: H.R. 4766 Native Language Immersion Bill needs support Message-ID: H.R. 4766 Native Language Immersion Bill needs support Native Language Immersion Bill Placed on the Suspension Calendar NEEDS TRIBAL LETTERS OF SUPPORT TO PASS http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-4766 The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006, H.R. 4766 will be on the suspension calendar in the House of Representatives the week of September 25th which means that the House will vote on the bill next week. This bill will create grant programs under the Department of Health and Human Services for Native language survival schools, Native language nests, and Native language restoration programs. Representative Heather Wilson, (R-NM) introduced this legislation during NIEA's Legislative Summit and has been working very closely with NIEA and Indian Country to turn the bill into law. Most recently, the House Education and Workforce Committee held field hearing on the bill in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Co-sponsors of H.R. 4766 include Representatives Rick Renzi (R-AZ), Tom Udall (D-NM), Steve Pearce (R-NM), and Mark Udall (D-CO). NIEA is requesting that all tribes, tribal Education departments, and schools express their support for this bill that will provide critical support for our languages. A sample letter is attached to send to your congressional delegation in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. We have a short time frame (by Monday) to get these letters into your congressional delegation and leadership on the House Education and Workforce Committee and Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The attached letters are addressed to the House Education and Workforce Committee and the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, but can be tailored to your individual Congressional members. PLEASE have your tribes, tribal education departments, and schools send in the letters to your congressional representatives TODAY and MONDAY. We do not have time to lose! If you have any questions- please feel free to contact NIEA at (202)544-7290. Please send the letters to your congressional representatives and the four fax #s below. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs fax #s (202) 224-5429 (Majority) and (202)228-2589 (Minority) House Education and Workforce Committee fax #s (202)225-9571 (Majority), and (202)226-4864 (Minority) Please send a copy to the National Indian Education Association fax # (202) 544-7293 Cut and paste the following text. SAMPLE LETTER TO THE HOUSE September __, 2006 The Honorable Howard "Buck" McKeon, Chairman Education and the Workforce Committee U.S. House of Representatives 2181 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 The Honorable George Miller, Ranking Member Education and the Workforce Committee U.S. House of Representatives 2181 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Dear Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Miller: On behalf of ___________, I support H.R. 4766, the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006. I understand that this bill will be on the suspension calendar in the House of Representatives the week of September 25th. We urge the House to pass this critical legislation. There is a crisis loss of Native languages across the country. It is estimated that only twenty indigenous languages will remain viable by the year 2050. Our Native languages are not spoken anywhere else in the world; and, if they are not preserved, they will disappear forever. Given the rapid pace of deterioration of Native languages, it is a race against the clock to save Native languages. The key to stemming the loss of Native languages is by significantly increasing support for Native American language immersion programs. It is well proven that language immersion programs are one of the few effective ways to create fluent speakers in Native languages. Further, data shows that Native students who participate in an immersion program attain higher academic success compared to their Native peers who do not participate in these programs. The United States should do all that it can to preserve Native American languages as these languages played a vital role in protecting our country during World Wars I and II. Also, as a result of federal assimilationist policies in the early and mid-1900s, many Native people stopped speaking their Native languages because they were forced to attend Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools that harshly forbid the speaking of Native languages. Currently, under existing law, the Administration for Native Americans, Health and Human Services, administers a Native American languages revitalization grant program under the Native American Programs Act of 1974. H.R. 4766 would provide for expanded uses under the current grant program to allow for Native American language immersion grants. The language immersion grants would assist Native communities as they work to revitalize and protect their languages for generations to come. We appreciate your efforts to help us save our Native American languages and look forward to working with you to ensure that this legislation is enacted into law. Sincerely, SAMPLE LETTER TO THE SENATE September __, 2006 The Honorable John McCain, Chairman Indian Affairs Committee U.S. Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 The Honorable Byron Dorgan, Vice Chairman Indian Affairs Committee U.S. Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 Dear Chairman McCain and Vice Chairman Dorgan: On behalf of ___________, I strongly support H.R. 4766, the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006. I understand that this bill will be on the suspension calendar in the House of Representatives the week of September 25th. This bill will likely pass the House, and we urge the Senate to pass the House bill by unanimous consent. There is a crisis loss of Native languages across the country. It is estimated that only twenty indigenous languages will remain viable by the year 2050. Our Native languages are not spoken anywhere else in the world; and, if they are not preserved, they will disappear forever. Given the rapid pace of deterioration of Native languages, it is a race against the clock to save Native languages. The key to stemming the loss of Native languages is by significantly increasing support for Native American language immersion programs. It is well proven that language immersion programs are one of the few effective ways to create fluent speakers in Native languages. Further, data shows that Native students who participate in an immersion program attain higher academic success compared to their Native peers who do not participate in these programs. The United States should do all that it can to preserve Native American languages as these languages played a vital role in protecting our country during World Wars I and II. Also, as a result of federal assimilationist policies in the early and mid-1900s, many Native people stopped speaking their Native languages because they were forced to attend Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools that harshly forbid the speaking of Native languages. Currently, under existing law, the Administration for Native Americans, Health and Human Services, administers a Native American languages revitalization grant program under the Native American Programs Act of 1974. H.R. 4766 would provide for expanded uses under the current grant program to allow for Native American language immersion grants. The language immersion grants would assist Native communities as they work to revitalize and protect their languages for generations to come. We appreciate your efforts to help us save our Native American languages and look forward to working with you to ensure that this legislation is enacted into law. Sincerely, Be a friend... Help support the Lakota Communities on Pine Ridge, go to: http://FriendsofPineRidgeReservation.org --------------------------------- Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates starting at 1¢/min. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Mon Sep 25 20:03:43 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:03:43 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thanks, Bryan. I appreciate your comments, and your good advice on the proper linguistic terms to use! Of course you are quite right to point out that the laminal /s/ is dependent upon the part of the tongue that approaches the alveolar ridge, not on what the tip is doing. You mention Dutch and Finnish as having laminal /s/. Is it just these two languages, or is this an areal phenomenon in northern Europe-- do you know? Also, you say that their laminal /s/ is "dark", like cross between /s/ and /s^/. I think in Omaha it's actually pretty sharp, and audibly very similar to English /s/. But that depends on exactly where against the roof of the mouth you put the top of the tongue. If what I seemed to work out with one speaker yesterday afternoon is correct, both /s/ and /s^/ are laminal in Omaha. I find a laminal /s^/ a little more awkward to produce than a laminal /s/, but it seems to work. If I am doing it right, it seems to be something like German ch in ich, but more forward, against the back of the alveolar ridge. The term "uvular" occurred to me after I sent the posting yesterday. It seems to me like the /g^/ is made in about the same location as the Parisian /r/, but mostly without the trill. So to make sure I've got the "gutterals" straight: laryngeal - Produced in the larynx, involving the vocal cords. Also "glottal"? pharyngeal - Produced by pressure between the root of the tongue and the top of the throat. uvular - Produced between the back of the tongue and tonsils? Uvula? velar - Produced a little further forward, between back of tongue and velum. palatal - Produced between the tongue and the hard palate. Is there a term for the /s^/ series? It's sort of front of palate, back of alveolar ridge. Alveolo-palatal? Thanks again, Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From linguista at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 21:49:47 2006 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan Gordon) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:49:47 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: /s^/ is usually called alveo-palatal or something similar like that. Phonologists who work in featural theory can't agree on whether it's a pure coronal or part-coronal and part-palatal. In any case, we shouldn't assume anything about the features of OP /s^/ simply because of what it's usually called for other languages. We know that it's different from the standard European esh-sound, so we shouldn't assume anything about it! The Parisian /r/ is uvular, and yes, uvular usually connotes the uvula, but it is possible to produce uvular sounds even if you don't have a uvula (imagine a Parisian or a Hebrew speaker who has had it removed for sleep apnea therapy). I would guess the tonsils or something near the rear of the velum would be operative in this case. As far as I know, there are no areal tendencies to have a laminal /s/ in Northern Europe. But one thing that Finnish and Dutch have in common is the lack of a historical development of /s^/. Finnish has no /s^/ at all in native lexemes, and Dutch's /s^/ phoneme arises from contact between /s/ and /j/. This being the case, the "space" for the /s/ phonemes in both languages is much larger than it is in languages which have historically distinguished between /s/ and /s^/, so there's no reason for speakers to avoid "darker" sounding pronunciations for fear of confusion. This is, of course, not true for OP, which does have a historical distinction between /s/ and /s^/. One thing I recall reading in a typology text (and the reason for the use of the language "distributed" as opposed to "apical") is that languages which distinguish /s/ from /s^/ always tend to distinguish an apical pronunciation (in which the articulator-site contact area is small) from a distributed pronunciation (in which the same area is large). If this is not true for OP, then OP would be a typological rarity, on the same level as certain Indo-Aryan languages with a three-way distinction among alveolar fricatives! On 9/25/06, Rory M Larson wrote: > > > Thanks, Bryan. I appreciate your comments, and your good advice on the > proper linguistic terms to use! > > Of course you are quite right to point out that the laminal /s/ is > dependent upon the part of the tongue that approaches the alveolar ridge, > not on what the tip is doing. You mention Dutch and Finnish as having > laminal /s/. Is it just these two languages, or is this an areal phenomenon > in northern Europe-- do you know? Also, you say that their laminal /s/ is > "dark", like cross between /s/ and /s^/. I think in Omaha it's actually > pretty sharp, and audibly very similar to English /s/. But that depends on > exactly where against the roof of the mouth you put the top of the tongue. > If what I seemed to work out with one speaker yesterday afternoon is > correct, both /s/ and /s^/ are laminal in Omaha. I find a laminal /s^/ a > little more awkward to produce than a laminal /s/, but it seems to work. If > I am doing it right, it seems to be something like German ch in ich, but > more forward, against the back of the alveolar ridge. > > The term "uvular" occurred to me after I sent the posting yesterday. It > seems to me like the /g^/ is made in about the same location as the Parisian > /r/, but mostly without the trill. > > So to make sure I've got the "gutterals" straight: > > laryngeal - Produced in the larynx, involving the vocal cords. Also > "glottal"? > > pharyngeal - Produced by pressure between the root of the tongue and > the top of the throat. > > uvular - Produced between the back of the tongue and tonsils? > Uvula? > > velar - Produced a little further forward, between back of tongue > and velum. > > palatal - Produced between the tongue and the hard palate. > > Is there a term for the /s^/ series? It's sort of front of palate, back of > alveolar ridge. Alveolo-palatal? > > Thanks again, > Rory > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Sep 26 01:47:52 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:47:52 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ These are pretty standard phonological symbols (in NetSiouan form) for Siouan usage. People do usually use theta and edh for interdentals and in linguistic usage some people make a point of writing pharyngeal symbols for the back series in Stoney. However, as you're discovering, the phonetic reality may stray somewhat from the norm for the symbol. For example, Teton [I think!] and Winnebago have fairly definitely uvular values for the "velar" series. The tendency of the s set to develop into interdentals (or labiodentals in Ofo) proably says something about the usual pronunciations of the s set. The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less alveolar are likely. Note that a fair number of American languages west of Siouan distinguish two s-sounds, one more alveolar and one more dental. I'm not clear on how laminality fits into this distinction. English speakers have a good deal of trouble with these distinctions because the two variants are both acoustically acceptable in English, and English speakers actually use a couple of different s sounds more or less at random, though consistently for particular speakers. Sometimes one variety or another is regarded as a speech defect or, going in the other direction, becomes a trademark. Humphrey Bogart is famous for a very retracted s/z pronunciation. (I believe I cribbed all of this from my memory of an article by Bill Bright on s-dot.) In Castillan Spanish and in Portuguese s is quite retracted. Castillian c and z are interdental or maybe it's really laminal. New World dialects generally conflate these two into an apical s/z set. Basque also has a three way contrast of s, s-dot, and s^, and I think Bob Rankin one told me that a three-way contrast was quite common in Mediaeval or Middle versions of European langauges, but has widely disappeared since then. I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. I forget his exact wording - the comment is in one of his manuscripts. If you look at the work of Fletcher and maybe Hamilton you'll notice that they write th for s in their transcriptions, and they worked extensively with the people of Francis LaFlesche's village. I suspect that other villages' pronunciations dominates modern usage and Dorsey's usage is probably based on what he encountered among the Ponca. LaFlesche used his Omaha scheme as the basis for his Osage scheme, and so c-cedilla appears in Osage, which either doesn't have that kind of s, or has one not in the form LaFlesche's phonetic key leads one to expect. Very likely it wasn't really an interdental. That just seemed like the best approximation of what it was. > We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., > which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. You'll find many of these marked with "turned s" and "turned c" in Dorsey's printed texts. Copies of these I've made for people often have that distinction suppressed as subphonemic, of course! > After some uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made > with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth. Or perhaps more critically, with the lamina or post-apical blade of the tongue approaching the upper teeth. Sometimes the apex end might touch the lower teeth, but it might not be the critical part of the gesture. I looked ahead to crib the word laminal from Bryan, of course, though Bob Rankin has also described some of this to me. I was probably asleep when David Rood went through it still earlier ... (my sincere apologies to everyone over the years for this problem of mine). > The difference between the Omaha [s] and the English [s] is hard to > detect by hearing. Yes - even knowing the stuff above I can't say that I was struck by it, so I'm plased to see you folsk looking into it so closely. I did try to determine whether s^/z^ were pronounced with lips rounded or not, but I don't recall my conclusions. Perhaps I never really got around to checking! I wondered about this because Bob Rankin had pointed out that these sounds are not rounded in some Dhegiha dialects. > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > > si 'foot' ( s.i 'seed' ( zi 'yellow' ( The "muted" form seems to be indifferently voiced. Typically the > voicing for the following vowel or n begins in the middle of the > fricative, so it starts out unvoiced and shifts to voiced in the middle > of producing it. More importantly, I think the traditional "voiceless" > version is marked by a greater forcefulness in pushing the air through > the gap. Producing a more breathy, sharp, or bright effect. I emphatically support your impression that the distinction between voiceless and voiced fricatives is more one of "brightness" or, as you put it, "sharpness" vs. mutedness. I think voicing per se tends to be a bit secondary to muting or non-sharping (less breathy friction?). In Osage I think that voicing may not enter into the definition of z/z^/g^ (or gh) as much even as in OP. I don't remember whether fricatives are more muted before n is Osage. Osage has many fewer sn/s^n sequences, since some of the ones in OP represent sR/s^R, which come out st/s^t/sc/s^c in Osage. The sn/s^n sequences shared by both languages come from *sr/s^r / _VN. The intermediate muted fricatives in OP before n are definitely somewhere in between the voiceless and voiced ones, and your early voicing (before the n) explanation makes perfect sense. I tend to put these intermediate forms with the voiceless or sharp ones, but this is somewhat arbitrary, since this is a context where voiceless and voiced or sharp and muted do not contrast. What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. > Finally, we come to our ever problematic x^/g^ sounds. These in fact to > not seem to be alternates in a single series. They are made at > different articulation points. [x^] is more forward, I think between > the top of the tongue and the back of the hard palate. [g^] is farther > back, I believe between the back of the tongue and the velum or tonsils > or something. This is wild - I had the same impression, but reversed! I though g^ was pretty much a velar (ach not ich) fricative, muted, more or less voiced, but that x was very bright, voiceless, but uvular fricative. I am in no position to quibble about which of us is right about position. You may be right. I definitely remember being puzzled about how to say what was different apart from the sharpness/mutedness. I wonder if the really critical feature isn't that sharpness vs. mutedness and the differences in position, or perceived position, whatever they are due to our trying to hear the distinction in the wrong terms. > The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: > > alveolo- > alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal > > forced s s^ x^ h > > muted s. s^. g^ > > voiced z z^ I think this is phonetically correct, barring my uncertainty about the actual position of x (you write x^). I don't think that the three way mutedness distinction is necessary in writing. The middle row can be merged with the top or bottom row as long as people know how to pronounce particular tokens. The traditional solution would be to write the muted forms with the voiceless symbols. In the same way we don't make a point of marking aspiration on ptk in English so we can leave it off in sp st sk. > Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another > symbol, say [x.]. I strongly recommend against this for two reasons: - g^ or gh (gamma) is the usual symbol for the phonemic element - the gh spelling (or something approximating gamma) was agreed upon independently by both the Ponca and Omahas spelling projects and there is nothing to be gained by flipflopping on this now I'd say, stick with x and gamma, and write gamma the way it has been. Just write better pronunciation guides. A third issue might be that pronunciation is not likely to be so uniform, as your relatively small sample suggests, and is even less likely to have been so the past. Moreover, it has undoubtedly changed over time. Dorsey may nor have been hearing exactly what we hear. Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., ghage' 'to cry' or gaghe vs. gaxe? bighoN vs. bixoN? Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or nuxe? From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 26 03:24:25 2006 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:24:25 -0700 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Just to chime in for a brief second -- > Note that a fair number of American languages west of Siouan distinguish two s-sounds, one more alveolar and one more dental. > Not sure how far west you were thinking, but I can say that Rumsen Ohlone (Penutian) apparently has a 3-way 's' distinction recorded by JP Harrington. Without taking time to go into too much detail, there's apparently the English-style alveolar 's', a retroflex 's' (which also exists in some Mayan languages), and the 'esh.' Mutsun, Rumsen's close cousin to the east, however, apparently only distinguished two (no retroflex). > In Castillan Spanish and in Portuguese s is quite retracted. > I believe in some dialects of Castilian the 's' is apical rather than alveolar, approaching more of a hissing 'sh' sound (which often happens in Greek dialects as well) though not quite 'esh'. I don't believe this is the case in standard Portuguese among speakers I've heard (although of course Portuguese does maintain the 'esh' that Spanish lost). Dave Koontz John E wrote: On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ These are pretty standard phonological symbols (in NetSiouan form) for Siouan usage. People do usually use theta and edh for interdentals and in linguistic usage some people make a point of writing pharyngeal symbols for the back series in Stoney. However, as you're discovering, the phonetic reality may stray somewhat from the norm for the symbol. For example, Teton [I think!] and Winnebago have fairly definitely uvular values for the "velar" series. The tendency of the s set to develop into interdentals (or labiodentals in Ofo) proably says something about the usual pronunciations of the s set. The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less alveolar are likely. Note that a fair number of American languages west of Siouan distinguish two s-sounds, one more alveolar and one more dental. I'm not clear on how laminality fits into this distinction. English speakers have a good deal of trouble with these distinctions because the two variants are both acoustically acceptable in English, and English speakers actually use a couple of different s sounds more or less at random, though consistently for particular speakers. Sometimes one variety or another is regarded as a speech defect or, going in the other direction, becomes a trademark. Humphrey Bogart is famous for a very retracted s/z pronunciation. (I believe I cribbed all of this from my memory of an article by Bill Bright on s-dot.) In Castillan Spanish and in Portuguese s is quite retracted. Castillian c and z are interdental or maybe it's really laminal. New World dialects generally conflate these two into an apical s/z set. Basque also has a three way contrast of s, s-dot, and s^, and I think Bob Rankin one told me that a three-way contrast was quite common in Mediaeval or Middle versions of European langauges, but has widely disappeared since then. I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. I forget his exact wording - the comment is in one of his manuscripts. If you look at the work of Fletcher and maybe Hamilton you'll notice that they write th for s in their transcriptions, and they worked extensively with the people of Francis LaFlesche's village. I suspect that other villages' pronunciations dominates modern usage and Dorsey's usage is probably based on what he encountered among the Ponca. LaFlesche used his Omaha scheme as the basis for his Osage scheme, and so c-cedilla appears in Osage, which either doesn't have that kind of s, or has one not in the form LaFlesche's phonetic key leads one to expect. Very likely it wasn't really an interdental. That just seemed like the best approximation of what it was. > We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., > which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. You'll find many of these marked with "turned s" and "turned c" in Dorsey's printed texts. Copies of these I've made for people often have that distinction suppressed as subphonemic, of course! > After some uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made > with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth. Or perhaps more critically, with the lamina or post-apical blade of the tongue approaching the upper teeth. Sometimes the apex end might touch the lower teeth, but it might not be the critical part of the gesture. I looked ahead to crib the word laminal from Bryan, of course, though Bob Rankin has also described some of this to me. I was probably asleep when David Rood went through it still earlier ... (my sincere apologies to everyone over the years for this problem of mine). > The difference between the Omaha [s] and the English [s] is hard to > detect by hearing. Yes - even knowing the stuff above I can't say that I was struck by it, so I'm plased to see you folsk looking into it so closely. I did try to determine whether s^/z^ were pronounced with lips rounded or not, but I don't recall my conclusions. Perhaps I never really got around to checking! I wondered about this because Bob Rankin had pointed out that these sounds are not rounded in some Dhegiha dialects. > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > > si 'foot' (> s.i 'seed' (> zi 'yellow' ( It's interesting that you should find muted s in *su words. 