Cognacy of the Omaha and Ponca (was Re: local reactions ...)

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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Koontz John E" <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>
To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 6:00 PM
Subject: Cognacy of the Omaha and Ponca (was Re: local reactions ...)


> On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, Tom Leonard wrote:
>> Ponca people have long held that they are "related" to the Omaha 
>> ("they're our relatives") but that they have always been a separate 
>> entity - the two tribes living together at one time but always distinct 
>> from one another. I've heard Omaha people describe the relationship in a 
>> similar manner.
>
> This sense of connection is probably behind LaFlesche's term 'cognate 
> tribes', extending to all the Dhegiha peoples.  He probably doesn't have 
> the current linguistic sense in mind as such and I also doubt he means 
> 'speaking languages full of cognate words'.  I'm not sure if 'agnate' 
> might not be the proper term for what he has in mind, for that matter. My 
> attempt to make sense of his term is to assume that he refers not to 
> common descent, lingusitic or otherwise, but to parallel institutions and 
> organizations, or perhaps to something of what Tom reports as a sense of 
> being connected, but always extant.
>
> Notice that Tom reports the Ponca and Omaha as seeing themselves more like 
> separated siblings (without explicit parents) than as children 
> (descendents) of a single parent entity.  This is analogous to Americans 
> and Canadians thinking of themselves and the English as all formerly 
> living together in England before, for some reason, the Americans and 
> (Anglo-)Canadians all moved to North America, leaving the English behind. 
> In fact, I believe we tend to think of ourselves as children of England.
>
> The concept that all present branches of a group have always been 
> logically separate, though not perhaps originally physically separate, is 
> one that reappears in Dhegiha accounts, and I think it is is common in 
> similar situations in the Plains area.  The other Dhegiha example occurs 
> in the "Ohio Origin" legend in which the five tribes are conceived of as 
> moving down the Ohio together and then splitting off from the main body at 
> various points.   The specifically Omaha and Ponca versions of this 
> continue the process in dividing the Omaha and Ponca.
>
>>>From a linguistic and ethnographic perspective, even if we try to escape
> the folk modelling of the process, it makes perfect sense to see the Omaha 
> and Ponca as offshoots or a single earlier entity.  Apart from the obvious 
> and particular similarities of the two languages, the clan structure of 
> the Omaha and Ponca is more or less complementary, when compared with that 
> of other Dhegiha groups like the Osage or Kaw.  In other words, you have 
> to add the Omaha and Ponca clan sets to come up with something like the 
> set exhibited among the Osage or Kaw.  There are some overlaps, but it 
> certainly looks like some event fissioned the original combined system.
>
> I don't know that we have to assume anything unusual for this event. Both 
> groups were internally divided into villages (Omaha) or bands (Ponca) when 
> encountered.  I assume the Omaha vs. Ponca fission was simply an earlier, 
> but fairly recent fissioning that persisted.
>
> Incidentally, the complex and rather well-developed interior structuring 
> of the Omaha "Left Hands Side" clan - also its large size compared with 
> other clans - suggests to me that it represents the reverse process, i.e., 
> it is an absorbed entity that was originally more independent.  This 
> absorption is well advanced, if this is the case, and it may have occurred 
> before the Omaha-Ponca split.  An analogy here might be the 
> Cheyenne-Suhtai merger or the association of the Kiowa and the "Kiowa 
> Apache."  Or consider the widespread fusions in the Caddoan groups.  (The 
> Caddo "proper" even incorporate one of the original Quapaw villages, the 
> ImaNhaN, demonstrating again that lingusitically dissimilar elements can 
> be absorbed fairly quickly.)
>
> So, while the traditions of both ethnographees and ethnographers tends to 
> assume constancy of language, we have to keep in mind that there is no 
> reason why all elements in the mix were always Dhegiha speaking.  It does 
> seem likely that any entity that divided into the linguistically similar 
> Omaha and Ponca must have been primarily speaking an earlier version of 
> Omaha-Ponca, but the Left Hand Side people, if originally separate, need 
> not have been Omaha-Ponca, or even Dhegiha speakers.
>
> I tend to keep the idea that languages can change in mind when trying to 
> explain the several Dakota bands north of the Omaha-Ponca area named 
> Waz^az^a.  Compare Dhegiha waz^az^e 'Osage', the name of one of the 
> "standard" Dhegiha clans.  And of course, examples like this, and 
> certainly like Imaha, warn us not to be too agressive in explaining names 
> of clans or tribes in terms of their current language.  Maybe we're 
> puzzled by the etymology of words like Kansa and Ponca, etc., because 
> they're not Siouan words, or at least not Dhegiha words.
>
> Turning from that point back to Bryan's apology for looking at still more 
> Algonquian data, I'd say don't apologize.  I don't think we whould 
> degenerate to looking always at all languages, but if we are consistent in 
> applying such glances to Siouan problems, I think we are OK.
>
> I like to see us looking at other languages, especially nearby ones, in 
> connection with Siouan, because I think we can only profit from knowing 
> more, collectively, about the wider linguistic context of Siouan.  Not 
> just vocabulary elements, of course, but also grammatical issues like 
> obviation in Algonquian, or clause syntax, etc.
>
> For example, I think Bob Rankin's usage "conjunctive (marker)" for the 
> Omaha-Ponca =e=gaN 'having ...' marker in clauses, borrowing from 
> Algonquian descriptive models, has been very helpful to me.  Maybe my 
> scheme of calling certain things in Dhegiha "obviative," wasn't quite as 
> helpful, though it has attracted people to thinking about what is actually 
> going on.
>
> A couple of debts need to be acknowledged. One is that I think that it was 
> actually Bob Rankin who suggested I should look at whether the OP "plural 
> singulars" etc. might be marking something like the proximate/obviative. 
> This is a case where in acknowledging the debt I need to observe that he 
> suggested looking at this would be interesting.  He didn't recommend that 
> I take over the terms.  So, while he deserved the credit for pointing us 
> in that direction, he's innocent of any terminological gaffes.  The other 
> debt is owed to Boas, who send Frida Hahn to Oklahoma to discoved, among 
> other things, what that -bi- was at the end of Omaha-Ponca verbs (or stuck 
> on the front of things like biama 'they say').  Even before that, of 
> course, Dorsey experimented with endless approaches to explaining the 
> particle coglomerations at the end of Omaha-Ponca sentences, and also 
> meticulously recorded his consultants observations on the implications of 
> using one kind of article vs. another, or of including a "plural marker in 
> a singular form or not.   In the end it was a very good thing that Dorsey 
> and other consultants managed to produce quite a few sentences with mixed 
> structures that later consultants seized upon as ungrammatical.
>