The Casa tribe, homeland, and language

[Rankin, Robert L]

I don't know that there are more than one or two words that might be "Ofo" before Swanton's field work.  
 
The F phoneme in the Muskogean languages was bilabial in the days before English or French bilingualism.  Now it is labio-dental for virtually all speakers.  Swanton writes is like European F and doesn't find anything about it remarkable.
 
Interestingly, the Ofo terms for 'Frenchman' and 'American' are both hard to find sources for, but neither has an F.
 
As for the trajectory, we know that [s] varies with [theta] in some Siouan languages and that, even in English, [theta] and [f] are acoustically very close and easy to confuse.  There are dialects in which [f] and [v] are substituted for voiceless and voiced theta and also foreign pronunciations of theta in English words that do the same thing.  Russian speakers often substitute "vis" and "vat" for 'this' and 'that'.
 
Bob

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson
Sent: Mon 2/19/2007 12:04 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: RE: The Casa tribe, homeland, and language



> I'm not aware of any European transcriptions that have a sibilant in Ofo that later became [f].  

I see.  Then how far back do European transcriptions of Ofo words containing [f] date?

And for the transjectory, do we know anything about the phonotactics of that [f]?  Labio-dental?  Bilabial?  Or that thing in Swedish they sometimes write sj-, where the back of the lower lip kind of covers the front of the upper teeth?

Rory