'Quail' is another one, I think, and one that Dorsey is very puzzled about writing, but I'm not sure about the turkey word. We can probably get you a list of *su/*zu words if you like. I'm not absolutely convinced that this is the same thing as the muting. But it is probably a reflex within the s of the *u. Perhaps the s is more rounded? > The "muted" form seems to be indifferently voiced. Typically the > voicing for the following vowel or n begins in the middle of the > fricative, so it starts out unvoiced and shifts to voiced in the middle > of producing it. More importantly, I think the traditional "voiceless" > version is marked by a greater forcefulness in pushing the air through > the gap. Producing a more breathy, sharp, or bright effect. I emphatically support your impression that the distinction between voiceless and voiced fricatives is more one of "brightness" or, as you put it, "sharpness" vs. mutedness. I think voicing per se tends to be a bit secondary to muting or non-sharping (less breathy friction?). In Osage I think that voicing may not enter into the definition of z/z^/g^ (or gh) as much even as in OP. I don't remember whether fricatives are more muted before n is Osage. Osage has many fewer sn/s^n sequences, since some of the ones in OP represent sR/s^R, which come out st/s^t/sc/s^c in Osage. The sn/s^n sequences shared by both languages come from *sr/s^r / _VN. The intermediate muted fricatives in OP before n are definitely somewhere in between the voiceless and voiced ones, and your early voicing (before the n) explanation makes perfect sense. I tend to put these intermediate forms with the voiceless or sharp ones, but this is somewhat arbitrary, since this is a context where voiceless and voiced or sharp and muted do not contrast. What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. > Finally, we come to our ever problematic x^/g^ sounds. These in fact to > not seem to be alternates in a single series. They are made at > different articulation points. [x^] is more forward, I think between > the top of the tongue and the back of the hard palate. [g^] is farther > back, I believe between the back of the tongue and the velum or tonsils > or something. This is wild - I had the same impression, but reversed! I though g^ was pretty much a velar (ach not ich) fricative, muted, more or less voiced, but that x was very bright, voiceless, but uvular fricative. I am in no position to quibble about which of us is right about position. You may be right. I definitely remember being puzzled about how to say what was different apart from the sharpness/mutedness. I wonder if the really critical feature isn't that sharpness vs. mutedness and the differences in position, or perceived position, whatever they are due to our trying to hear the distinction in the wrong terms. > The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: > > alveolo- > alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal > > forced s s^ x^ h > > muted s. s^. g^ > > voiced z z^ I think this is phonetically correct, barring my uncertainty about the actual position of x (you write x^). I don't think that the three way mutedness distinction is necessary in writing. The middle row can be merged with the top or bottom row as long as people know how to pronounce particular tokens. The traditional solution would be to write the muted forms with the voiceless symbols. In the same way we don't make a point of marking aspiration on ptk in English so we can leave it off in sp st sk. > Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another > symbol, say [x.]. I strongly recommend against this for two reasons: - g^ or gh (gamma) is the usual symbol for the phonemic element - the gh spelling (or something approximating gamma) was agreed upon independently by both the Ponca and Omahas spelling projects and there is nothing to be gained by flipflopping on this now I'd say, stick with x and gamma, and write gamma the way it has been. Just write better pronunciation guides. A third issue might be that pronunciation is not likely to be so uniform, as your relatively small sample suggests, and is even less likely to have been so the past. Moreover, it has undoubtedly changed over time. Dorsey may nor have been hearing exactly what we hear. Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., ghage' 'to cry' or gaghe vs. gaxe? bighoN vs. bixoN? Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or nuxe? --------------------------------- All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Wed Sep 27 19:29:46 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 14:29:46 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: These are interesting observations. It's not unexpected that people whose use of a native language is fairly fluent but who are, nonetheless, English-dominant, might begin hearing "sounds" rather than phonemes in the native language. This is fairly common, especially if a particular sound is allophonic in the native language but phonemic in English. It would take some experimentation as well as introspection to determine the status of "muted S" in Omaha. You might tape a speaker saying 'foot' and 'seed' a number of times (keeping track yourself of which is which) and then play them back to someone who wasn't in on the discussion and ask him/her to identify the words. If these are really distinct phonemes, they shoud get the words right 100 times out of 100. You could throw 'yellow' in a few times just to muddy the waters a bit. I do tend to believe that "muted S" is something other than a previously undiscovered Omaha phoneme. That said, however, it is still the case that we have some instances in which the Comparative Dictionary shows "irregular" sibilant sets, and the 'chicken' word you mention is one of them ('seed' and 'foot' are not). Normally Omaha /s/ matches Dakotan /s/ and /z/ matches /z/. The exceptional cognate sets that I have found are: OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') LA ziNtka 'bird' (but zic^a 'partridge') OM sattaN 'five' LA zaptaN 'five' OM siNga 'squirrel' LA zic^a 'squirrel' It is barely possible that we have missed something in the fricative sets. The above words ought to be checked in Omaha to see if they contain the "muted S" rather than the normal one. Wouldn't it be interesting if that were the case? Think of the mess it would make of "fricative ablaut". Dorsey heard the "muted" sounds, generally preceding a sonorant, and tended to call them "mediae". It's the ones preceding vowels that are interesting here. If you're interested in the sets of European sibilants that John was mentioning, the article to start with is probably "The Mediaeval Sibilants", reprinted in _Readings in Linguistics_ ed. by Martin Joos. The author talks about the ones in Romance and Germanic at length. Bob > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > si 'foot' ( s.i 'seed' ( zi 'yellow' ( Message-ID: Bryan wrote: > One thing I recall reading in a > typology text (and the reason for the use of the language > "distributed" as opposed to "apical") is that languages which > distinguish /s/ from /s^/ always tend to distinguish an apical > pronunciation (in which the articulator-site contact area is small) > from a distributed pronunciation (in which the same area is large). If > this is not true for OP, then OP would be a typological rarity, on the > same level as certain Indo-Aryan languages with a three-way > distinction among alveolar fricatives! So does this mean that in English /s/ is "apical" and /s^/ is "distributed"? I think I'd agree that the articulator-site contact area for /s/ is small, and for /s^/ is large, in the way I form them. But doesn't the term "apical" refer to the tip of something, rather than the size of the articulator-site contact area? I assumed it meant a sound made with the tip of the tongue. For me, both /s/ and /s^/ are made with the tip or leading edge of the tongue, or maybe the top of the leading margin for /s/. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Sep 28 03:09:44 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:09:44 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John Koontz wrote: > The tendency of the s set to develop into interdentals (or labiodentals in > Ofo) proably says something about the usual pronunciations of the s set. > The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less > alveolar are likely. I'm confused by what you mean by "apical" here. Do you mean the tip of the palate ahead of the alveolar ridge? I do see how the laminar pronunciation would favor the interdentalization of the s, though. If the tip just swings up a little, it starts coming up against the upper front teeth to produce the thorn sound. > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient > coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his > pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions > that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? >> We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., >> which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. > > You'll find many of these marked with "turned s" and "turned c" in > Dorsey's printed texts. Copies of these I've made for people often have > that distinction suppressed as subphonemic, of course! Yes. The "turned s" is a little harder to see than the "turned c". >> Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we >> had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal >> triplet of words in the s series: >> >> si 'foot' (> s.i 'seed' (> zi 'yellow' ( > It's interesting that you should find muted s in *su words. 'Quail' is > another one, I think, and one that Dorsey is very puzzled about writing, > but I'm not sure about the turkey word. We can probably get you a list of > *su/*zu words if you like. I'm not absolutely convinced that this is the > same thing as the muting. But it is probably a reflex within the s of the > *u. Perhaps the s is more rounded? I'd be glad to get a list of *su/*zu words. I'm not sure it's restricted to those-- we seemed to be getting quite a bunch of them the other week. But it would certainly be something to test. I'll try to watch out for lip-rounding too. I'm also not sure that the only difference between 'foot' and 'seed' is the muting, but it seemed to be one of them. We worked on these words for a while with one speaker, in the presence of the other two. The speaker insisted that the two were distinct. Her initial explanation was that the si of 'foot' was shorter, though perhaps not in the sense that the vowel in the 'seed' word was long. My impression of her pronunciation agreed. It seemed to me that si, 'foot' was delivered in a quick burst of force, which quickly disappeared. (Taking Japanese, I've noticed that when they want to emphasize a word, say, to explain it to a class, they cut off the final vowel sharply at the height of its career with a glottal closure in a way that in English would only be done in situations of military strutting, like the "p" in "Hup!". The end of si, 'foot', was almost, but not quite, this sudden. It was more like a rapidly fading vowel being put out of its misery.) When she pronounced s.i, 'seed', the breath was not slammed through it like that; the s seemed to be of the muted type, and the vowel trailed off in a more relaxed way. Also, there seemed to be a qualitative difference in the vowel to me. In si, 'foot', the vowel was closer to the /i/ sound in "deed". In s.i, 'seed', it seemed to approach the /I/ sound in "did". I didn't notice any lip rounding in either case. > What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar > quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. You mean before dh, right? I've been wondering about that, too. I seem to recall Bryan pointing out to me a few months ago that it was in fact the muted form before dh, at least for certain words. I'll have to dig up his posting again. >> The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: >> >> alveolo- >> alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal >> >> forced s s^ x^ h >> >> muted s. s^. g^ >> >> voiced z z^ > > I think this is phonetically correct, barring my uncertainty about the > actual position of x (you write x^). I don't think that the three way > mutedness distinction is necessary in writing. The middle row can be > merged with the top or bottom row as long as people know how to pronounce > particular tokens. The traditional solution would be to write the muted > forms with the voiceless symbols. In the same way we don't make a point > of marking aspiration on ptk in English so we can leave it off in sp st > sk. That's what I've been assuming up until now too, supposing that the muted s. and s^. forms occur only before n, or in certain other nasal contexts where their manifestation is phonologically constrained. But if they are popping up arbitrarily, then they do need to be distinguished. >> Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another >> symbol, say [x.]. > > I strongly recommend against this for two reasons: > > - g^ or gh (gamma) is the usual symbol for the phonemic element > > - the gh spelling (or something approximating gamma) was agreed upon > independently by both the Ponca and Omahas spelling projects and there is > nothing to be gained by flipflopping on this now > > I'd say, stick with x and gamma, and write gamma the way it has been. > Just write better pronunciation guides. Hmm. I posed this question to the list a few months ago, and the general opinion on orthography seemed to be indifferent. This is fine for the Siouanist list, though I am inclined to favor marking the x as x^, simply to make sure we really intend it to mean the sharp and forceful form. The x has been used for either or both velar fricatives so much in Omaha that I really don't trust anything written with x as necessarily being distinctive. For Macy, the issue is touchy. They have some investment in the old La Flesche system, and there could be fallout from trying to revise it. With a push, they might accept using gh for the mute form, though that would be painful for the very common 'make'/'do' verb, which would then have to be written gaghe instead of gaxe. Alternatively, I think we got a green light in the context of the discussion we had this summer to adopt my suggestion of diacritics for the x's: x-hacek for the sharp one and x-underdot for the muted one. This would have the advantage of retaining the x for both, which should keep orthographic conservatives happy, while preserving the phonological distinction, which should satisfy phonologic conservatives. (Whether modern computer technology is yet capable of adding diacritics to x remains undetermined.) What are these Ponca and Omaha spelling projects? Who all has been included? > Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., > > ghage' 'to cry' > > or gaghe vs. gaxe? > bighoN vs. bixoN? > > Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or > nuxe? ghage' has been our favorite example of a leading gh- word. wax^e is a standard x^ word. The 'make'/'do' verb is understood to have gh. I think Mark has elicited 'ice', but I don't recall what he found it to be. When you ask about "gaghe vs. gaxe?", "bighoN vs. bixoN?", are these separate words, or are you just asking which way we hear them? If they are separate words, could you remind me of their respective meanings? Thanks for your comments! Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From linguista at gmail.com Thu Sep 28 06:14:38 2006 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan Gordon) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:14:38 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > So does this mean that in English /s/ is "apical" and /s^/ is > "distributed"? I think I'd agree that the articulator-site contact area for > /s/ is small, and for /s^/ is large, in the way I form them. But doesn't > the term "apical" refer to the tip of something, rather than the size of the > articulator-site contact area? I assumed it meant a sound made with the tip > of the tongue. For me, both /s/ and /s^/ are made with the tip or leading > edge of the tongue, or maybe the top of the leading margin for /s/. > My impression is that /s^/ in English at least (and probably most European languages) is almost never apical. A pronunciation with the tip of the tongue would cause the fricative surface to be too small for a "distributed" specification. Rather, /s^/ for me at least seems to be pronounced significantly behind the tip of the tongue. If I attempt to pronounce an apical /s/ in the same site as /s^/, what I get is a retroflex. From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Thu Sep 28 13:56:42 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 08:56:42 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: Rory: Mary Gale LaFlesche, mother of Francis LaF, was raised primarily by her Ioway-Otoe mother, ÑiGunaMi, who kept regular contact with both village groups. As such, her first language was IO, and there is no information as to which dialect dominated Mary's or her mother's speech. However, in as much as Mary's grandfather was Ioway Leader ("chief") WajinWasje) and her Otoe grandmother, Thunder Eagle Woman, in turn she was the daughter of an Otoe Leader ("chief") and an Omaha mother. The grandparents lived in the area of Bellevue, NE. Mary's father, Dr. Gale, an Army surgeon played no role in her life. IO political and social mores of the day would suggest that Mary's and her Mother's speech would tend towards Ioway in dialect. When she was about pre-adolescence or earlier, her step-father, a French (speaking) Fur trader, Peter Sarpy (a not very French sounding name) with the American Fur Company sent Mary to a Saint Louis French school where she learned to speak French. No doubt, Mary had gained some familiarity with Omaha from the activity of the Trading Post. However, when she married Joseph LaFlesche, who was equally bilingual in Omaha and French, Omaha became her dominant language, and the first language of all her children. Neither Mary nor Joseph spoke or understood English. Perhaps the above will provide some insight on possible language influence of Mary on her son Francis's Omaha speech patterns reflected in his written works. Jimm ----- Original Message ----- From: Rory M Larson To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 10:09 PM Subject: Re: Omaha fricative set John Koontz wrote: > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient > coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his > pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions > that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Sep 28 14:12:06 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:12:06 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') ?? The only 'chicken' terms I've heard of are waz^iN'gaz^ide ("red bird", Dorsey) and waz^iN'ga ("bird", modern Omaha). On the other hand, to my knowledge, 'turkey' is zizi'kka, not zizi'ga. Do you know where these terms were found? Otherwise, thanks for your suggestions! I'll try to follow up on them. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 14:51:19 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:51:19 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: This sort of question is what that paper on "The Mediaeval Sibilants" is about. Apical S's were fairly widespread in Europe. They still appear in Greek, Basque, Castilian, Aragonese and Catalan (all but Greek in a narrow geographical area). I can't remember about Leonese or Asturias, but I don't think so. In English either apical or laminal pronunciation is accepted. John mentioned Humphrey Bogart's S. Jimmy Stewart is another apical speaker and the pronunciation is characteristic of central Pennsylvania English, since I have it sometimes as well. "Features" can be looked at two ways. You can ask whether phoneme X is realtively "distributed" with respect to phoneme (or phonological series) Y, or you can try to set some sort of inflexible physiological parameters for "distributed", like dyed-in-the-wool phoneticians try to do. The latter almost always encounter failure in one or another language. In phonology (i.e., linguistics) features are usually "relative" in the Jakobsonian sense. In Speech departments, they attempt the phonetic definitions. So, in English /s/ is not apical or laminal with respect to any other variety of S (since English only has one phoneme /s/). English /s/ IS "non-distributed" with respect to /theta/, which IS "distributed". It then differs from English /s^/ by a different feature. The phonetic and phonological definitions of distinctive features can be a little confusing, because different specialists approach the topic with completely different assumptions/definitions. > > So does this mean that in English /s/ is "apical" and /s^/ is > > "distributed"? > My impression is that /s^/ in English at least (and probably most European languages) is almost never apical. A pronunciation with the tip of the tongue would cause the fricative surface to be too small for a "distributed" specification. Rather, /s^/ for me at least seems to be pronounced significantly behind the tip of the tongue. If I attempt to pronounce an apical /s/ in the same site as /s^/, what I get is a retroflex. From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 15:10:44 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:10:44 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: > . . . When she pronounced s.i, 'seed', the breath was not slammed through it like that; the s seemed to be of the muted type, and the vowel trailed off in a more relaxed way. Also, there seemed to be a qualitative difference in the vowel to me. In si, 'foot', the vowel was closer to the /i/ sound in "deed". In s.i, 'seed', it seemed to approach the /I/ sound in "did". > That's what I've been assuming up until now too, supposing that the muted s. and s^. forms occur only before n, or in certain other nasal contexts where their manifestation is phonologically constrained. But if they are popping up arbitrarily, then they do need to be distinguished. I think you'll find that pretty quickly you can get them to "hear" distinctions in Omaha among all the vowels of English. The I of "bit" will be distinct from the I of "beat", etc. Unaccented A or nasal A will sound like the A of "sofa" if you point it out to them. And the distributions may not have the restrictions that they have in English. Dorsey wrote these distinctions, but unfortunately they don't seem to correlate with anything phonemic. Omaha has reached the stage of "personal dialects", and introspection will probably just provide confusion. I'd really suggest running the experiments with recordings using speakers who haven't thought about the discussion to find out whether you have something real or not. I doubt there's anything there, but I could be surprised. For /bixaN/ vs. /bighaN/ try 'to sit on and break' and 'to blow on a fire to start it'. Those are minimal pairs in Kaw, although Kaw appears to have a /aN/ vs. /oN/ distinction too. Bob From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 15:19:56 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:19:56 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: That would mean "cardinal" in Kaw! All these terms come from earlier ones that referred to birds that are native to North America. Try some related meaning for [sikka]. It's 'chicken' nowadays in all the other Dhegiha dialects (QU, KS, OS). Let me check my notes from the '70's and Dick Carter's from about the same time. It looks as though they've gotten two roots mixed here. They're quite distinct in Dakota and most other languages. One is *sit-ka and the other is *zi-ka (earlier *si-ka). the /tk/ cluster gives Dhegiha /kk/ (Osage hk). Bob ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson Sent: Thu 9/28/2006 9:12 AM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: RE: Omaha fricative set > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') ?? The only 'chicken' terms I've heard of are waz^iN'gaz^ide ("red bird", Dorsey) and waz^iN'ga ("bird", modern Omaha). On the other hand, to my knowledge, 'turkey' is zizi'kka, not zizi'ga. Do you know where these terms were found? Otherwise, thanks for your suggestions! I'll try to follow up on them. Rory From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 15:38:28 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:38:28 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: You're right! I copied the Kaw form by mistake. Kaw does have /ziziga/; Omaha /zizikka/. But Omaha does have /zaNziga/ 'flicker', with the etymologically correct form of the root. I guess /zizikka/ is what happened to common Dhegiha *sihka in Omaha. These various largish bird terms don't seem to really be cognate across the plains Siouan languages. Dakotan /ziNtka-/ not only has the z/s problem compared with Dhegiha, but it also has the nasal vowel and the /tk/ cluster. Superficially, the /tk/ looks like it should match Dhegiha /kk/ or /hk/, but, in fact, it doesn't. The *tk cluster actually metathesizes in Dhegiha to /kt/, with means that 'chicken' should really be /sitta/, not /sikka/. So these are all borrowings and diffused words. Unfortunately this reduces the usefullness of those three sets of apparent z/s correspondences I posted. 