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<p><tt>> For me at any rate, it's 'way too late to try to second guess the Tunicas on why they adopted the chunk they did. Since truncation usually comes off the right-hand side of the name, I assume the Ofos had already lost the initial labial (Swanton's progression of names down the Ohio and Mississippi confirms this, and the same loss in Biloxi suggests it was very early). I strongly doubt that any non-OVS language lost initial labial sonorants spontaneously, so, to me it all pretty strongly supports identification of Swanton's ethnonyms and Tunica ushpi with the Ofos.</tt><br>
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<tt>I'm not following this argument, or quite where it's directed. First, if loss of the initial labial /m/ is a single event in Ofo-Biloxi, and if Mosopelea is the ancestral name of the Ofo, then the 17th century Mosopelea would have to be ancestral to the Biloxi as well.</tt><br>
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<tt>Second, I don't see why we are assuming that Ofo-ic speakers were an ethnic singularity at this time. Swanton's account makes it clear that the Uspe and the Ofo-gula were two separate groups in the period from 1699 to 1722. The Ofo-gula can certainly be identified with the Ofo as represented linguistically by Rosa Pierrette. The Tunica knew her group as the Ushpi, which can equally certainly be identified with the Uspe. Either name could be derived from Mosopelea, but not both at once.</tt><br>
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<tt>Under the circumstances, I think the Uspe are the better choice. Swanton gives the vowels in the Tunica version as long, with the first being circumflex: Uus^pii. The various French versions given are Ouispe (/wispe/), Oussipe's (/usipee/), Ounspie (/uNspii/), and Onspe'e (oNspee). We could reasonably reconstruct this as something like *woNs8pee ~ *wuNs8pii. In an earlier posting (May 4, 2004), Michael McCafferty has stated that the first record of the Mosopelea name was on Marquette's map of the Mississippi of 1673, in which it was written MONS8PELEA, with the initial vowel nasalized and the second (I think) schwa. So if we drop the final (ethnonymic?) -a, consider the initial m to be a tight w before a nasal vowel, and guess that the l was a light rhotic or y to separate the two e syllables, we are essentially there: *moNs8pe(l)e ~ *woNs8pee.</tt><br>
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<tt>This does not mean that Ofo cannot be cognate to Moso-. Given that the Tunica knew Rosa Pierrette's Ofo group as Uus^pii, the Ofo and the Uspe must have been the same kind of people to them. It seems quite plausible that multiple groups of Ofo-ic speakers existed prior to the 17th century. They may have had a common ethnonym, and that ethnonym may have been something like *moso or *woNso. In fact, this might have been the ethnonym for the entire OVS group. If Ofo-gula and Uspe represented separate OVS dialects, and the Uspe/Mosopelea had just recently moved in from Ohio, then Ofo is very likely more closely related to Biloxi than to the original Mosopelea/Uspe tongue.</tt><br>
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<tt>Could you remind me again: in OVS, what is the relationship tree of Tutelo, Ofo and Biloxi? Any sense on the time depth?</tt><br>
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<tt>Rory</tt><br>
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