'Five' is still a mystery though. Bob > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') ?? The only 'chicken' terms I've heard of are waz^iN'gaz^ide ("red bird", Dorsey) and waz^iN'ga ("bird", modern Omaha). On the other hand, to my knowledge, 'turkey' is zizi'kka, not zizi'ga. Do you know where these terms were found? Otherwise, thanks for your suggestions! I'll try to follow up on them. Rory From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Sep 28 16:25:55 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 11:25:55 -0500 Subject: POTENTIAL SPAM: Re: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: <001101c6e306$1221c5f0$3b01133f@JIMM> Message-ID: Thanks, Jimm! I should think that would explain the La Flesche family's tendency toward interdentalization of /s/ and /z/. Rory Sent by: To owner-siouan at list s.colorado.edu cc Subject 09/28/2006 08:56 Re: Omaha fricative set AM Please respond to siouan at lists.colo rado.edu Rory: Mary Gale LaFlesche, mother of Francis LaF, was raised primarily by her Ioway-Otoe mother, ÑiGunaMi, who kept regular contact with both village groups. As such, her first language was IO, and there is no information as to which dialect dominated Mary's or her mother's speech. However, in as much as Mary's grandfather was Ioway Leader ("chief") WajinWasje) and her Otoe grandmother, Thunder Eagle Woman, in turn she was the daughter of an Otoe Leader ("chief") and an Omaha mother. The grandparents lived in the area of Bellevue, NE. Mary's father, Dr. Gale, an Army surgeon played no role in her life. IO political and social mores of the day would suggest that Mary's and her Mother's speech would tend towards Ioway in dialect. When she was about pre-adolescence or earlier, her step-father, a French (speaking) Fur trader, Peter Sarpy (a not very French sounding name) with the American Fur Company sent Mary to a Saint Louis French school where she learned to speak French. No doubt, Mary had gained some familiarity with Omaha from the activity of the Trading Post. However, when she married Joseph LaFlesche, who was equally bilingual in Omaha and French, Omaha became her dominant language, and the first language of all her children. Neither Mary nor Joseph spoke or understood English. Perhaps the above will provide some insight on possible language influence of Mary on her son Francis's Omaha speech patterns reflected in his written works. Jimm ----- Original Message ----- From: Rory M Larson To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 10:09 PM Subject: Re: Omaha fricative set John Koontz wrote: > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient > coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his > pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions > that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: pic01670.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1255 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Sep 29 01:31:31 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:31:31 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > I'm confused by what you mean by "apical" here. Do you mean the tip of the > palate ahead of the alveolar ridge? Apical refers to the tongue tip. > > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, ... > Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? Yes, however, I think the evidence suggests it was not just the LaFlesche family using theta-like pronunciation. > Yes. The "turned s" is a little harder to see than the "turned c". Much like telling a turned P from a d! > I'd be glad to get a list of *su/*zu words. I'm not sure it's restricted > to those-- we seemed to be getting quite a bunch of them the other week. > But it would certainly be something to test. I'll try to watch out for > lip-rounding too. OK. I'll see what I can find. > I'm also not sure that the only difference between 'foot' and 'seed' is the > muting, but it seemed to be one of them. We worked on these words for a > while with one speaker, in the presence of the other two. The speaker > insisted that the two were distinct. ... Bob's explained the usual procedure for trying to resolve issues like this. > Her initial explanation was that the si of 'foot' was shorter, though > perhaps not in the sense that the vowel in the 'seed' word was long. I suppose one way to test this would be to look at the accentual pattern, perhaps in compounds, if they occur, or with certain enclitics like =di(thaN) and =tta(thaN), if they can co-occur. I'm not sure this would work, however. As far as compounds for 'foot', sippa occurs to me, and sigdhe. I don't remember anything with 'seed' off hand. It might be possible to come up with a verb (phrase) that took both as an unmodified object, perhaps 'always stepping on' or something like that. (Aside: I've wondered about tests like this with the tta- and tte- compounds, which seem to accent somewhat unexpectedly in print.) Another approach is to look at the length of the forms within a standard frame using sonograms. It could be that there is some sort of different final treatment for the two words, though that would assume that ...CV words are actually two different types ...CVx and ...CVy and nobody has ever noticed it. That would seem like grasping at straws except that we no that -h is lost pretty widely, but did once exist. One might get different treatments for *CV# (CV?) and *CVh(e) (CV(h)). Or there might be two different accentual patterns for monosyllables, also not previously noted, but perhaps associated with underlying length (or perhaps even surface length). Again this only seems worth suggesting because we have problems with accentuation in these languages. I'm more inclined to suspect *su vs. *si, but who knows. > like the "p" in "Hup!". Essentially hu?. > The end of si, 'foot', was almost, but not quite, this sudden. It was > more like a rapidly fading vowel being put out of its misery.) When she > pronounced s.i, 'seed', the breath was not slammed through it like that; > the s seemed to be of the muted type, and the vowel trailed off in a > more relaxed way. On this argument, words with -kka would tend to follow whatever pattern was associated with *Vh-, since -kka is explained as *-h-ka. In other words, one reflex of -h is that adding *-ka as a suffix produces -kka in Dhegiha, -kha in Dakotan, and in Winnebago you have -ke without loss of final -e. > Also, there seemed to be a qualitative difference in the vowel to me. > In si, 'foot', the vowel was closer to the /i/ sound in "deed". In s.i, > 'seed', it seemed to approach the /I/ sound in "did". I didn't notice > any lip rounding in either case. Maybe one might expect I for */ih/. I've noticed that ChV sequences have V more like "lax" vowels in English. > > What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar > > quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. > > You mean before dh, right? Yes the second time I typed dh and gh came out some how. > I've been wondering about that, too. I seem to recall Bryan pointing > out to me a few months ago that it was in fact the muted form before dh, > at least for certain words. I'll have to dig up his posting again. I ask because the muted sn and s^n clusters are from *sr and *s^r. In those contexts *r > *R, which appears as n in OP. But *xr remains *xr and appears as xdh. The same thing happens in Osage, but *R is t or c (before e and i), and so the effect is a bit more subtle. This shift of *Sr to *SR also occurs in Dakotan, but there it also affects *xr, which is *xR. In Ioway-Otoe and Winnebago, there's no shift of r to R or perhaps it would be better to say that *r and *R are indistinguishable. > That's what I've been assuming up until now too, supposing that the muted > s. and s^. forms occur only before n, or in certain other nasal contexts > where their manifestation is phonologically constrained. But if they are > popping up arbitrarily, then they do need to be distinguished. Maybe - but I'm not fully convinced of the s(mute)V examples. They're very limited in distribution, and before n we only find s(mute). It's a bit like the cases in Teton of phV vs. pxV. I think that's usually explained as individual wavering between two minor dialect treatments. > Hmm. I posed this question to the list a few months ago, and the general > opinion on orthography seemed to be indifferent. Well, I remember being too busy to say anything at the time. The less fiddling with the existing "popular" schemes the better, I think. It should only be done where it is absolutely necessary. > This is fine for the Siouanist list, though I am inclined to favor marking > the x as x^, simply to make sure we really intend it to mean the sharp and > forceful form. The x has been used for either or both velar fricatives so > much in Omaha that I really don't trust anything written with x as > necessarily being distinctive. There's some point to that, but by the same logic you should carefully write tt vs. tH (or th), and not t vs. tH (or th), and so on. But again that tramples on a carefully arranged compromised that appeals strongly to Omahas and Poncas. I'm inclined not to mess with it. > For Macy, the issue is touchy. They have some investment in the old La > Flesche system, and there could be fallout from trying to revise it. With > a push, they might accept using gh for the mute form, though that would be > painful for the very common 'make'/'do' verb, which would then have to be > written gaghe instead of gaxe. But the same logic applies to writing xitha as x^itha. > What are these Ponca and Omaha spelling projects? Who all has been > included? I defer to Kathy and Ardis, my primary sources on them. I don't claim that they were produced by majorities or official committees. But both seemed to have some tentative agreeableness and recognition. I will have to say that if the results of those projects aren't more or less sacrosanct, and are subject to what are arbuably arbitrary adjustments to taste as well as necessary linguistic adjustment, then, to avoid getting into the situation of Dakota, where each author is a rule unto themself, and to escape the impossible situation of trying to meet with conflicting popular systems, I will probably revert to "Siouanist usage." There's no point in trying to use a standard popular orthography if there isn't one. The main virtue of popular systems is popularity. If they are simple personal variations, then "Standard Siouanist" usage has at least the virtue of being predictable to linguists given the understanding of the phonology. Of course, if "everybody" (whoever that is) does now or ultimately agrees on one system or at most two very similar ones (one each for Omaha and Ponca), I can see getting in line with that. > > Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., > > > > ghage' 'to cry' > > > > or gaghe vs. gaxe? > > bighoN vs. bixoN? > > > > Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or > > nuxe? > > ghage' has been our favorite example of a leading gh- word. wax^e is a > standard x^ word. The 'make'/'do' verb is understood to have gh. I think > Mark has elicited 'ice', but I don't recall what he found it to be. > > When you ask about "gaghe vs. gaxe?", "bighoN vs. bixoN?", are these > separate words, or are you just asking which way we hear them? If they are > separate words, could you remind me of their respective meanings? As I recollect it, gaghe is 'to make' and gaxe is 'branch', perhaps only in the context of a riverine system. There's a form for 'comb' that is somewhat similar that's not coming to me. 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? From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 29 01:34:46 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:34:46 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob wrote: > You're right! I copied the Kaw form by mistake. Kaw does have /ziziga/; Omaha /zizikka/. Is the Kaw reflex of common Dhegiha preaspirates also hp/ht/hk, as in Osage? > But Omaha does have /zaNziga/ 'flicker', with the etymologically correct form of the root. I guess /zizikka/ is what happened to common Dhegiha *sihka in Omaha. These various largish bird terms don't seem to really be cognate across the plains Siouan languages. Dakotan /ziNtka-/ not only has the z/s problem compared with Dhegiha, but it also has the nasal vowel and the /tk/ cluster. Superficially, the /tk/ looks like it should match Dhegiha /kk/ or /hk/, but, in fact, it doesn't. The *tk cluster actually metathesizes in Dhegiha to /kt/, with means that 'chicken' should really be /sitta/, not /sikka/. John mentioned before that in stop clusters, the second element usually won, except when the first element was t, which usually took over in any case. Is this a more sophisticated explanation of that observation? I.e., MVS *tk regularly -> Early Dh. *kt -> Later Dh. *ht ? Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? > So these are all borrowings and diffused words. Unfortunately this reduces the usefullness of those three sets of apparent z/s correspondences I posted. 'Five' is still a mystery though. What about the 'squirrel' term? Would that still be good? But if borrowing/diffusion can explain the 'chicken' term, I would think that a standard number term would be even easier, as a tool for trade between groups. The *s/z/aptaN term isn't even common to Siouan outside of MVS, is it? Maybe these problematic s/z terms all date to a period shortly after the spread of MVS, after significant differences in pronunciation had developed between dialects, but while they were still pretty well mutually comprehensible, and while the speakers still recognized a common ethnicity. Do we have any others? (Trade terms? Hunting small animals? Spread of bow and arrow?) Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Sep 29 02:08:40 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:08:40 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > Is the Kaw reflex of common Dhegiha preaspirates also hp/ht/hk, as in > Osage? I think preaspiration as opposed to length and tenseness is usually associated only with Osage in terms of modern attested phonetics. However, the forms that can't be tied to stop-stop clusters in Mississippi Valley are generally reconstructed as *hC preaspirates in Proto-Mississippi Valley and thus in Proto-Dhegiha. These are the forms in the Dakotan Ch : Dhegiha CC : IO C(h) : Winnebago C / __V sets, like Da tha : OP tta : IO t(h)a : Wi taa vs. (a cluster set) Da pte : OP tte : IO c^(h)e : Wi c^ee > John mentioned before that in stop clusters, the second element usually > won, except when the first element was t, which usually took over in any > case. Is this a more sophisticated explanation of that observation? Essentially yes. My explanation along those lines was more in the line of classifying results. Bob's approach attempts to explain how tk and kt both become tt in phonetic terms. The inspiration and justification for this analysis is the treatment of *tk in Ioway-Otoe vs. Winnebago, I believe. In 'bow', for example, I seem to recall that IO has maN(aN)hdu where Wi has maNaNc^gu, presumably both from something like *maNaNtku. Something similar happens - independently - to *tk in Stoney. > I.e., MVS *tk regularly -> Early Dh. *kt -> Later Dh. *ht ? That's the idea. > Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? Not off the top of my head, but I think are some. > > So these are all borrowings and diffused words. Unfortunately this > > reduces the usefullness of those three sets of apparent z/s > > correspondences I posted. 'Five' is still a mystery though. I tend to suspect that 'five' might not also involve borrowings and diffusion, even within Siouan. I remember helping someone a while back with terms for some aquatic and/or tuberous plants and discovering that they were rife with this same kind of irregularity. I think the forms mostly involved (p)Se/i(N). > What about the 'squirrel' term? Would that still be good? I thought 'squirrel' terms were squirrely by definition. > But if borrowing/diffusion can explain the 'chicken' term, I would think > that a standard number term would be even easier, as a tool for trade > between groups. The *s/z/aptaN term isn't even common to Siouan outside of > MVS, is it? I tend to agree. The relative stability of numerals in Indo-European led to an early impression that they were basic, but I think consulting additional data tends to suggest that they are "cultural." > Maybe these problematic s/z terms ... Hu Matthews must be chuckling sympathetically right about now. I think the reference is Matthews 1970 in IJAL. > all date to a period shortly after the spread of MVS, after significant > differences in pronunciation had developed between dialects, but while > they were still pretty well mutually comprehensible, and while the > speakers still recognized a common ethnicity. It's probably worth pointing out that only Mississippi Valley distinguishes voicing or sharp/muted oppositions in fricatives at all, which is a large part of what Matthews was wrestling with. > Do we have any others? (Trade terms? Hunting small animals? Spread of > bow and arrow?) The 'bow' terms are perhaps trade terms, since they seem to be of Algonquian origin. Terms for horticultural items are also sometimes rather problematic, including particularly 'tobacco'. We got into 'cat' briefly a while back (for the nth time). One of the things you gradually recognize in dealing with Proto-Siouan is that a number of common sets contain small irregularities that we have gotten used to ignoring over the years. I mean irregularities that can't be accounted for in terms of morphological context, obvious analogies, etc. From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 29 02:29:31 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:29:31 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') > LA ziNtka 'bird' (but zic^a 'partridge') > > OM siNga 'squirrel' > LA zic^a 'squirrel' After sending out that last message, I took another look at those sets. There isn't really any consistent difference between a squirrel and a largish bird, is there? By the 'bird' set, we'd have to allow a variably pronounced term *[s/z]i[N][t/?], followed, perhaps, by an animate classifier *-ka. The 'squirrel' set fits into the same range. In Lakhota, 'squirrel' and 'partridge' even seem to be pronounced the same. I wonder if the semantics, at one time, could have ranged to a disparaging "small prey animal, obtainable with a bow and arrow in the woods in winter"? Even if there were originally separate words that sounded similar, say, ziNt- 'bird' vs. si 'squirrel', a semantic and phonetic convergence like that could account for all that scrambling. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 29 04:04:29 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:04:29 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John Koontz wrote: > The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less > alveolar are likely. >> I'm confused by what you mean by "apical" here. Do you mean the tip of the >> palate ahead of the alveolar ridge? > > 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. > The less > fiddling with the existing "popular" schemes the better, I think. It > should only be done where it is absolutely necessary. The projects we're working on (textbook and eventually revised dictionary) should be as linguistically well-founded as possible, but since they are intended largely for the Omaha community, the legacy "popular" scheme needs to be treated with respect. That's the balancing act here. It isn't just about the linguists, but their concerns are important, as well as the Omaha community's. That's why I asked the Siouanists for advice. >> This is fine for the Siouanist list, though I am inclined to favor marking >> the x as x^, simply to make sure we really intend it to mean the sharp and >> forceful form. The x has been used for either or both velar fricatives so >> much in Omaha that I really don't trust anything written with x as >> necessarily being distinctive. > > There's some point to that, but by the same logic you should carefully > write tt vs. tH (or th), and not t vs. tH (or th), and so on. But again > that tramples on a carefully arranged compromised that appeals strongly to > Omahas and Poncas. I'm inclined not to mess with it. 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. 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. I know I don't have much support for this view at this end, and I don't know how the final copy will go down, but I do feel strongly about this, and I'm inclined to push for unambiguious marking both of the voiceless stops and of the velar fricatives. >> For Macy, the issue is touchy. They have some investment in the old La >> Flesche system, and there could be fallout from trying to revise it. With >> a push, they might accept using gh for the mute form, though that would be >> painful for the very common 'make'/'do' verb, which would then have to be >> written gaghe instead of gaxe. > > But the same logic applies to writing xitha as x^itha. No. In that case, you've still got an x, and people who want to see it that way can simply ignore the diacritic. The actual spelling doesn't have to change. This is just like adding accent marks to Greek, or macrons to Latin, or vowel points to Hebrew. The traditional spelling is still there, nobody who is used to the old scheme is forced to use the diacritics, everything written in the original scheme is still valid, and at the same time we add a convention that preserves known phonological features that the old scheme doesn't distinguish. It starts out as a teaching and reference aid for people learning Omaha as a second language, and it may or may not spread beyond that arena. > As I recollect it, gaghe is 'to make' and gaxe is 'branch', perhaps only > in the context of a riverine system. You mean a branch of a river, not the branch of a tree growing by a river, right? :) > There's a form for 'comb' that is > somewhat similar that's not coming to me. Would that be gahe' ? (I'm not sure if we ever got the pronunciation of this word pinned down.) > 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! Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Sep 29 17:10:31 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:10:31 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: > You're right! I copied the Kaw form by mistake. Kaw does have /ziziga/; Omaha /zizikka/. >Is the Kaw reflex of common Dhegiha preaspirates also hp/ht/hk, as in Osage? No, those are normally [pp, tt, kk] in Kaw, as in Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw. So 'turkey' has to have been *zizika, with the simple /k/ that voices in Kaw, Omaha and Ponca. This matches the Dakotan cognate and leaves the Omaha /kk/ a bit of a mystery. I assume it comes from "contamination" from that older term that means 'chicken' in the rest of Dhegiha. > But Omaha does have /zaNziga/ 'flicker', with the etymologically correct form of the root. I guess /zizikka/ is what happened to common Dhegiha *sihka in Omaha. These various largish bird terms don't seem to really be cognate across the plains Siouan languages. Dakotan /ziNtka-/ not only has the z/s problem compared with Dhegiha, but it also has the nasal vowel and the /tk/ cluster. Superficially, the /tk/ looks like it should match Dhegiha /kk/ or /hk/, but, in fact, it doesn't. The *tk cluster actually metathesizes in Dhegiha to /kt/, with means that 'chicken' should really be /sitta/, not /sikka/. > John mentioned before that in stop clusters, the second element usually won, except when the first element was t, which usually took over in any case. Is this a more sophisticated explanation of that observation? 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 I.e., MVS *tk regularly -> Early Dh. *kt -> Later Dh. *ht ? Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? I think there's some tp/kp variation. Both give Dhegiha /pp/ though, as in 'evening'. Dakota has vairable potpaNka and potkaNka 'cranberry' (Riggs dict.) One decent example seems to be: Dakota ka-tpa 'to strike' Omaha naN-tte 'to kick' Kaw wa-cce 'count coup' Quapaw naN-tte 'kick' They have different prefixes, but the roots match and suggest that tp > pt > tt. There may be other cases but I'd have to dig through the file. What about the 'squirrel' term? Would that still be good? Yes, I think so. It's true that animal names get around a lot geographically speaking, but if there's a problem with it, it would be vowel nasalization. It's certainly worth checking. Actually, even though the 'chicken, turkey' terms look diffused, it would still be interesting to check them out. I guess if Omaha lacks the word with initial /s/ that won't be possible. > But if borrowing/diffusion can explain the 'chicken' term, I would think that a standard number term would be even easier, as a tool for trade between groups. The *s/z/aptaN term isn't even common to Siouan outside of MVS, is it? Yes, Ofo has it in /iftaptaN/ 'ten', with an intrusive /t/ after the /f/ as in several other Ofo words. > Maybe these problematic s/z terms all date to a period shortly after the spread of MVS, after significant differences in pronunciation had developed between dialects, but while they were still pretty well mutually comprehensible, and while the speakers still recognized a common ethnicity. Do we have any others? (Trade terms? Hunting small animals? Spread of bow and arrow?) I'm fresh out of examples for the moment, but there may be more. Bob From rankin at ku.edu Fri Sep 29 17:15:29 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:15:29 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: 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. Small birds are "tree fleas" in Dakotan and lizards are "bugs" in Kaw, but I have to admit that "small prey critter" doesn't do it for me at the moment. Bob ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson Sent: Thu 9/28/2006 9:29 PM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: RE: Omaha fricative set > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') > LA ziNtka 'bird' (but zic^a 'partridge') > > OM siNga 'squirrel' > LA zic^a 'squirrel' After sending out that last message, I took another look at those sets. There isn't really any consistent difference between a squirrel and a largish bird, is there? By the 'bird' set, we'd have to allow a variably pronounced term *[s/z]i[N][t/?], followed, perhaps, by an animate classifier *-ka. The 'squirrel' set fits into the same range. In Lakhota, 'squirrel' and 'partridge' even seem to be pronounced the same. I wonder if the semantics, at one time, could have ranged to a disparaging "small prey animal, obtainable with a bow and arrow in the woods in winter"? Even if there were originally separate words that sounded similar, say, ziNt- 'bird' vs. si 'squirrel', a semantic and phonetic convergence like that could account for all that scrambling. Rory From rankin at ku.edu Fri Sep 29 17:34:07 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:34:07 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: > As I recollect it, gaghe is 'to make' and gaxe is 'branch', perhaps only > in the context of a riverine system. > You mean a branch of a river, not the branch of a tree growing by a river, right? :) The word you want is /gaxa/ 'branch' (stream). Kaw and Quapaw accent the final syllable here. > There's a form for 'comb' that is > somewhat similar that's not coming to me. > Would that be gahe' ? Yes. In Omaha and Ponca *ph > h. It's /gaphe/ in Kaw. > 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! What you have here is 'to break by pressure' and 'to blow by pressure', both with the prefix /bi-/. The latter was translated 'to blow on a fire to start it' by Mrs. Rowe, but she laughed and dodged the equally obvious 'fart' interpretation. You can try both. I don't know how it may have specialized semantically in Omaha. Bob From mrichardson at haliwa-saponi.com Fri Sep 1 19:35:38 2006 From: mrichardson at haliwa-saponi.com (Marvin Richardson) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 15:35:38 -0400 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns Message-ID: Is it more proper to use w or m in the case of Tutelo pronouns, such as wi 1sgP vs. mi 1sgP in Tutelo verbs. Could someone explain Oliverio's usage a little. Sorry if I'm not asking the question correctly. Marvin "Marty" Richardson Tribal Planner Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe (252) 586-4017 (Work) (252) 586-3918 (Fax) (252) 883-6357 (Cell) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Sat Sep 2 18:25:06 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 13:25:06 -0500 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns Message-ID: I believe that in her analysis she felt that the sounds [m] and [w] were treated as the same sound by Tutelo/Saponi speakers. The single phoneme would have had the pronunciation [m] if it came before a nasal vowel and [w] before an oral vowel. This may not resolve the issue completely, as speakers may simply have vacillated back and forth between the two pronunciations. The two sounds do not seem to actually contrast with each other in Virginia Siouan like they do in English "met" vs. "wet". One of my former students, Cory Spotted Bear, was learning the Mandan language from Edwin Benson. One day he heard Mr. Benson say a particular word but couldn't quite make out the first sound in the word. He asked "was that an "m" or a "w"?? Mr. Benson answered "yes". Just yesterday I was typing some of my Kansa language notes and found that on one page I had heard the word "milk" as [bazeni]. On the very next page (from the following day's recordings) I had written it [mazeni]. Those two little anecdotes may say something about the same sounds in Saponi. My guess is that the 19th century linguists who wrote the words down probably had similar experiences. Giulia Oliverio is probably still using the email address: fngro at uaf.edu. You can try corresponding with her. Good luck, Bob Rankin ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Marvin Richardson Sent: Fri 9/1/2006 2:35 PM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns Is it more proper to use w or m in the case of Tutelo pronouns, such as wi 1sgP vs. mi 1sgP in Tutelo verbs. Could someone explain Oliverio's usage a little. Sorry if I'm not asking the question correctly. Marvin "Marty" Richardson Tribal Planner Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe (252) 586-4017 (Work) (252) 586-3918 (Fax) (252) 883-6357 (Cell) From ahartley at d.umn.edu Sat Sep 2 21:16:58 2006 From: ahartley at d.umn.edu (Alan H. Hartley) Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 16:16:58 -0500 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob Rankin wrote: > I believe that in her analysis she felt that the sounds [m] and [w] > were treated as the same sound by Tutelo/Saponi speakers. Cf. two of Meriwether Lewis's records of Sacagawea's (Hidatsa) name, Sah-cah-gar-we-ah and Sah-ca-gar me-ah (both with silent -r- indicating a "broad" pronunciation of the preceding -a-). John Koontz and Bob Rankin several years ago pointed out to me the w/m alternation in Hidatsa, and Wes Jones explained that "the alternation of w/m (and r/n) is not really free. The nasal forms appear after pause, i.e. word initially in very careful speech and in syllabification." Alan From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Sun Sep 3 00:02:29 2006 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2006 17:02:29 -0700 Subject: Usage of w/m in Tutelo pronouns In-Reply-To: <44F9F4CA.8060103@d.umn.edu> Message-ID: > John Koontz and Bob Rankin several years ago pointed out to me the w/m alternation in Hidatsa > Just for the record, I've found one example (so far only one) of a similar alternation in Biloxi: mahe and wahe, both meaning 'cry out' or 'howl like a wolf.' Dave "Alan H. Hartley" wrote: Bob Rankin wrote: > I believe that in her analysis she felt that the sounds [m] and [w] > were treated as the same sound by Tutelo/Saponi speakers. Cf. two of Meriwether Lewis's records of Sacagawea's (Hidatsa) name, Sah-cah-gar-we-ah and Sah-ca-gar me-ah (both with silent -r- indicating a "broad" pronunciation of the preceding -a-). John Koontz and Bob Rankin several years ago pointed out to me the w/m alternation in Hidatsa, and Wes Jones explained that "the alternation of w/m (and r/n) is not really free. The nasal forms appear after pause, i.e. word initially in very careful speech and in syllabification." Alan --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Sep 5 20:38:13 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 14:38:13 -0600 Subject: PMV *(wa)the 'skirt' In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Rankin, Robert L wrote: > To which add: > > Lakota: nit?-hepi 'woman's skirt; the kind that stands out from the hip (|nit?|)' (from Eli James) > > Dakota: heyake 'dress' Willamson-54a > > Yankton: hayake 'dress' Wm-54a A little closer to the core semantics, I have to admit! From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Sep 5 20:35:00 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2006 14:35:00 -0600 Subject: 'All' and C + dh Clusters (RE: Osage 'eight') In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Mark J Awakuni-Swetland wrote: > ZhiNtheho John, ShoNgeska is identified as Ellis Blackbird, ... He is > pictured in F&LaF The Omaha Tribe pp. 171-175. They report that the > MoNthiNkagaxe (Earth Makers) did not have subclans, but had "groups" > associated with certain rites. One was the "wolf" or mikasi group. KHagesoNga, thanks for sorting that out! The Wolf Clan reference left me feeling a bit puzzled. I knew it had to be a conventional English equivalent of one of the Omaha terms. These equivalents are perhaps one of the undocumented parts of Omaha culture. The ethnographers tended to be purists, and didn't elaborate on the English handling of things, though here we see that Dorsey knew about them, which is interesting. It occurs to me that somebody should write something up on this English/translational nomenclature, before it gets lost, too. For example, there's a certain scheme for talking about kin in English, and for addressing them, though I have to confess that I fairly ignorant of it. And then, as I think we noticed a long time ago, when we were talking about street signs and such in Macy, a lot of places have distinctly Omaha names - in English! From shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk Wed Sep 6 16:44:03 2006 From: shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk (shokooh Ingham) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2006 17:44:03 +0100 Subject: Place names of foreign origin in garbled form In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Interesting about the Omaha sounding place names in English. You find that also in the Gulf (Persian not Mexican) countries. A lot of names date from earlier English days when they were learnt orally rather than through writing. In Qatar there is a place called in Arabic saylayn which looks as though it means 'two floods', but in fact comes from English Sea Lane. Also I heard in Abadan of something called Simin Kulub which originated in Seaman's Club. Bruce --- Koontz John E wrote: > On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Mark J Awakuni-Swetland wrote: > > ZhiNtheho John, ShoNgeska is identified as Ellis > Blackbird, ... He is > > pictured in F&LaF The Omaha Tribe pp. 171-175. > They report that the > > MoNthiNkagaxe (Earth Makers) did not have > subclans, but had "groups" > > associated with certain rites. One was the "wolf" > or mikasi group. > > KHagesoNga, thanks for sorting that out! The Wolf > Clan reference left me > feeling a bit puzzled. I knew it had to be a > conventional English > equivalent of one of the Omaha terms. These > equivalents are perhaps one > of the undocumented parts of Omaha culture. The > ethnographers tended to > be purists, and didn't elaborate on the English > handling of things, though > here we see that Dorsey knew about them, which is > interesting. > > It occurs to me that somebody should write something > up on this > English/translational nomenclature, before it gets > lost, too. For > example, there's a certain scheme for talking about > kin in English, and > for addressing them, though I have to confess that I > fairly ignorant of > it. > > And then, as I think we noticed a long time ago, > when we were talking > about street signs and such in Macy, a lot of places > have distinctly Omaha > names - in English! > > ___________________________________________________________ All New Yahoo! Mail ? Tired of Vi at gr@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Thu Sep 14 20:58:08 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 14:58:08 -0600 Subject: Place names of foreign origin in garbled form In-Reply-To: <20060906164403.54480.qmail@web26811.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 6 Sep 2006, shokooh Ingham wrote: > Interesting about the Omaha sounding place names in English. You find > that also in the Gulf (Persian not Mexican) countries. ... My language was ambiguous. I was thinking about places like Skunk Hollow Road - namesake of the Skunk Hollow Singers, and a road through Macy named by Omahas - I should even remember the name of the name giver, but I don't. Skunk Hollow Road is named after a locale in Dogpatch of comic pages fame. Or ... uh ... 48 ... Hill? I'm not sure I have the number of the kind of place right there. It's a place named after a dance, I know, and I think the number there changes with time, too. It's a pan-Plains thing, I think. There are various folks explanations, but I once read that it was probably a borrowing from English tent-show nomenclature, e.g., "Review of '48." Or the Million Dollar Hill (grade on the highway outside of town). I just meant that the basis of these English language names was in Omaha culture and history, and often also in the Omaha sense of humor. It was in that sense that I meant that they were characteristically Omaha, though English in form. More venerable and closer to what you understood would be the town of Rosalie. Folks explained that it was named for a lady named Dhuzadhi - a member of the LaFlesche family, I believe, though the details escape me at the moment - and that Rosalie was just the English version of her name. I was a bit skeptical at the time, but I think they were right. I hadn't realized at that point that certain French names - mostly with common English equivalents to confuse matters - had become Omaha personal names through the merger of the Omaha metis population with the Omaha tribe. I actually suspect now that this may account for the lack of attested Omaha names for some of the better known metis figures. Very likely that had Omaha names in most cases, but these were displaced by their metis names, which were, essentially, perceived as Omaha. From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 15 12:44:43 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2006 07:44:43 -0500 Subject: Place names and personal names In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John, you're a dollar short. It is called "49 hill" named after a popular dance type. Most 49s take place in out of the way places and often after dark. Singers stand in the middle holding the drum and sing while surrounded by a relatively tight circle of inward facing dancers. If you've every seen domestic turkeys huddled into a closely pack circle dancing you will get the idea. The dance step is similar to a round dance. Male and female dancers are paired, or at least intermixed. It is an opportunity to sing and dance to love songs and other humorous ditties while trying to snag a partner for an ongoing relationship. This is an adult dance, after all. On the other topic: Omaha have quite a few so called "half breed" names for family members who may be mixed blood and no clan affiliation/name. Most are Omaha renderings of the English name. Grandma Elizabeth Saunsoci Stabler (1905-1985) had no clan due to her paternal lineage back to Louis Saunsoci, the french trader. Her Indian name was "Thi'sabet". Other names include Julia=> Juthi', Jenny=> JEniwiN', Mary=> Mathe', or Methe' (similar to the Hawaiian renderings for Mary and Marie). I cannot call to mind male examples but I know I've heard them. There were also half-breed names that were descriptive in some fashion similar to the clan names. All of these names have never been gathered and analyzed to my knowledge. Perhaps an interesting little project for someone, enit? For a time on the Omaha Reservation at Macy the name "Bedrock" was being applied to one of the tribal housing projects...taken from the Flintstones genre. Sunrise Village, the oldest tribal housing venture north of the tribal offices is still known by that name. Omaha Lodges is the housing project due east of Macy. Oakleaf is the name applied to a housing project between Macy and Walthill. I believe the name originates from the early 20th century country school and township at that location. Million dollar hill gets it name from the speculated cost of improving that section of highway 75 back in the early 20th century. It is a several miles long grade rising from south to north along the east side of Macy. Grandpa Charles Stabler (1900-1992) recalled how he worked on the grading because he had a team of horses available for the job. Uthixide Mark Awakuni-Swetland UmoNhoN ie thethudi Omaha Language Spoken Here Koontz John E Sent by: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu 09/14/2006 03:58 PM Please respond to siouan at lists.colorado.edu To siouan at lists.colorado.edu cc Subject Re: Place names of foreign origin in garbled form On Wed, 6 Sep 2006, shokooh Ingham wrote: > Interesting about the Omaha sounding place names in English. You find > that also in the Gulf (Persian not Mexican) countries. ... My language was ambiguous. I was thinking about places like Skunk Hollow Road - namesake of the Skunk Hollow Singers, and a road through Macy named by Omahas - I should even remember the name of the name giver, but I don't. Skunk Hollow Road is named after a locale in Dogpatch of comic pages fame. Or ... uh ... 48 ... Hill? I'm not sure I have the number of the kind of place right there. It's a place named after a dance, I know, and I think the number there changes with time, too. It's a pan-Plains thing, I think. There are various folks explanations, but I once read that it was probably a borrowing from English tent-show nomenclature, e.g., "Review of '48." Or the Million Dollar Hill (grade on the highway outside of town). I just meant that the basis of these English language names was in Omaha culture and history, and often also in the Omaha sense of humor. It was in that sense that I meant that they were characteristically Omaha, though English in form. More venerable and closer to what you understood would be the town of Rosalie. Folks explained that it was named for a lady named Dhuzadhi - a member of the LaFlesche family, I believe, though the details escape me at the moment - and that Rosalie was just the English version of her name. I was a bit skeptical at the time, but I think they were right. I hadn't realized at that point that certain French names - mostly with common English equivalents to confuse matters - had become Omaha personal names through the merger of the Omaha metis population with the Omaha tribe. I actually suspect now that this may account for the lack of attested Omaha names for some of the better known metis figures. Very likely that had Omaha names in most cases, but these were displaced by their metis names, which were, essentially, perceived as Omaha. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 03:40:31 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:40:31 -0600 Subject: Woman's Friend Message-ID: Here's another interesting Dakota term that I haven't seen a parallel for elsewhere in Mississippi Valley Siouan. tha'was^e 'a woman's female friend' tha'was^etku 'her friend, a female's friend' It's not clear why tha- is accented here. I would assume that the underlying form was awa's^e, but it seems to be was^e' 'a woman's female friend, corresponding to kho'la [i.e., for a man]; a woman's sister-in-law, thus a word used if persons are not on very good terms'. Buechel compares mas^e' 'a brother-in-law'. Buechel's comment on not being on good tgerms is not clear. I think he means that one might call a sister-in-law this if one wasn't on good terms with her, instead of 'sister-in-law'. s^c^ephaN'ku 'her sister-in-law' However, maybe it's the other way around, because he explains mas^e' as mas^e' 'a man's brother-in-law. It is used if they are on very good terms' And that leads to ma's^ke 'a friend. It is usedd by women as men say kho'la. thama's^keku 'her female friend' This time the accent is not initial in the tha-form, but it is in the simple stem. Incidentally, the term for 'man's brother-in-law' is different from this, too: thaNhaN'ku 'his wife's brother; his sister's husband' John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU Mon Sep 18 03:06:35 2006 From: John.Koontz at Colorado.EDU (Koontz John E) Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:06:35 -0600 Subject: Co-Wife In-Reply-To: Message-ID: This has nothing to do with contemporary Dakota culture, as far as I know, but in looking at Siouan kinship terms, I've been struck by this Dakota term. the'yaku 'her co-wife' I think this might be tha-iya'-ku or tha-eya'-ku, historically, from iya 'to speak' or eya' 'to say', i.e., perhaps 'her-(co)-speaker', 'her someone she talks to'. The initial accent suggests a contraction or elision. Buechel also says that the'ya means 'one who has more than one wife', an interesting additional application of the term. I think, however, that this is a result of misinterpreting the definition in Riggs, which is 'when a man has more than one wife, one calls the other teya'. I think Buechel's additional definition is the result of taking the two clasues as alternatives. I haven't run into a recorded term for 'co-wife' elsewhere, but I assume that most Siouan groups must have had such terms. I suppose in the context of many situations 'sister' might have worked. From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 06:27:27 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:27:27 -0600 Subject: Woman's Brother/Sister-in-Law Message-ID: The foregoing led me to this messy set: s^ic^?e'ku 'her husband's brother; her sister's husband' sc^e'phaNku ~ s^c^e'phaNku 'her husband's sister; her brother's wife' Note correction in accent. Also note that Buechel seems to get as confused by these in-law terms as I do. I think he's not always right about his definitions. These are from Lesser! Note that in most cases in Mississippi Valley Siouan conception it would be ideal for brothers to marry sisters. (Also for a polygynous man to marry sisters.) So, 'her sister's husband = her husband's brother' is something of a potential identity as well as having a nice terminological symmetry. And, of course, 'her brother's wife = her husband's sister' is the other side of the coin. Imagine the world is divided into two descent groups, exchanging spouses. Of course, it would get awkward in the next generation, if there were only two descent groups. Lesser gives the corresponding Yankton terms as s^ic^?e'ku c^e'phaNku Actually, he gives s^e'phaNku, but I think it's a notational problem. Santee (Lesser has more notational problems here) has s^ic^?e'ku ic^e'phaNku 'her husband's sister' For Assiniboine Lesser gives first persons only: mis^ii'j^e mis^ii'j^ep[h]aN >>From these, it looks like the forms for Proto-Dakotan might be *s^ic^?e'=ku 'her husband's brother; her sister's husband' *s^ic^(?)e'-phaN=ku 'her husband's sister; her brother's wife' The feminine is formed by adding -phaN. I'm not sure where phaN comes from - probably not phaN 'woman's work bag'! - but it might be connected with the Santee cardinal names *ha'phaN 'second daughter' and *he'phaN 'second son'. It's not clear if the p in these forms is aspirated, however. The initial sequence *s^ic?e is considerably modified in the feminine forms. Teton reduces it to s^c^e' ~ sc^e' - contraction explains the anomalous accent and the cluster probably accounts for the loss of ejection - and Yankton has c^e'- and Santee ic^e'-. Assinboine alone has s^ij^e' < *s^ic^?e' in both forms. I think the loss of ejection is regular, but this is a point where I need some help from one of the Assiniboine-Stoney experts! In the rest of Mississippi Valley the terms reconstructable seem to be: *s^ik?e' 'her husband's brother; her sister's husband' *s^ikhaN' 'her husband's sister; her brother's wife' I'm guessing aspiration of the k in Dhegiha from the weirdness in Lesser's sets. Winnebago and Ioway-Otoe have g < *kh, of course, and Ioway-Otoe seems to lack the nasalization. Comparing the Dakotan and other forms: PDa *s^ic^?e : POMV *s^ik?e' PDa *s^ic^?e-phaN : POMV *s^ikhaN reveals that Dakotan has c^? < *k? after i. There seems likely to be some sort of connection between the PDa *-phaN and the *-haN found in the rest of MV Siouan. The best I can do at present is: PMV *s^ik ?e > *s^ik#?e *s^ik (?e=pi) haN > *s^ik#?ep#haN ~ *s^ik#haN This is based primarily upon (a) the knowledge that many longer compounds in Siouan are derived from phrases, and (b) a knowledge of phrase structure in modern MV. Asside from the possibility that *s^ik might 'be 'bad' (perhaps 'forbidden'?) and that -p(i) might be a plural, I haven't any idea what the forms might mean. !!! Note to those who hate kinship stuff and like morphology and also to those who understand kinship systems a lot better than I do: My apologies and skip ahead to point A. One further observation, somewhat complicated: in Omaha-Ponca, taking that as an example of patrilineal usage within Mississippi Valley, the mother's clan at the level below mother's parents consists of "uncles and mothers down the line" i.e., all the male descendents of mother's father are ine'gi 'one's mother's brother' and all the female ones are ihaN 'one's mother'. Not just mother's brothers (and sisters), and mother's father's brother's sons (and daughters), etc., but also mother's brother's sons (and daughters), etc. Not mother's sister's sons (and daughters), they'd be in mother's sister's husband's clan, quite possibly your own, if mother and her sister had married brothers as expected. The emphasis here - conveyed by the parentheses around the women - is on lineal descent in the male line. Men and women both have children, but only men convey clan membership to their children. Men's children are members of the man's clan; women's children are members of their husband's clan. Men's sons produce more clan members; men's daughters produce children for other clans. Looking the other directioon, fatgher's a memb er of the clan, but mother is not. In some sense women produce children, but men produce descendents. Anyway, the descendents of an uncle (mother's brother) are uncles and mothers. In contrast, Dakotan kinship is bilateral, like European systems, rather than patrilineal, so the further extensions of terms beyond the immediate family are often quite different from those in Omaha-Ponca. I'm not sure I fully understand them, but, essentially, males of mother's generation on her side of the family are leks^itku 'his/her mother's brother; his/her uncle', while the females are huNku 'his/her mother'. On father's side, the males of his genration are atku'ku (or ateku) 'his/her father', while the females are thuNwiNc^u 'his/her father's sister; his/her aunt' The children of a leks^i are s^ic^?e-s^i(tku), if male, and c^e'phaN-s^i(tku), if female, and the same applies to the children of thuNwiN'. The anthropological term is "cross-cousins" - children of mother's brother and father's sisters, as opposed to "parallel cousins" - children of mother's sister or father's brother. One way the Dakotan system does differ from European systems is that the same-sex siblings of parents are counted as parents, and the parallel cousins are counted as siblings. Siouan patrilineal and matrilineal systems lack cross-cousin terms. !!! Point A. Safe to resume reading. Anyway, the Dakota women's cross-cousin terms (in Teton, anyway) are: s^ic^?e'-s^itku 'her male cross-cousin' c^e'phaN-s^itku 'her female cross-cousin' Notice that the Dakotan terms for women's male and female kin in these "cross cousin" lineages are the terms for their male and female siblings-in-law with the element -s^i(t)- added. As Dick Carter observed somewhere, this element is probably *-s^ic^- < *-s^ik- 'bad', losing the final consonant if nothing follows, and dissimilating it to t before the third person possessive enclitic =ku. !!! Skippers resume skipping. Right to the next letter. So the terms for 'woman's (male/female) sibling by marriage' are extended to 'woman's (male/female) cousin', which is sort of what you'd expect if your mother's brother had done the normal thing and married your father's sister. But, even if he hadn't, everybody in sight in your generation who wasn't a 'bother' or 'sister' (part of the family) would be a *s^ic^?e' or *s^ic^?e'-phaN, except that the 'bad' ones would be relatives by blood, and not eligible spouses. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 11:22:52 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 05:22:52 -0600 Subject: Place names and personal names In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Fri, 15 Sep 2006, Mark J Awakuni-Swetland wrote: > John, you're a dollar short. And a day late, as usual! Thanks for the details! I seem to recall a discussion of the general phenomenon somewhere by Powers or maybe Howard? As far as remembering numbers, I'm infamous for not, so I need all the help there I can get! > On the other topic: > Omaha have quite a few so called "half breed" names for family members who > may be mixed blood and no clan affiliation/name. Most are Omaha renderings > of the English name. Grandma Elizabeth Saunsoci Stabler (1905-1985) had no > clan due to her paternal lineage back to Louis Saunsoci, the french > trader. Her Indian name was "Thi'sabet". Other names include Julia=> > Juthi', Jenny=> JEniwiN', Mary=> Mathe', or Methe' (similar to the > Hawaiian renderings for Mary and Marie). Wow! You know a lot of these! I remember hearing Mary Clay addressed as Me'dhi (or so I thought it was at the time). I've assumed that in some of these cases the original is perhaps French, e.g., Marie. With many names it would be hard to tell, e.g., Dhizabet, Medhe ~ Medhi, Dhuzadhi, once it had been through the wringer of Omaha, since the English forms are derived from the French, and very similar in detail, but perhaps Judhi' is Julie, not Julia, and though JeniwiN might have 'woman' appended, I'd guess Genevieve might be in its pedigree. > I cannot call to mind male examples but I know I've heard them. I think the Dorsey texts have HaNdhi, which I assume is Henri, though it is translated Henry. Otherwise I've seen (but never heard) Sasu (?Francois) and Bac^[]i (Abadie) and J^o. > There were also half-breed names that were descriptive in some fashion > similar to the clan names. Haven't heard of any of these, specifically. Are there any you can repeat? > All of these names have never been gathered and analyzed to my > knowledge. Perhaps an interesting little project for someone, enit? Yes! > For a time on the Omaha Reservation at Macy the name "Bedrock" was being > applied to one of the tribal housing projects...taken from the Flintstones > genre. > > Sunrise Village, the oldest tribal housing venture north of the tribal > offices is still known by that name. > > Omaha Lodges is the housing project due east of Macy. > > Oakleaf is the name applied to a housing project between Macy and > Walthill. I believe the name originates from the early 20th century > country school and township at that location. > > Million dollar hill gets it name from the speculated cost of improving > that section of highway 75 back in the early 20th century. It is a several > miles long grade rising from south to north along the east side of Macy. > Grandpa Charles Stabler (1900-1992) recalled how he worked on the grading > because he had a team of horses available for the job. A number of my ancestors supported homesteads along the Sappa Creek (Sapa Wakpala?) in Kansas grading railroad beds in that area! They also had teams available and probably not much else. It was about a generation earlier, but I think the principles were the same. From mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu Mon Sep 18 17:19:46 2006 From: mawakuni-swetland2 at unlnotes.unl.edu (Mark J Awakuni-Swetland) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:19:46 -0500 Subject: Ponca 19 century Birdhead inquiry Message-ID: Aloha All, A colleague at the University of Omaha Native American Studies program posed the following inquiry. ...Looking for a late 19th or early 20th century manuscript or article identified as The Oratory of Chief Birdhead (Northern Ponca). Perhaps collected by someone named Bell. Does this sound familiar to anyone? wibthahoN 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 John.Koontz at colorado.edu Mon Sep 18 22:33:48 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:33:48 -0600 Subject: Omaha-Ponca 'Ought' Message-ID: In the Dorsey texts the modal sense 'must, ought, apparently' is represented by an enclitic following the future and plural slots, wsith the form as^e. jod 1890:119.17 dhi' ha's^i=daN wahna'the=tt=as^e (NetSiouan) thi' ha'shidoN wana'tHetashe (Popular, Net Adapted) you afterward you must eat (word for word) jod 1890:144.14 hni'?a=b=as^e ni'?abashe you must fail jod 1890:210.12 aNwaN'kkide=hnaN=tta=b=as^e oNwoN'kidenoN tabashe we must shoot at them regularly Rory Larson reports that the =as^e form is no longer recognized. > I don't recall ever seeing [kkude] in Dorsey either. There, I think the > word for 'should/ought to' is something like ttas^e or tHas^e, but [the > ladies working with the Omaha class at UN] don't seem to recognize that. > They gave us kku'de/kku'de tte instead, and we've been using it pretty > freely ever since, without them objecting. The kku'de is apparently a > verb, but it's used impersonally and doesn't seem to conjugate. The same pattern of impersonal usage applies, of course, to =as^e. It occurs to me that there might be a chance of an etymology for kkude in terms consistent with Dorsey, if it is =kkud[schwa] or has some other heavily reduced vowel where e is written. It could be =kk[i] udaN 'it would be good if' ~ =kk[i] udaN=tte 'it would be good if'. This pattern is used for the imeprative in Northwestern languages, I understand. In my experience u'daN is a good example of the strong tendency of final aN to reduce to schwa, also exhibited in umaNhaN 'Omaha' and gdhebaN 'ten'. And the verb u'daN is used impersonally. It is also inflected in the dative as an experiencer verb 'to like, to enjoy; lit. 'to be pleasureable for', e.g., niN[iN]'niN gi[i]'ud(aN)= att(A)=s^(AN) tobacco she likes (to her it is good) very (completely to it) She likes smoking too much. ... naN[aN]'de iN[iN]'udaN ... heart to me is good "I'm glad that ..." Here V[V] => probably a long V (V) => elided (cap V) => elided or voiceless However, this is just a sudden inspiration, and it might have no bearing at all on =kkude. John E. Koontz http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz From mary.marino at usask.ca Sat Sep 23 19:44:23 2006 From: mary.marino at usask.ca (Marino) Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:44:23 -0600 Subject: SCLA 2007 Message-ID: Dear colleagues, >Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is a possible venue for the 2007 SCLC >Conference. The Canadian Linguistics Association will be meeting here >from 26 to 29 May, and there will also be a half-day session on the >aboriginal languages in the Canadian Indigenous and Native Studies >Association (CINSA) meeting. I would suggest either the week of 21 May >(Monday) or the week beginning Wednesday, 30 May, following the CLA >conference. I am told that there would be some funding available for a >joint session with the CLA, if that seems like an attractive >option. Please let me know your thoughts on this. There may also be the >option of Norman, OK as a 2007 venue. For further information about this, >please contact Linda Cumberland. Best regards to all, Mary Marino From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Sun Sep 24 22:52:34 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 17:52:34 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: <6.1.2.0.0.20060923134202.01f39e28@sask.usask.ca> Message-ID: Mark and I have just had a session with three of our speakers to try to hammer out the phonology of Omaha fricatives. We came to some tentative conclusions, which I present below. Any comments or critiques would be welcome. In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: s s^ x^ z z^ g^ We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. I seem to recall somebody mentioning on the Siouanist list some time back, perhaps a year or so ago, that some Siouan language(s) made [s] with the tip of the tongue pressed against the lower front teeth, rather than just under the alveolar ridge, as in English. In other words, the [s] hiss would be made between the top of the tongue (convex upwards) and the alveolar ridge, rather than between the leading edge of the tongue (curled up so the top of the tongue is concave upwards) and the alveolar ridge. After some uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth. [z] is made the same way, and with less confidence it seems that [s^] is also made with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth, rather than against the back of the alveolar ridge as in English. The difference between the Omaha [s] and the English [s] is hard to detect by hearing. Not only have we native English speakers been using our version of [s] when speaking Omaha, but apparently our Omaha informants still use their version of [s] when speaking English. Our eldest speaker remarked that English words spoken with the English version of [s] didn't sound right to her. Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal triplet of words in the s series: si 'foot' ( From shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk Mon Sep 25 14:46:14 2006 From: shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk (shokooh Ingham) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:46:14 +0100 Subject: SCLA 2007 In-Reply-To: <6.1.2.0.0.20060923134202.01f39e28@sask.usask.ca> Message-ID: My vote goes to Saskatoon. The later date would be better for me, as exams come up over here at that time Yours Bruce --- Marino wrote: > Dear colleagues, > > > >Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is a possible venue for the > 2007 SCLC > >Conference. The Canadian Linguistics Association > will be meeting here > >from 26 to 29 May, and there will also be a > half-day session on the > >aboriginal languages in the Canadian Indigenous and > Native Studies > >Association (CINSA) meeting. I would suggest > either the week of 21 May > >(Monday) or the week beginning Wednesday, 30 May, > following the CLA > >conference. I am told that there would be some > funding available for a > >joint session with the CLA, if that seems like an > attractive > >option. Please let me know your thoughts on this. > There may also be the > >option of Norman, OK as a 2007 venue. For further > information about this, > >please contact Linda Cumberland. > > > Best regards to all, > Mary Marino > > > ___________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger - with free PC-PC calling and photo sharing. http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com From linguista at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 15:47:55 2006 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan Gordon) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:47:55 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Rory - Much of what you've said matches some of my impressions on hearing spoken Ponca. I would offer that what you're describing as /s/-series pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the lower teeth are probably simple laminal /s/. Laminal (or "distributed" in some phonological theory) are articulated with the part of the tongue behind the tip. Where the tip goes is therefore not very important, and it doesn't make much of a difference whether the tip remains raised or is totally lowered. Dutch and Finnish both have widespread laminal /s/ and this is why the /s/ in those languages sounds "dark" or like a cross between /s/ and /s^/. I believe Nepali also pronounces /s/ with a lowered tongue tip in certain contexts. Anyway, "laminal" is a very concise way to describe the sound, and it's a word most people who know IPA are familiar with. As far as the /x, g^/ thing goes, your analysis fits what I've noticed also. I do believe /x/ is, as you said, pronounced much farther forward on the velum than we traditionally have said. The word for something pronounced against "the back of the tongue and the velum or tonsils" would probably be "uvular." A laryngeal would be something like /h/ or a glottal stop; while a pharyngeal would be something pronounced by the root of the tongue in the throat itself, and I don't believe this is what's happening in OP. Uvular pronunciation, on the other hand, is very common in many Plains languages, including as an allophone for /k/ or even a separate phoneme. - Bryan Gordon On 9/24/06, Rory M Larson wrote: > > > Mark and I have just had a session with three of our speakers to try to > hammer out the phonology of Omaha fricatives. We came to some tentative > conclusions, which I present below. Any comments or critiques would be > welcome. > > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ > > We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., > which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. > > I seem to recall somebody mentioning on the Siouanist list some time back, > perhaps a year or so ago, that some Siouan language(s) made [s] with the tip > of the tongue pressed against the lower front teeth, rather than just under > the alveolar ridge, as in English. In other words, the [s] hiss would be > made between the top of the tongue (convex upwards) and the alveolar ridge, > rather than between the leading edge of the tongue (curled up so the top of > the tongue is concave upwards) and the alveolar ridge. After some > uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made with the tip > of the tongue against the lower front teeth. [z] is made the same way, and > with less confidence it seems that [s^] is also made with the tip of the > tongue against the lower front teeth, rather than against the back of the > alveolar ridge as in English. The difference between the Omaha [s] and the > English [s] is hard to detect by hearing. Not only have we native English > speakers been using our version of [s] when speaking Omaha, but apparently > our Omaha informants still use their version of [s] when speaking English. > Our eldest speaker remarked that English words spoken with the English > version of [s] didn't sound right to her. > > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > > si 'foot' ( s.i 'seed' ( zi 'yellow' ( > The word for 'turkey' is problematic. When Mark elicited the word from one > speaker last Monday, and from another today, asking them to repeat it three > times, both speakers pronounced it s.izi'kka all three times, with the > initial sound a muted s ([s.]). Then he asked the third speaker, the > youngest, and she gave zizi'kka. The others (or her older sister at least) > agreed with her staunchly, insisting that the right way to pronounce it was > in fact zizi'kka. > > The "muted" form seems to be indifferently voiced. Typically the voicing > for the following vowel or n begins in the middle of the fricative, so it > starts out unvoiced and shifts to voiced in the middle of producing it. > More importantly, I think the traditional "voiceless" version is marked by a > greater forcefulness in pushing the air through the gap. So the "muted" > form might be the basal unmarked form, with forcefulness being added to mark > the "voiceless" series, and voicing being added to mark the voiced series. > For the s and s^ locations we should have: > > forced (+forcing; -voicing) s s^ > muted (-forcing; -voicing) s. s^. > voiced (-forcing; +voicing) z z^ > > Finally, we come to our ever problematic x^/g^ sounds. These in fact to > not seem to be alternates in a single series. They are made at different > articulation points. [x^] is more forward, I think between the top of the > tongue and the back of the hard palate. > [g^] is farther back, I believe between the back of the tongue and the > velum or tonsils or something. (A laryngeal?) Somebody who knows Arabic > would probably be able to describe it better. (Bruce??) > > Also, the [x^] seems to be clearly voiceless and forced. I've never felt > comfortable describing the Omaha [g^] as voiced, although voicing sometimes > comes in on the trailing end of it. Nor is it at all forceful. It seems to > belong to the muted series, with indifferent or marginal voicing and > non-forceful production. > > The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: > > alveolo- > alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal > > forced s s^ x^ h > > muted s. s^. g^ > > voiced z z^ > > > Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another > symbol, say [x.]. > > Does this understanding of the Omaha fricative set seem reasonable to > everyone who has opinions? > > Thanks for any input, > > Rory > From okibjonathan at yahoo.com Mon Sep 25 15:59:35 2006 From: okibjonathan at yahoo.com (Jonathan Holmes) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:59:35 -0700 Subject: H.R. 4766 Native Language Immersion Bill needs support Message-ID: H.R. 4766 Native Language Immersion Bill needs support Native Language Immersion Bill Placed on the Suspension Calendar NEEDS TRIBAL LETTERS OF SUPPORT TO PASS http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-4766 The Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006, H.R. 4766 will be on the suspension calendar in the House of Representatives the week of September 25th which means that the House will vote on the bill next week. This bill will create grant programs under the Department of Health and Human Services for Native language survival schools, Native language nests, and Native language restoration programs. Representative Heather Wilson, (R-NM) introduced this legislation during NIEA's Legislative Summit and has been working very closely with NIEA and Indian Country to turn the bill into law. Most recently, the House Education and Workforce Committee held field hearing on the bill in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Co-sponsors of H.R. 4766 include Representatives Rick Renzi (R-AZ), Tom Udall (D-NM), Steve Pearce (R-NM), and Mark Udall (D-CO). NIEA is requesting that all tribes, tribal Education departments, and schools express their support for this bill that will provide critical support for our languages. A sample letter is attached to send to your congressional delegation in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. We have a short time frame (by Monday) to get these letters into your congressional delegation and leadership on the House Education and Workforce Committee and Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The attached letters are addressed to the House Education and Workforce Committee and the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, but can be tailored to your individual Congressional members. PLEASE have your tribes, tribal education departments, and schools send in the letters to your congressional representatives TODAY and MONDAY. We do not have time to lose! If you have any questions- please feel free to contact NIEA at (202)544-7290. Please send the letters to your congressional representatives and the four fax #s below. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs fax #s (202) 224-5429 (Majority) and (202)228-2589 (Minority) House Education and Workforce Committee fax #s (202)225-9571 (Majority), and (202)226-4864 (Minority) Please send a copy to the National Indian Education Association fax # (202) 544-7293 Cut and paste the following text. SAMPLE LETTER TO THE HOUSE September __, 2006 The Honorable Howard "Buck" McKeon, Chairman Education and the Workforce Committee U.S. House of Representatives 2181 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 The Honorable George Miller, Ranking Member Education and the Workforce Committee U.S. House of Representatives 2181 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 Dear Chairman McKeon and Ranking Member Miller: On behalf of ___________, I support H.R. 4766, the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006. I understand that this bill will be on the suspension calendar in the House of Representatives the week of September 25th. We urge the House to pass this critical legislation. There is a crisis loss of Native languages across the country. It is estimated that only twenty indigenous languages will remain viable by the year 2050. Our Native languages are not spoken anywhere else in the world; and, if they are not preserved, they will disappear forever. Given the rapid pace of deterioration of Native languages, it is a race against the clock to save Native languages. The key to stemming the loss of Native languages is by significantly increasing support for Native American language immersion programs. It is well proven that language immersion programs are one of the few effective ways to create fluent speakers in Native languages. Further, data shows that Native students who participate in an immersion program attain higher academic success compared to their Native peers who do not participate in these programs. The United States should do all that it can to preserve Native American languages as these languages played a vital role in protecting our country during World Wars I and II. Also, as a result of federal assimilationist policies in the early and mid-1900s, many Native people stopped speaking their Native languages because they were forced to attend Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools that harshly forbid the speaking of Native languages. Currently, under existing law, the Administration for Native Americans, Health and Human Services, administers a Native American languages revitalization grant program under the Native American Programs Act of 1974. H.R. 4766 would provide for expanded uses under the current grant program to allow for Native American language immersion grants. The language immersion grants would assist Native communities as they work to revitalize and protect their languages for generations to come. We appreciate your efforts to help us save our Native American languages and look forward to working with you to ensure that this legislation is enacted into law. Sincerely, SAMPLE LETTER TO THE SENATE September __, 2006 The Honorable John McCain, Chairman Indian Affairs Committee U.S. Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 The Honorable Byron Dorgan, Vice Chairman Indian Affairs Committee U.S. Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 Dear Chairman McCain and Vice Chairman Dorgan: On behalf of ___________, I strongly support H.R. 4766, the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006. I understand that this bill will be on the suspension calendar in the House of Representatives the week of September 25th. This bill will likely pass the House, and we urge the Senate to pass the House bill by unanimous consent. There is a crisis loss of Native languages across the country. It is estimated that only twenty indigenous languages will remain viable by the year 2050. Our Native languages are not spoken anywhere else in the world; and, if they are not preserved, they will disappear forever. Given the rapid pace of deterioration of Native languages, it is a race against the clock to save Native languages. The key to stemming the loss of Native languages is by significantly increasing support for Native American language immersion programs. It is well proven that language immersion programs are one of the few effective ways to create fluent speakers in Native languages. Further, data shows that Native students who participate in an immersion program attain higher academic success compared to their Native peers who do not participate in these programs. The United States should do all that it can to preserve Native American languages as these languages played a vital role in protecting our country during World Wars I and II. Also, as a result of federal assimilationist policies in the early and mid-1900s, many Native people stopped speaking their Native languages because they were forced to attend Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools that harshly forbid the speaking of Native languages. Currently, under existing law, the Administration for Native Americans, Health and Human Services, administers a Native American languages revitalization grant program under the Native American Programs Act of 1974. H.R. 4766 would provide for expanded uses under the current grant program to allow for Native American language immersion grants. The language immersion grants would assist Native communities as they work to revitalize and protect their languages for generations to come. We appreciate your efforts to help us save our Native American languages and look forward to working with you to ensure that this legislation is enacted into law. Sincerely, Be a friend... Help support the Lakota Communities on Pine Ridge, go to: http://FriendsofPineRidgeReservation.org --------------------------------- Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates starting at 1¢/min. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Mon Sep 25 20:03:43 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:03:43 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thanks, Bryan. I appreciate your comments, and your good advice on the proper linguistic terms to use! Of course you are quite right to point out that the laminal /s/ is dependent upon the part of the tongue that approaches the alveolar ridge, not on what the tip is doing. You mention Dutch and Finnish as having laminal /s/. Is it just these two languages, or is this an areal phenomenon in northern Europe-- do you know? Also, you say that their laminal /s/ is "dark", like cross between /s/ and /s^/. I think in Omaha it's actually pretty sharp, and audibly very similar to English /s/. But that depends on exactly where against the roof of the mouth you put the top of the tongue. If what I seemed to work out with one speaker yesterday afternoon is correct, both /s/ and /s^/ are laminal in Omaha. I find a laminal /s^/ a little more awkward to produce than a laminal /s/, but it seems to work. If I am doing it right, it seems to be something like German ch in ich, but more forward, against the back of the alveolar ridge. The term "uvular" occurred to me after I sent the posting yesterday. It seems to me like the /g^/ is made in about the same location as the Parisian /r/, but mostly without the trill. So to make sure I've got the "gutterals" straight: laryngeal - Produced in the larynx, involving the vocal cords. Also "glottal"? pharyngeal - Produced by pressure between the root of the tongue and the top of the throat. uvular - Produced between the back of the tongue and tonsils? Uvula? velar - Produced a little further forward, between back of tongue and velum. palatal - Produced between the tongue and the hard palate. Is there a term for the /s^/ series? It's sort of front of palate, back of alveolar ridge. Alveolo-palatal? Thanks again, Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From linguista at gmail.com Mon Sep 25 21:49:47 2006 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan Gordon) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:49:47 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: /s^/ is usually called alveo-palatal or something similar like that. Phonologists who work in featural theory can't agree on whether it's a pure coronal or part-coronal and part-palatal. In any case, we shouldn't assume anything about the features of OP /s^/ simply because of what it's usually called for other languages. We know that it's different from the standard European esh-sound, so we shouldn't assume anything about it! The Parisian /r/ is uvular, and yes, uvular usually connotes the uvula, but it is possible to produce uvular sounds even if you don't have a uvula (imagine a Parisian or a Hebrew speaker who has had it removed for sleep apnea therapy). I would guess the tonsils or something near the rear of the velum would be operative in this case. As far as I know, there are no areal tendencies to have a laminal /s/ in Northern Europe. But one thing that Finnish and Dutch have in common is the lack of a historical development of /s^/. Finnish has no /s^/ at all in native lexemes, and Dutch's /s^/ phoneme arises from contact between /s/ and /j/. This being the case, the "space" for the /s/ phonemes in both languages is much larger than it is in languages which have historically distinguished between /s/ and /s^/, so there's no reason for speakers to avoid "darker" sounding pronunciations for fear of confusion. This is, of course, not true for OP, which does have a historical distinction between /s/ and /s^/. One thing I recall reading in a typology text (and the reason for the use of the language "distributed" as opposed to "apical") is that languages which distinguish /s/ from /s^/ always tend to distinguish an apical pronunciation (in which the articulator-site contact area is small) from a distributed pronunciation (in which the same area is large). If this is not true for OP, then OP would be a typological rarity, on the same level as certain Indo-Aryan languages with a three-way distinction among alveolar fricatives! On 9/25/06, Rory M Larson wrote: > > > Thanks, Bryan. I appreciate your comments, and your good advice on the > proper linguistic terms to use! > > Of course you are quite right to point out that the laminal /s/ is > dependent upon the part of the tongue that approaches the alveolar ridge, > not on what the tip is doing. You mention Dutch and Finnish as having > laminal /s/. Is it just these two languages, or is this an areal phenomenon > in northern Europe-- do you know? Also, you say that their laminal /s/ is > "dark", like cross between /s/ and /s^/. I think in Omaha it's actually > pretty sharp, and audibly very similar to English /s/. But that depends on > exactly where against the roof of the mouth you put the top of the tongue. > If what I seemed to work out with one speaker yesterday afternoon is > correct, both /s/ and /s^/ are laminal in Omaha. I find a laminal /s^/ a > little more awkward to produce than a laminal /s/, but it seems to work. If > I am doing it right, it seems to be something like German ch in ich, but > more forward, against the back of the alveolar ridge. > > The term "uvular" occurred to me after I sent the posting yesterday. It > seems to me like the /g^/ is made in about the same location as the Parisian > /r/, but mostly without the trill. > > So to make sure I've got the "gutterals" straight: > > laryngeal - Produced in the larynx, involving the vocal cords. Also > "glottal"? > > pharyngeal - Produced by pressure between the root of the tongue and > the top of the throat. > > uvular - Produced between the back of the tongue and tonsils? > Uvula? > > velar - Produced a little further forward, between back of tongue > and velum. > > palatal - Produced between the tongue and the hard palate. > > Is there a term for the /s^/ series? It's sort of front of palate, back of > alveolar ridge. Alveolo-palatal? > > Thanks again, > Rory > From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Tue Sep 26 01:47:52 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:47:52 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ These are pretty standard phonological symbols (in NetSiouan form) for Siouan usage. People do usually use theta and edh for interdentals and in linguistic usage some people make a point of writing pharyngeal symbols for the back series in Stoney. However, as you're discovering, the phonetic reality may stray somewhat from the norm for the symbol. For example, Teton [I think!] and Winnebago have fairly definitely uvular values for the "velar" series. The tendency of the s set to develop into interdentals (or labiodentals in Ofo) proably says something about the usual pronunciations of the s set. The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less alveolar are likely. Note that a fair number of American languages west of Siouan distinguish two s-sounds, one more alveolar and one more dental. I'm not clear on how laminality fits into this distinction. English speakers have a good deal of trouble with these distinctions because the two variants are both acoustically acceptable in English, and English speakers actually use a couple of different s sounds more or less at random, though consistently for particular speakers. Sometimes one variety or another is regarded as a speech defect or, going in the other direction, becomes a trademark. Humphrey Bogart is famous for a very retracted s/z pronunciation. (I believe I cribbed all of this from my memory of an article by Bill Bright on s-dot.) In Castillan Spanish and in Portuguese s is quite retracted. Castillian c and z are interdental or maybe it's really laminal. New World dialects generally conflate these two into an apical s/z set. Basque also has a three way contrast of s, s-dot, and s^, and I think Bob Rankin one told me that a three-way contrast was quite common in Mediaeval or Middle versions of European langauges, but has widely disappeared since then. I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. I forget his exact wording - the comment is in one of his manuscripts. If you look at the work of Fletcher and maybe Hamilton you'll notice that they write th for s in their transcriptions, and they worked extensively with the people of Francis LaFlesche's village. I suspect that other villages' pronunciations dominates modern usage and Dorsey's usage is probably based on what he encountered among the Ponca. LaFlesche used his Omaha scheme as the basis for his Osage scheme, and so c-cedilla appears in Osage, which either doesn't have that kind of s, or has one not in the form LaFlesche's phonetic key leads one to expect. Very likely it wasn't really an interdental. That just seemed like the best approximation of what it was. > We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., > which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. You'll find many of these marked with "turned s" and "turned c" in Dorsey's printed texts. Copies of these I've made for people often have that distinction suppressed as subphonemic, of course! > After some uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made > with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth. Or perhaps more critically, with the lamina or post-apical blade of the tongue approaching the upper teeth. Sometimes the apex end might touch the lower teeth, but it might not be the critical part of the gesture. I looked ahead to crib the word laminal from Bryan, of course, though Bob Rankin has also described some of this to me. I was probably asleep when David Rood went through it still earlier ... (my sincere apologies to everyone over the years for this problem of mine). > The difference between the Omaha [s] and the English [s] is hard to > detect by hearing. Yes - even knowing the stuff above I can't say that I was struck by it, so I'm plased to see you folsk looking into it so closely. I did try to determine whether s^/z^ were pronounced with lips rounded or not, but I don't recall my conclusions. Perhaps I never really got around to checking! I wondered about this because Bob Rankin had pointed out that these sounds are not rounded in some Dhegiha dialects. > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > > si 'foot' ( s.i 'seed' ( zi 'yellow' ( The "muted" form seems to be indifferently voiced. Typically the > voicing for the following vowel or n begins in the middle of the > fricative, so it starts out unvoiced and shifts to voiced in the middle > of producing it. More importantly, I think the traditional "voiceless" > version is marked by a greater forcefulness in pushing the air through > the gap. Producing a more breathy, sharp, or bright effect. I emphatically support your impression that the distinction between voiceless and voiced fricatives is more one of "brightness" or, as you put it, "sharpness" vs. mutedness. I think voicing per se tends to be a bit secondary to muting or non-sharping (less breathy friction?). In Osage I think that voicing may not enter into the definition of z/z^/g^ (or gh) as much even as in OP. I don't remember whether fricatives are more muted before n is Osage. Osage has many fewer sn/s^n sequences, since some of the ones in OP represent sR/s^R, which come out st/s^t/sc/s^c in Osage. The sn/s^n sequences shared by both languages come from *sr/s^r / _VN. The intermediate muted fricatives in OP before n are definitely somewhere in between the voiceless and voiced ones, and your early voicing (before the n) explanation makes perfect sense. I tend to put these intermediate forms with the voiceless or sharp ones, but this is somewhat arbitrary, since this is a context where voiceless and voiced or sharp and muted do not contrast. What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. > Finally, we come to our ever problematic x^/g^ sounds. These in fact to > not seem to be alternates in a single series. They are made at > different articulation points. [x^] is more forward, I think between > the top of the tongue and the back of the hard palate. [g^] is farther > back, I believe between the back of the tongue and the velum or tonsils > or something. This is wild - I had the same impression, but reversed! I though g^ was pretty much a velar (ach not ich) fricative, muted, more or less voiced, but that x was very bright, voiceless, but uvular fricative. I am in no position to quibble about which of us is right about position. You may be right. I definitely remember being puzzled about how to say what was different apart from the sharpness/mutedness. I wonder if the really critical feature isn't that sharpness vs. mutedness and the differences in position, or perceived position, whatever they are due to our trying to hear the distinction in the wrong terms. > The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: > > alveolo- > alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal > > forced s s^ x^ h > > muted s. s^. g^ > > voiced z z^ I think this is phonetically correct, barring my uncertainty about the actual position of x (you write x^). I don't think that the three way mutedness distinction is necessary in writing. The middle row can be merged with the top or bottom row as long as people know how to pronounce particular tokens. The traditional solution would be to write the muted forms with the voiceless symbols. In the same way we don't make a point of marking aspiration on ptk in English so we can leave it off in sp st sk. > Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another > symbol, say [x.]. I strongly recommend against this for two reasons: - g^ or gh (gamma) is the usual symbol for the phonemic element - the gh spelling (or something approximating gamma) was agreed upon independently by both the Ponca and Omahas spelling projects and there is nothing to be gained by flipflopping on this now I'd say, stick with x and gamma, and write gamma the way it has been. Just write better pronunciation guides. A third issue might be that pronunciation is not likely to be so uniform, as your relatively small sample suggests, and is even less likely to have been so the past. Moreover, it has undoubtedly changed over time. Dorsey may nor have been hearing exactly what we hear. Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., ghage' 'to cry' or gaghe vs. gaxe? bighoN vs. bixoN? Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or nuxe? From dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 26 03:24:25 2006 From: dvklinguist2003 at yahoo.com (David Kaufman) Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 20:24:25 -0700 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Just to chime in for a brief second -- > Note that a fair number of American languages west of Siouan distinguish two s-sounds, one more alveolar and one more dental. > Not sure how far west you were thinking, but I can say that Rumsen Ohlone (Penutian) apparently has a 3-way 's' distinction recorded by JP Harrington. Without taking time to go into too much detail, there's apparently the English-style alveolar 's', a retroflex 's' (which also exists in some Mayan languages), and the 'esh.' Mutsun, Rumsen's close cousin to the east, however, apparently only distinguished two (no retroflex). > In Castillan Spanish and in Portuguese s is quite retracted. > I believe in some dialects of Castilian the 's' is apical rather than alveolar, approaching more of a hissing 'sh' sound (which often happens in Greek dialects as well) though not quite 'esh'. I don't believe this is the case in standard Portuguese among speakers I've heard (although of course Portuguese does maintain the 'esh' that Spanish lost). Dave Koontz John E wrote: On Sun, 24 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ These are pretty standard phonological symbols (in NetSiouan form) for Siouan usage. People do usually use theta and edh for interdentals and in linguistic usage some people make a point of writing pharyngeal symbols for the back series in Stoney. However, as you're discovering, the phonetic reality may stray somewhat from the norm for the symbol. For example, Teton [I think!] and Winnebago have fairly definitely uvular values for the "velar" series. The tendency of the s set to develop into interdentals (or labiodentals in Ofo) proably says something about the usual pronunciations of the s set. The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less alveolar are likely. Note that a fair number of American languages west of Siouan distinguish two s-sounds, one more alveolar and one more dental. I'm not clear on how laminality fits into this distinction. English speakers have a good deal of trouble with these distinctions because the two variants are both acoustically acceptable in English, and English speakers actually use a couple of different s sounds more or less at random, though consistently for particular speakers. Sometimes one variety or another is regarded as a speech defect or, going in the other direction, becomes a trademark. Humphrey Bogart is famous for a very retracted s/z pronunciation. (I believe I cribbed all of this from my memory of an article by Bill Bright on s-dot.) In Castillan Spanish and in Portuguese s is quite retracted. Castillian c and z are interdental or maybe it's really laminal. New World dialects generally conflate these two into an apical s/z set. Basque also has a three way contrast of s, s-dot, and s^, and I think Bob Rankin one told me that a three-way contrast was quite common in Mediaeval or Middle versions of European langauges, but has widely disappeared since then. I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. I forget his exact wording - the comment is in one of his manuscripts. If you look at the work of Fletcher and maybe Hamilton you'll notice that they write th for s in their transcriptions, and they worked extensively with the people of Francis LaFlesche's village. I suspect that other villages' pronunciations dominates modern usage and Dorsey's usage is probably based on what he encountered among the Ponca. LaFlesche used his Omaha scheme as the basis for his Osage scheme, and so c-cedilla appears in Osage, which either doesn't have that kind of s, or has one not in the form LaFlesche's phonetic key leads one to expect. Very likely it wasn't really an interdental. That just seemed like the best approximation of what it was. > We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., > which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. You'll find many of these marked with "turned s" and "turned c" in Dorsey's printed texts. Copies of these I've made for people often have that distinction suppressed as subphonemic, of course! > After some uncertainty, it seemed everyone agreed that Omaha [s] is made > with the tip of the tongue against the lower front teeth. Or perhaps more critically, with the lamina or post-apical blade of the tongue approaching the upper teeth. Sometimes the apex end might touch the lower teeth, but it might not be the critical part of the gesture. I looked ahead to crib the word laminal from Bryan, of course, though Bob Rankin has also described some of this to me. I was probably asleep when David Rood went through it still earlier ... (my sincere apologies to everyone over the years for this problem of mine). > The difference between the Omaha [s] and the English [s] is hard to > detect by hearing. Yes - even knowing the stuff above I can't say that I was struck by it, so I'm plased to see you folsk looking into it so closely. I did try to determine whether s^/z^ were pronounced with lips rounded or not, but I don't recall my conclusions. Perhaps I never really got around to checking! I wondered about this because Bob Rankin had pointed out that these sounds are not rounded in some Dhegiha dialects. > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > > si 'foot' (> s.i 'seed' (> zi 'yellow' ( It's interesting that you should find muted s in *su words. 'Quail' is another one, I think, and one that Dorsey is very puzzled about writing, but I'm not sure about the turkey word. We can probably get you a list of *su/*zu words if you like. I'm not absolutely convinced that this is the same thing as the muting. But it is probably a reflex within the s of the *u. Perhaps the s is more rounded? > The "muted" form seems to be indifferently voiced. Typically the > voicing for the following vowel or n begins in the middle of the > fricative, so it starts out unvoiced and shifts to voiced in the middle > of producing it. More importantly, I think the traditional "voiceless" > version is marked by a greater forcefulness in pushing the air through > the gap. Producing a more breathy, sharp, or bright effect. I emphatically support your impression that the distinction between voiceless and voiced fricatives is more one of "brightness" or, as you put it, "sharpness" vs. mutedness. I think voicing per se tends to be a bit secondary to muting or non-sharping (less breathy friction?). In Osage I think that voicing may not enter into the definition of z/z^/g^ (or gh) as much even as in OP. I don't remember whether fricatives are more muted before n is Osage. Osage has many fewer sn/s^n sequences, since some of the ones in OP represent sR/s^R, which come out st/s^t/sc/s^c in Osage. The sn/s^n sequences shared by both languages come from *sr/s^r / _VN. The intermediate muted fricatives in OP before n are definitely somewhere in between the voiceless and voiced ones, and your early voicing (before the n) explanation makes perfect sense. I tend to put these intermediate forms with the voiceless or sharp ones, but this is somewhat arbitrary, since this is a context where voiceless and voiced or sharp and muted do not contrast. What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. > Finally, we come to our ever problematic x^/g^ sounds. These in fact to > not seem to be alternates in a single series. They are made at > different articulation points. [x^] is more forward, I think between > the top of the tongue and the back of the hard palate. [g^] is farther > back, I believe between the back of the tongue and the velum or tonsils > or something. This is wild - I had the same impression, but reversed! I though g^ was pretty much a velar (ach not ich) fricative, muted, more or less voiced, but that x was very bright, voiceless, but uvular fricative. I am in no position to quibble about which of us is right about position. You may be right. I definitely remember being puzzled about how to say what was different apart from the sharpness/mutedness. I wonder if the really critical feature isn't that sharpness vs. mutedness and the differences in position, or perceived position, whatever they are due to our trying to hear the distinction in the wrong terms. > The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: > > alveolo- > alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal > > forced s s^ x^ h > > muted s. s^. g^ > > voiced z z^ I think this is phonetically correct, barring my uncertainty about the actual position of x (you write x^). I don't think that the three way mutedness distinction is necessary in writing. The middle row can be merged with the top or bottom row as long as people know how to pronounce particular tokens. The traditional solution would be to write the muted forms with the voiceless symbols. In the same way we don't make a point of marking aspiration on ptk in English so we can leave it off in sp st sk. > Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another > symbol, say [x.]. I strongly recommend against this for two reasons: - g^ or gh (gamma) is the usual symbol for the phonemic element - the gh spelling (or something approximating gamma) was agreed upon independently by both the Ponca and Omahas spelling projects and there is nothing to be gained by flipflopping on this now I'd say, stick with x and gamma, and write gamma the way it has been. Just write better pronunciation guides. A third issue might be that pronunciation is not likely to be so uniform, as your relatively small sample suggests, and is even less likely to have been so the past. Moreover, it has undoubtedly changed over time. Dorsey may nor have been hearing exactly what we hear. Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., ghage' 'to cry' or gaghe vs. gaxe? bighoN vs. bixoN? Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or nuxe? --------------------------------- All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Wed Sep 27 19:29:46 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 14:29:46 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: These are interesting observations. It's not unexpected that people whose use of a native language is fairly fluent but who are, nonetheless, English-dominant, might begin hearing "sounds" rather than phonemes in the native language. This is fairly common, especially if a particular sound is allophonic in the native language but phonemic in English. It would take some experimentation as well as introspection to determine the status of "muted S" in Omaha. You might tape a speaker saying 'foot' and 'seed' a number of times (keeping track yourself of which is which) and then play them back to someone who wasn't in on the discussion and ask him/her to identify the words. If these are really distinct phonemes, they shoud get the words right 100 times out of 100. You could throw 'yellow' in a few times just to muddy the waters a bit. I do tend to believe that "muted S" is something other than a previously undiscovered Omaha phoneme. That said, however, it is still the case that we have some instances in which the Comparative Dictionary shows "irregular" sibilant sets, and the 'chicken' word you mention is one of them ('seed' and 'foot' are not). Normally Omaha /s/ matches Dakotan /s/ and /z/ matches /z/. The exceptional cognate sets that I have found are: OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') LA ziNtka 'bird' (but zic^a 'partridge') OM sattaN 'five' LA zaptaN 'five' OM siNga 'squirrel' LA zic^a 'squirrel' It is barely possible that we have missed something in the fricative sets. The above words ought to be checked in Omaha to see if they contain the "muted S" rather than the normal one. Wouldn't it be interesting if that were the case? Think of the mess it would make of "fricative ablaut". Dorsey heard the "muted" sounds, generally preceding a sonorant, and tended to call them "mediae". It's the ones preceding vowels that are interesting here. If you're interested in the sets of European sibilants that John was mentioning, the article to start with is probably "The Mediaeval Sibilants", reprinted in _Readings in Linguistics_ ed. by Martin Joos. The author talks about the ones in Romance and Germanic at length. Bob > In the past, we've roughly assumed a set of three oral fricative locations, > each of which may be voiced or unvoiced: > s s^ x^ > z z^ g^ > Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we > had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal > triplet of words in the s series: > si 'foot' ( s.i 'seed' ( zi 'yellow' ( Message-ID: Bryan wrote: > One thing I recall reading in a > typology text (and the reason for the use of the language > "distributed" as opposed to "apical") is that languages which > distinguish /s/ from /s^/ always tend to distinguish an apical > pronunciation (in which the articulator-site contact area is small) > from a distributed pronunciation (in which the same area is large). If > this is not true for OP, then OP would be a typological rarity, on the > same level as certain Indo-Aryan languages with a three-way > distinction among alveolar fricatives! So does this mean that in English /s/ is "apical" and /s^/ is "distributed"? I think I'd agree that the articulator-site contact area for /s/ is small, and for /s^/ is large, in the way I form them. But doesn't the term "apical" refer to the tip of something, rather than the size of the articulator-site contact area? I assumed it meant a sound made with the tip of the tongue. For me, both /s/ and /s^/ are made with the tip or leading edge of the tongue, or maybe the top of the leading margin for /s/. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Sep 28 03:09:44 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:09:44 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John Koontz wrote: > The tendency of the s set to develop into interdentals (or labiodentals in > Ofo) proably says something about the usual pronunciations of the s set. > The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less > alveolar are likely. I'm confused by what you mean by "apical" here. Do you mean the tip of the palate ahead of the alveolar ridge? I do see how the laminar pronunciation would favor the interdentalization of the s, though. If the tip just swings up a little, it starts coming up against the upper front teeth to produce the thorn sound. > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient > coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his > pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions > that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? >> We've also been aware that s and s^ have "muted" alternates s. and s^., >> which occur regularly before n, and sometimes elsewhere as well. > > You'll find many of these marked with "turned s" and "turned c" in > Dorsey's printed texts. Copies of these I've made for people often have > that distinction suppressed as subphonemic, of course! Yes. The "turned s" is a little harder to see than the "turned c". >> Second, the "muted" versions of s and s^ seem to be more widespread than we >> had supposed. According to one of our speakers, we seem to have a minimal >> triplet of words in the s series: >> >> si 'foot' (> s.i 'seed' (> zi 'yellow' ( > It's interesting that you should find muted s in *su words. 'Quail' is > another one, I think, and one that Dorsey is very puzzled about writing, > but I'm not sure about the turkey word. We can probably get you a list of > *su/*zu words if you like. I'm not absolutely convinced that this is the > same thing as the muting. But it is probably a reflex within the s of the > *u. Perhaps the s is more rounded? I'd be glad to get a list of *su/*zu words. I'm not sure it's restricted to those-- we seemed to be getting quite a bunch of them the other week. But it would certainly be something to test. I'll try to watch out for lip-rounding too. I'm also not sure that the only difference between 'foot' and 'seed' is the muting, but it seemed to be one of them. We worked on these words for a while with one speaker, in the presence of the other two. The speaker insisted that the two were distinct. Her initial explanation was that the si of 'foot' was shorter, though perhaps not in the sense that the vowel in the 'seed' word was long. My impression of her pronunciation agreed. It seemed to me that si, 'foot' was delivered in a quick burst of force, which quickly disappeared. (Taking Japanese, I've noticed that when they want to emphasize a word, say, to explain it to a class, they cut off the final vowel sharply at the height of its career with a glottal closure in a way that in English would only be done in situations of military strutting, like the "p" in "Hup!". The end of si, 'foot', was almost, but not quite, this sudden. It was more like a rapidly fading vowel being put out of its misery.) When she pronounced s.i, 'seed', the breath was not slammed through it like that; the s seemed to be of the muted type, and the vowel trailed off in a more relaxed way. Also, there seemed to be a qualitative difference in the vowel to me. In si, 'foot', the vowel was closer to the /i/ sound in "deed". In s.i, 'seed', it seemed to approach the /I/ sound in "did". I didn't notice any lip rounding in either case. > What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar > quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. You mean before dh, right? I've been wondering about that, too. I seem to recall Bryan pointing out to me a few months ago that it was in fact the muted form before dh, at least for certain words. I'll have to dig up his posting again. >> The complete Omaha fricative set, as I'm conceiving it now, is as follows: >> >> alveolo- >> alveolar palatal palatal velar glottal >> >> forced s s^ x^ h >> >> muted s. s^. g^ >> >> voiced z z^ > > I think this is phonetically correct, barring my uncertainty about the > actual position of x (you write x^). I don't think that the three way > mutedness distinction is necessary in writing. The middle row can be > merged with the top or bottom row as long as people know how to pronounce > particular tokens. The traditional solution would be to write the muted > forms with the voiceless symbols. In the same way we don't make a point > of marking aspiration on ptk in English so we can leave it off in sp st > sk. That's what I've been assuming up until now too, supposing that the muted s. and s^. forms occur only before n, or in certain other nasal contexts where their manifestation is phonologically constrained. But if they are popping up arbitrarily, then they do need to be distinguished. >> Looking at it this way, the g^ should probably be replaced by another >> symbol, say [x.]. > > I strongly recommend against this for two reasons: > > - g^ or gh (gamma) is the usual symbol for the phonemic element > > - the gh spelling (or something approximating gamma) was agreed upon > independently by both the Ponca and Omahas spelling projects and there is > nothing to be gained by flipflopping on this now > > I'd say, stick with x and gamma, and write gamma the way it has been. > Just write better pronunciation guides. Hmm. I posed this question to the list a few months ago, and the general opinion on orthography seemed to be indifferent. This is fine for the Siouanist list, though I am inclined to favor marking the x as x^, simply to make sure we really intend it to mean the sharp and forceful form. The x has been used for either or both velar fricatives so much in Omaha that I really don't trust anything written with x as necessarily being distinctive. For Macy, the issue is touchy. They have some investment in the old La Flesche system, and there could be fallout from trying to revise it. With a push, they might accept using gh for the mute form, though that would be painful for the very common 'make'/'do' verb, which would then have to be written gaghe instead of gaxe. Alternatively, I think we got a green light in the context of the discussion we had this summer to adopt my suggestion of diacritics for the x's: x-hacek for the sharp one and x-underdot for the muted one. This would have the advantage of retaining the x for both, which should keep orthographic conservatives happy, while preserving the phonological distinction, which should satisfy phonologic conservatives. (Whether modern computer technology is yet capable of adding diacritics to x remains undetermined.) What are these Ponca and Omaha spelling projects? Who all has been included? > Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., > > ghage' 'to cry' > > or gaghe vs. gaxe? > bighoN vs. bixoN? > > Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or > nuxe? ghage' has been our favorite example of a leading gh- word. wax^e is a standard x^ word. The 'make'/'do' verb is understood to have gh. I think Mark has elicited 'ice', but I don't recall what he found it to be. When you ask about "gaghe vs. gaxe?", "bighoN vs. bixoN?", are these separate words, or are you just asking which way we hear them? If they are separate words, could you remind me of their respective meanings? Thanks for your comments! Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From linguista at gmail.com Thu Sep 28 06:14:38 2006 From: linguista at gmail.com (Bryan Gordon) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 01:14:38 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > So does this mean that in English /s/ is "apical" and /s^/ is > "distributed"? I think I'd agree that the articulator-site contact area for > /s/ is small, and for /s^/ is large, in the way I form them. But doesn't > the term "apical" refer to the tip of something, rather than the size of the > articulator-site contact area? I assumed it meant a sound made with the tip > of the tongue. For me, both /s/ and /s^/ are made with the tip or leading > edge of the tongue, or maybe the top of the leading margin for /s/. > My impression is that /s^/ in English at least (and probably most European languages) is almost never apical. A pronunciation with the tip of the tongue would cause the fricative surface to be too small for a "distributed" specification. Rather, /s^/ for me at least seems to be pronounced significantly behind the tip of the tongue. If I attempt to pronounce an apical /s/ in the same site as /s^/, what I get is a retroflex. From goodtracks at peoplepc.com Thu Sep 28 13:56:42 2006 From: goodtracks at peoplepc.com (goodtracks at peoplepc.com) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 08:56:42 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: Rory: Mary Gale LaFlesche, mother of Francis LaF, was raised primarily by her Ioway-Otoe mother, ?iGunaMi, who kept regular contact with both village groups. As such, her first language was IO, and there is no information as to which dialect dominated Mary's or her mother's speech. However, in as much as Mary's grandfather was Ioway Leader ("chief") WajinWasje) and her Otoe grandmother, Thunder Eagle Woman, in turn she was the daughter of an Otoe Leader ("chief") and an Omaha mother. The grandparents lived in the area of Bellevue, NE. Mary's father, Dr. Gale, an Army surgeon played no role in her life. IO political and social mores of the day would suggest that Mary's and her Mother's speech would tend towards Ioway in dialect. When she was about pre-adolescence or earlier, her step-father, a French (speaking) Fur trader, Peter Sarpy (a not very French sounding name) with the American Fur Company sent Mary to a Saint Louis French school where she learned to speak French. No doubt, Mary had gained some familiarity with Omaha from the activity of the Trading Post. However, when she married Joseph LaFlesche, who was equally bilingual in Omaha and French, Omaha became her dominant language, and the first language of all her children. Neither Mary nor Joseph spoke or understood English. Perhaps the above will provide some insight on possible language influence of Mary on her son Francis's Omaha speech patterns reflected in his written works. Jimm ----- Original Message ----- From: Rory M Larson To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 10:09 PM Subject: Re: Omaha fricative set John Koontz wrote: > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient > coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his > pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions > that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Sep 28 14:12:06 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:12:06 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') ?? The only 'chicken' terms I've heard of are waz^iN'gaz^ide ("red bird", Dorsey) and waz^iN'ga ("bird", modern Omaha). On the other hand, to my knowledge, 'turkey' is zizi'kka, not zizi'ga. Do you know where these terms were found? Otherwise, thanks for your suggestions! I'll try to follow up on them. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 14:51:19 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 09:51:19 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: This sort of question is what that paper on "The Mediaeval Sibilants" is about. Apical S's were fairly widespread in Europe. They still appear in Greek, Basque, Castilian, Aragonese and Catalan (all but Greek in a narrow geographical area). I can't remember about Leonese or Asturias, but I don't think so. In English either apical or laminal pronunciation is accepted. John mentioned Humphrey Bogart's S. Jimmy Stewart is another apical speaker and the pronunciation is characteristic of central Pennsylvania English, since I have it sometimes as well. "Features" can be looked at two ways. You can ask whether phoneme X is realtively "distributed" with respect to phoneme (or phonological series) Y, or you can try to set some sort of inflexible physiological parameters for "distributed", like dyed-in-the-wool phoneticians try to do. The latter almost always encounter failure in one or another language. In phonology (i.e., linguistics) features are usually "relative" in the Jakobsonian sense. In Speech departments, they attempt the phonetic definitions. So, in English /s/ is not apical or laminal with respect to any other variety of S (since English only has one phoneme /s/). English /s/ IS "non-distributed" with respect to /theta/, which IS "distributed". It then differs from English /s^/ by a different feature. The phonetic and phonological definitions of distinctive features can be a little confusing, because different specialists approach the topic with completely different assumptions/definitions. > > So does this mean that in English /s/ is "apical" and /s^/ is > > "distributed"? > My impression is that /s^/ in English at least (and probably most European languages) is almost never apical. A pronunciation with the tip of the tongue would cause the fricative surface to be too small for a "distributed" specification. Rather, /s^/ for me at least seems to be pronounced significantly behind the tip of the tongue. If I attempt to pronounce an apical /s/ in the same site as /s^/, what I get is a retroflex. From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 15:10:44 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:10:44 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: > . . . When she pronounced s.i, 'seed', the breath was not slammed through it like that; the s seemed to be of the muted type, and the vowel trailed off in a more relaxed way. Also, there seemed to be a qualitative difference in the vowel to me. In si, 'foot', the vowel was closer to the /i/ sound in "deed". In s.i, 'seed', it seemed to approach the /I/ sound in "did". > That's what I've been assuming up until now too, supposing that the muted s. and s^. forms occur only before n, or in certain other nasal contexts where their manifestation is phonologically constrained. But if they are popping up arbitrarily, then they do need to be distinguished. I think you'll find that pretty quickly you can get them to "hear" distinctions in Omaha among all the vowels of English. The I of "bit" will be distinct from the I of "beat", etc. Unaccented A or nasal A will sound like the A of "sofa" if you point it out to them. And the distributions may not have the restrictions that they have in English. Dorsey wrote these distinctions, but unfortunately they don't seem to correlate with anything phonemic. Omaha has reached the stage of "personal dialects", and introspection will probably just provide confusion. I'd really suggest running the experiments with recordings using speakers who haven't thought about the discussion to find out whether you have something real or not. I doubt there's anything there, but I could be surprised. For /bixaN/ vs. /bighaN/ try 'to sit on and break' and 'to blow on a fire to start it'. Those are minimal pairs in Kaw, although Kaw appears to have a /aN/ vs. /oN/ distinction too. Bob From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 15:19:56 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:19:56 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: That would mean "cardinal" in Kaw! All these terms come from earlier ones that referred to birds that are native to North America. Try some related meaning for [sikka]. It's 'chicken' nowadays in all the other Dhegiha dialects (QU, KS, OS). Let me check my notes from the '70's and Dick Carter's from about the same time. It looks as though they've gotten two roots mixed here. They're quite distinct in Dakota and most other languages. One is *sit-ka and the other is *zi-ka (earlier *si-ka). the /tk/ cluster gives Dhegiha /kk/ (Osage hk). Bob ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson Sent: Thu 9/28/2006 9:12 AM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: RE: Omaha fricative set > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') ?? The only 'chicken' terms I've heard of are waz^iN'gaz^ide ("red bird", Dorsey) and waz^iN'ga ("bird", modern Omaha). On the other hand, to my knowledge, 'turkey' is zizi'kka, not zizi'ga. Do you know where these terms were found? Otherwise, thanks for your suggestions! I'll try to follow up on them. Rory From rankin at ku.edu Thu Sep 28 15:38:28 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:38:28 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: You're right! I copied the Kaw form by mistake. Kaw does have /ziziga/; Omaha /zizikka/. But Omaha does have /zaNziga/ 'flicker', with the etymologically correct form of the root. I guess /zizikka/ is what happened to common Dhegiha *sihka in Omaha. These various largish bird terms don't seem to really be cognate across the plains Siouan languages. Dakotan /ziNtka-/ not only has the z/s problem compared with Dhegiha, but it also has the nasal vowel and the /tk/ cluster. Superficially, the /tk/ looks like it should match Dhegiha /kk/ or /hk/, but, in fact, it doesn't. The *tk cluster actually metathesizes in Dhegiha to /kt/, with means that 'chicken' should really be /sitta/, not /sikka/. So these are all borrowings and diffused words. Unfortunately this reduces the usefullness of those three sets of apparent z/s correspondences I posted. 'Five' is still a mystery though. Bob > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') ?? The only 'chicken' terms I've heard of are waz^iN'gaz^ide ("red bird", Dorsey) and waz^iN'ga ("bird", modern Omaha). On the other hand, to my knowledge, 'turkey' is zizi'kka, not zizi'ga. Do you know where these terms were found? Otherwise, thanks for your suggestions! I'll try to follow up on them. Rory From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Thu Sep 28 16:25:55 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 11:25:55 -0500 Subject: POTENTIAL SPAM: Re: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: <001101c6e306$1221c5f0$3b01133f@JIMM> Message-ID: Thanks, Jimm! I should think that would explain the La Flesche family's tendency toward interdentalization of /s/ and /z/. Rory Sent by: To owner-siouan at list s.colorado.edu cc Subject 09/28/2006 08:56 Re: Omaha fricative set AM Please respond to siouan at lists.colo rado.edu Rory: Mary Gale LaFlesche, mother of Francis LaF, was raised primarily by her Ioway-Otoe mother, ?iGunaMi, who kept regular contact with both village groups. As such, her first language was IO, and there is no information as to which dialect dominated Mary's or her mother's speech. However, in as much as Mary's grandfather was Ioway Leader ("chief") WajinWasje) and her Otoe grandmother, Thunder Eagle Woman, in turn she was the daughter of an Otoe Leader ("chief") and an Omaha mother. The grandparents lived in the area of Bellevue, NE. Mary's father, Dr. Gale, an Army surgeon played no role in her life. IO political and social mores of the day would suggest that Mary's and her Mother's speech would tend towards Ioway in dialect. When she was about pre-adolescence or earlier, her step-father, a French (speaking) Fur trader, Peter Sarpy (a not very French sounding name) with the American Fur Company sent Mary to a Saint Louis French school where she learned to speak French. No doubt, Mary had gained some familiarity with Omaha from the activity of the Trading Post. However, when she married Joseph LaFlesche, who was equally bilingual in Omaha and French, Omaha became her dominant language, and the first language of all her children. Neither Mary nor Joseph spoke or understood English. Perhaps the above will provide some insight on possible language influence of Mary on her son Francis's Omaha speech patterns reflected in his written works. Jimm ----- Original Message ----- From: Rory M Larson To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 10:09 PM Subject: Re: Omaha fricative set John Koontz wrote: > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, and failing a convenient > coresponding voiced symbol he used the same for z, too. He prized his > pronunciation of s/z and used symbols to insist on it. Dorsey mentions > that members of the LaFlesche family had what ammounted to a lisp. Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: graycol.gif Type: image/gif Size: 105 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: pic01670.gif Type: image/gif Size: 1255 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: ecblank.gif Type: image/gif Size: 45 bytes Desc: not available URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Sep 29 01:31:31 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 19:31:31 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > I'm confused by what you mean by "apical" here. Do you mean the tip of the > palate ahead of the alveolar ridge? Apical refers to the tongue tip. > > I'm pretty sure that something like an extreme laminality or apicality > > explains the LaFlesche use of c-cedilla for s, ... > Wasn't a mother or grandmother of that family an Otoe? Yes, however, I think the evidence suggests it was not just the LaFlesche family using theta-like pronunciation. > Yes. The "turned s" is a little harder to see than the "turned c". Much like telling a turned P from a d! > I'd be glad to get a list of *su/*zu words. I'm not sure it's restricted > to those-- we seemed to be getting quite a bunch of them the other week. > But it would certainly be something to test. I'll try to watch out for > lip-rounding too. OK. I'll see what I can find. > I'm also not sure that the only difference between 'foot' and 'seed' is the > muting, but it seemed to be one of them. We worked on these words for a > while with one speaker, in the presence of the other two. The speaker > insisted that the two were distinct. ... Bob's explained the usual procedure for trying to resolve issues like this. > Her initial explanation was that the si of 'foot' was shorter, though > perhaps not in the sense that the vowel in the 'seed' word was long. I suppose one way to test this would be to look at the accentual pattern, perhaps in compounds, if they occur, or with certain enclitics like =di(thaN) and =tta(thaN), if they can co-occur. I'm not sure this would work, however. As far as compounds for 'foot', sippa occurs to me, and sigdhe. I don't remember anything with 'seed' off hand. It might be possible to come up with a verb (phrase) that took both as an unmodified object, perhaps 'always stepping on' or something like that. (Aside: I've wondered about tests like this with the tta- and tte- compounds, which seem to accent somewhat unexpectedly in print.) Another approach is to look at the length of the forms within a standard frame using sonograms. It could be that there is some sort of different final treatment for the two words, though that would assume that ...CV words are actually two different types ...CVx and ...CVy and nobody has ever noticed it. That would seem like grasping at straws except that we no that -h is lost pretty widely, but did once exist. One might get different treatments for *CV# (CV?) and *CVh(e) (CV(h)). Or there might be two different accentual patterns for monosyllables, also not previously noted, but perhaps associated with underlying length (or perhaps even surface length). Again this only seems worth suggesting because we have problems with accentuation in these languages. I'm more inclined to suspect *su vs. *si, but who knows. > like the "p" in "Hup!". Essentially hu?. > The end of si, 'foot', was almost, but not quite, this sudden. It was > more like a rapidly fading vowel being put out of its misery.) When she > pronounced s.i, 'seed', the breath was not slammed through it like that; > the s seemed to be of the muted type, and the vowel trailed off in a > more relaxed way. On this argument, words with -kka would tend to follow whatever pattern was associated with *Vh-, since -kka is explained as *-h-ka. In other words, one reflex of -h is that adding *-ka as a suffix produces -kka in Dhegiha, -kha in Dakotan, and in Winnebago you have -ke without loss of final -e. > Also, there seemed to be a qualitative difference in the vowel to me. > In si, 'foot', the vowel was closer to the /i/ sound in "deed". In s.i, > 'seed', it seemed to approach the /I/ sound in "did". I didn't notice > any lip rounding in either case. Maybe one might expect I for */ih/. I've noticed that ChV sequences have V more like "lax" vowels in English. > > What about x before dh? I don't think Dorsey pointed to any peculiar > > quality here, but logically x should be muted before gh. > > You mean before dh, right? Yes the second time I typed dh and gh came out some how. > I've been wondering about that, too. I seem to recall Bryan pointing > out to me a few months ago that it was in fact the muted form before dh, > at least for certain words. I'll have to dig up his posting again. I ask because the muted sn and s^n clusters are from *sr and *s^r. In those contexts *r > *R, which appears as n in OP. But *xr remains *xr and appears as xdh. The same thing happens in Osage, but *R is t or c (before e and i), and so the effect is a bit more subtle. This shift of *Sr to *SR also occurs in Dakotan, but there it also affects *xr, which is *xR. In Ioway-Otoe and Winnebago, there's no shift of r to R or perhaps it would be better to say that *r and *R are indistinguishable. > That's what I've been assuming up until now too, supposing that the muted > s. and s^. forms occur only before n, or in certain other nasal contexts > where their manifestation is phonologically constrained. But if they are > popping up arbitrarily, then they do need to be distinguished. Maybe - but I'm not fully convinced of the s(mute)V examples. They're very limited in distribution, and before n we only find s(mute). It's a bit like the cases in Teton of phV vs. pxV. I think that's usually explained as individual wavering between two minor dialect treatments. > Hmm. I posed this question to the list a few months ago, and the general > opinion on orthography seemed to be indifferent. Well, I remember being too busy to say anything at the time. The less fiddling with the existing "popular" schemes the better, I think. It should only be done where it is absolutely necessary. > This is fine for the Siouanist list, though I am inclined to favor marking > the x as x^, simply to make sure we really intend it to mean the sharp and > forceful form. The x has been used for either or both velar fricatives so > much in Omaha that I really don't trust anything written with x as > necessarily being distinctive. There's some point to that, but by the same logic you should carefully write tt vs. tH (or th), and not t vs. tH (or th), and so on. But again that tramples on a carefully arranged compromised that appeals strongly to Omahas and Poncas. I'm inclined not to mess with it. > For Macy, the issue is touchy. They have some investment in the old La > Flesche system, and there could be fallout from trying to revise it. With > a push, they might accept using gh for the mute form, though that would be > painful for the very common 'make'/'do' verb, which would then have to be > written gaghe instead of gaxe. But the same logic applies to writing xitha as x^itha. > What are these Ponca and Omaha spelling projects? Who all has been > included? I defer to Kathy and Ardis, my primary sources on them. I don't claim that they were produced by majorities or official committees. But both seemed to have some tentative agreeableness and recognition. I will have to say that if the results of those projects aren't more or less sacrosanct, and are subject to what are arbuably arbitrary adjustments to taste as well as necessary linguistic adjustment, then, to avoid getting into the situation of Dakota, where each author is a rule unto themself, and to escape the impossible situation of trying to meet with conflicting popular systems, I will probably revert to "Siouanist usage." There's no point in trying to use a standard popular orthography if there isn't one. The main virtue of popular systems is popularity. If they are simple personal variations, then "Standard Siouanist" usage has at least the virtue of being predictable to linguists given the understanding of the phonology. Of course, if "everybody" (whoever that is) does now or ultimately agrees on one system or at most two very similar ones (one each for Omaha and Ponca), I can see getting in line with that. > > Have you looked at the famous initial gh/medial x words, e.g., > > > > ghage' 'to cry' > > > > or gaghe vs. gaxe? > > bighoN vs. bixoN? > > > > Do you hear waxe 'whiteman' as waxe or waghe? How about 'ice'? Nughe or > > nuxe? > > ghage' has been our favorite example of a leading gh- word. wax^e is a > standard x^ word. The 'make'/'do' verb is understood to have gh. I think > Mark has elicited 'ice', but I don't recall what he found it to be. > > When you ask about "gaghe vs. gaxe?", "bighoN vs. bixoN?", are these > separate words, or are you just asking which way we hear them? If they are > separate words, could you remind me of their respective meanings? As I recollect it, gaghe is 'to make' and gaxe is 'branch', perhaps only in the context of a riverine system. There's a form for 'comb' that is somewhat similar that's not coming to me. 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? From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 29 01:34:46 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:34:46 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Bob wrote: > You're right! I copied the Kaw form by mistake. Kaw does have /ziziga/; Omaha /zizikka/. Is the Kaw reflex of common Dhegiha preaspirates also hp/ht/hk, as in Osage? > But Omaha does have /zaNziga/ 'flicker', with the etymologically correct form of the root. I guess /zizikka/ is what happened to common Dhegiha *sihka in Omaha. These various largish bird terms don't seem to really be cognate across the plains Siouan languages. Dakotan /ziNtka-/ not only has the z/s problem compared with Dhegiha, but it also has the nasal vowel and the /tk/ cluster. Superficially, the /tk/ looks like it should match Dhegiha /kk/ or /hk/, but, in fact, it doesn't. The *tk cluster actually metathesizes in Dhegiha to /kt/, with means that 'chicken' should really be /sitta/, not /sikka/. John mentioned before that in stop clusters, the second element usually won, except when the first element was t, which usually took over in any case. Is this a more sophisticated explanation of that observation? I.e., MVS *tk regularly -> Early Dh. *kt -> Later Dh. *ht ? Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? > So these are all borrowings and diffused words. Unfortunately this reduces the usefullness of those three sets of apparent z/s correspondences I posted. 'Five' is still a mystery though. What about the 'squirrel' term? Would that still be good? But if borrowing/diffusion can explain the 'chicken' term, I would think that a standard number term would be even easier, as a tool for trade between groups. The *s/z/aptaN term isn't even common to Siouan outside of MVS, is it? Maybe these problematic s/z terms all date to a period shortly after the spread of MVS, after significant differences in pronunciation had developed between dialects, but while they were still pretty well mutually comprehensible, and while the speakers still recognized a common ethnicity. Do we have any others? (Trade terms? Hunting small animals? Spread of bow and arrow?) Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From John.Koontz at colorado.edu Fri Sep 29 02:08:40 2006 From: John.Koontz at colorado.edu (Koontz John E) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 20:08:40 -0600 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Rory M Larson wrote: > Is the Kaw reflex of common Dhegiha preaspirates also hp/ht/hk, as in > Osage? I think preaspiration as opposed to length and tenseness is usually associated only with Osage in terms of modern attested phonetics. However, the forms that can't be tied to stop-stop clusters in Mississippi Valley are generally reconstructed as *hC preaspirates in Proto-Mississippi Valley and thus in Proto-Dhegiha. These are the forms in the Dakotan Ch : Dhegiha CC : IO C(h) : Winnebago C / __V sets, like Da tha : OP tta : IO t(h)a : Wi taa vs. (a cluster set) Da pte : OP tte : IO c^(h)e : Wi c^ee > John mentioned before that in stop clusters, the second element usually > won, except when the first element was t, which usually took over in any > case. Is this a more sophisticated explanation of that observation? Essentially yes. My explanation along those lines was more in the line of classifying results. Bob's approach attempts to explain how tk and kt both become tt in phonetic terms. The inspiration and justification for this analysis is the treatment of *tk in Ioway-Otoe vs. Winnebago, I believe. In 'bow', for example, I seem to recall that IO has maN(aN)hdu where Wi has maNaNc^gu, presumably both from something like *maNaNtku. Something similar happens - independently - to *tk in Stoney. > I.e., MVS *tk regularly -> Early Dh. *kt -> Later Dh. *ht ? That's the idea. > Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? Not off the top of my head, but I think are some. > > So these are all borrowings and diffused words. Unfortunately this > > reduces the usefullness of those three sets of apparent z/s > > correspondences I posted. 'Five' is still a mystery though. I tend to suspect that 'five' might not also involve borrowings and diffusion, even within Siouan. I remember helping someone a while back with terms for some aquatic and/or tuberous plants and discovering that they were rife with this same kind of irregularity. I think the forms mostly involved (p)Se/i(N). > What about the 'squirrel' term? Would that still be good? I thought 'squirrel' terms were squirrely by definition. > But if borrowing/diffusion can explain the 'chicken' term, I would think > that a standard number term would be even easier, as a tool for trade > between groups. The *s/z/aptaN term isn't even common to Siouan outside of > MVS, is it? I tend to agree. The relative stability of numerals in Indo-European led to an early impression that they were basic, but I think consulting additional data tends to suggest that they are "cultural." > Maybe these problematic s/z terms ... Hu Matthews must be chuckling sympathetically right about now. I think the reference is Matthews 1970 in IJAL. > all date to a period shortly after the spread of MVS, after significant > differences in pronunciation had developed between dialects, but while > they were still pretty well mutually comprehensible, and while the > speakers still recognized a common ethnicity. It's probably worth pointing out that only Mississippi Valley distinguishes voicing or sharp/muted oppositions in fricatives at all, which is a large part of what Matthews was wrestling with. > Do we have any others? (Trade terms? Hunting small animals? Spread of > bow and arrow?) The 'bow' terms are perhaps trade terms, since they seem to be of Algonquian origin. Terms for horticultural items are also sometimes rather problematic, including particularly 'tobacco'. We got into 'cat' briefly a while back (for the nth time). One of the things you gradually recognize in dealing with Proto-Siouan is that a number of common sets contain small irregularities that we have gotten used to ignoring over the years. I mean irregularities that can't be accounted for in terms of morphological context, obvious analogies, etc. From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 29 02:29:31 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 21:29:31 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') > LA ziNtka 'bird' (but zic^a 'partridge') > > OM siNga 'squirrel' > LA zic^a 'squirrel' After sending out that last message, I took another look at those sets. There isn't really any consistent difference between a squirrel and a largish bird, is there? By the 'bird' set, we'd have to allow a variably pronounced term *[s/z]i[N][t/?], followed, perhaps, by an animate classifier *-ka. The 'squirrel' set fits into the same range. In Lakhota, 'squirrel' and 'partridge' even seem to be pronounced the same. I wonder if the semantics, at one time, could have ranged to a disparaging "small prey animal, obtainable with a bow and arrow in the woods in winter"? Even if there were originally separate words that sounded similar, say, ziNt- 'bird' vs. si 'squirrel', a semantic and phonetic convergence like that could account for all that scrambling. Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu Fri Sep 29 04:04:29 2006 From: rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu (Rory M Larson) Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:04:29 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set In-Reply-To: Message-ID: John Koontz wrote: > The laminal pronunciation you mention or anything more apical and less > alveolar are likely. >> I'm confused by what you mean by "apical" here. Do you mean the tip of the >> palate ahead of the alveolar ridge? > > 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. > The less > fiddling with the existing "popular" schemes the better, I think. It > should only be done where it is absolutely necessary. The projects we're working on (textbook and eventually revised dictionary) should be as linguistically well-founded as possible, but since they are intended largely for the Omaha community, the legacy "popular" scheme needs to be treated with respect. That's the balancing act here. It isn't just about the linguists, but their concerns are important, as well as the Omaha community's. That's why I asked the Siouanists for advice. >> This is fine for the Siouanist list, though I am inclined to favor marking >> the x as x^, simply to make sure we really intend it to mean the sharp and >> forceful form. The x has been used for either or both velar fricatives so >> much in Omaha that I really don't trust anything written with x as >> necessarily being distinctive. > > There's some point to that, but by the same logic you should carefully > write tt vs. tH (or th), and not t vs. tH (or th), and so on. But again > that tramples on a carefully arranged compromised that appeals strongly to > Omahas and Poncas. I'm inclined not to mess with it. 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. 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. I know I don't have much support for this view at this end, and I don't know how the final copy will go down, but I do feel strongly about this, and I'm inclined to push for unambiguious marking both of the voiceless stops and of the velar fricatives. >> For Macy, the issue is touchy. They have some investment in the old La >> Flesche system, and there could be fallout from trying to revise it. With >> a push, they might accept using gh for the mute form, though that would be >> painful for the very common 'make'/'do' verb, which would then have to be >> written gaghe instead of gaxe. > > But the same logic applies to writing xitha as x^itha. No. In that case, you've still got an x, and people who want to see it that way can simply ignore the diacritic. The actual spelling doesn't have to change. This is just like adding accent marks to Greek, or macrons to Latin, or vowel points to Hebrew. The traditional spelling is still there, nobody who is used to the old scheme is forced to use the diacritics, everything written in the original scheme is still valid, and at the same time we add a convention that preserves known phonological features that the old scheme doesn't distinguish. It starts out as a teaching and reference aid for people learning Omaha as a second language, and it may or may not spread beyond that arena. > As I recollect it, gaghe is 'to make' and gaxe is 'branch', perhaps only > in the context of a riverine system. You mean a branch of a river, not the branch of a tree growing by a river, right? :) > There's a form for 'comb' that is > somewhat similar that's not coming to me. Would that be gahe' ? (I'm not sure if we ever got the pronunciation of this word pinned down.) > 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! Rory -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rankin at ku.edu Fri Sep 29 17:10:31 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:10:31 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: > You're right! I copied the Kaw form by mistake. Kaw does have /ziziga/; Omaha /zizikka/. >Is the Kaw reflex of common Dhegiha preaspirates also hp/ht/hk, as in Osage? No, those are normally [pp, tt, kk] in Kaw, as in Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw. So 'turkey' has to have been *zizika, with the simple /k/ that voices in Kaw, Omaha and Ponca. This matches the Dakotan cognate and leaves the Omaha /kk/ a bit of a mystery. I assume it comes from "contamination" from that older term that means 'chicken' in the rest of Dhegiha. > But Omaha does have /zaNziga/ 'flicker', with the etymologically correct form of the root. I guess /zizikka/ is what happened to common Dhegiha *sihka in Omaha. These various largish bird terms don't seem to really be cognate across the plains Siouan languages. Dakotan /ziNtka-/ not only has the z/s problem compared with Dhegiha, but it also has the nasal vowel and the /tk/ cluster. Superficially, the /tk/ looks like it should match Dhegiha /kk/ or /hk/, but, in fact, it doesn't. The *tk cluster actually metathesizes in Dhegiha to /kt/, with means that 'chicken' should really be /sitta/, not /sikka/. > John mentioned before that in stop clusters, the second element usually won, except when the first element was t, which usually took over in any case. Is this a more sophisticated explanation of that observation? 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 I.e., MVS *tk regularly -> Early Dh. *kt -> Later Dh. *ht ? Does MVS *tp do the same thing? Can you offer any example words? I think there's some tp/kp variation. Both give Dhegiha /pp/ though, as in 'evening'. Dakota has vairable potpaNka and potkaNka 'cranberry' (Riggs dict.) One decent example seems to be: Dakota ka-tpa 'to strike' Omaha naN-tte 'to kick' Kaw wa-cce 'count coup' Quapaw naN-tte 'kick' They have different prefixes, but the roots match and suggest that tp > pt > tt. There may be other cases but I'd have to dig through the file. What about the 'squirrel' term? Would that still be good? Yes, I think so. It's true that animal names get around a lot geographically speaking, but if there's a problem with it, it would be vowel nasalization. It's certainly worth checking. Actually, even though the 'chicken, turkey' terms look diffused, it would still be interesting to check them out. I guess if Omaha lacks the word with initial /s/ that won't be possible. > But if borrowing/diffusion can explain the 'chicken' term, I would think that a standard number term would be even easier, as a tool for trade between groups. The *s/z/aptaN term isn't even common to Siouan outside of MVS, is it? Yes, Ofo has it in /iftaptaN/ 'ten', with an intrusive /t/ after the /f/ as in several other Ofo words. > Maybe these problematic s/z terms all date to a period shortly after the spread of MVS, after significant differences in pronunciation had developed between dialects, but while they were still pretty well mutually comprehensible, and while the speakers still recognized a common ethnicity. Do we have any others? (Trade terms? Hunting small animals? Spread of bow and arrow?) I'm fresh out of examples for the moment, but there may be more. Bob From rankin at ku.edu Fri Sep 29 17:15:29 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:15:29 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: 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. Small birds are "tree fleas" in Dakotan and lizards are "bugs" in Kaw, but I have to admit that "small prey critter" doesn't do it for me at the moment. Bob ________________________________ From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson Sent: Thu 9/28/2006 9:29 PM To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu Subject: RE: Omaha fricative set > OM sikka 'chicken' (but ziziga 'turkey') > LA ziNtka 'bird' (but zic^a 'partridge') > > OM siNga 'squirrel' > LA zic^a 'squirrel' After sending out that last message, I took another look at those sets. There isn't really any consistent difference between a squirrel and a largish bird, is there? By the 'bird' set, we'd have to allow a variably pronounced term *[s/z]i[N][t/?], followed, perhaps, by an animate classifier *-ka. The 'squirrel' set fits into the same range. In Lakhota, 'squirrel' and 'partridge' even seem to be pronounced the same. I wonder if the semantics, at one time, could have ranged to a disparaging "small prey animal, obtainable with a bow and arrow in the woods in winter"? Even if there were originally separate words that sounded similar, say, ziNt- 'bird' vs. si 'squirrel', a semantic and phonetic convergence like that could account for all that scrambling. Rory From rankin at ku.edu Fri Sep 29 17:34:07 2006 From: rankin at ku.edu (Rankin, Robert L) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:34:07 -0500 Subject: Omaha fricative set Message-ID: > As I recollect it, gaghe is 'to make' and gaxe is 'branch', perhaps only > in the context of a riverine system. > You mean a branch of a river, not the branch of a tree growing by a river, right? :) The word you want is /gaxa/ 'branch' (stream). Kaw and Quapaw accent the final syllable here. > There's a form for 'comb' that is > somewhat similar that's not coming to me. > Would that be gahe' ? Yes. In Omaha and Ponca *ph > h. It's /gaphe/ in Kaw. > 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! What you have here is 'to break by pressure' and 'to blow by pressure', both with the prefix /bi-/. The latter was translated 'to blow on a fire to start it' by Mrs. Rowe, but she laughed and dodged the equally obvious 'fart' interpretation. You can try both. I don't know how it may have specialized semantically in Omaha. Bob