Rankin Vindicated: Suddenly and Repeatedly

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Robert L. Rankin wrote:
> The sort of thing John did here is especially valuable to those of us
> doing analyses of related languages that are mostly or completely extinct
> (Kansa, Quapaw, Osage, etc.).  Even with several summers of field work on
> Kansa while there were still a couple of speakers, I don't have entire
> sets like these in Omaha.  However I do expect to find enough
> analogs/cognates in Kansa to reconstruct the system by comparing what I do
> have with what John finds in Omaha. 

Thanks!  

Just for the record, the forsm I've encountered, except dhe=dhe (causative
of 'go') are from chance encounters in the Dorsey texts, so credit for the
data isn't really mine.  I do have, I think, the dubious honor of being
the first to notice that there are a set of forms of this nature.  That
is, I'm sure Dorsey noticed them, but I haven't seen a description of them
by him, or by anyone else.  I was able to find a fair number of cognate
forms in the dictionaries of most of the Dhegiha languages, and also in
Ioway-Otoe (primarily Jimm's dictionary).  In addition, each of these
languages' sets includes one or two forms that are cognate with what seem
to be holes in the set of forms attested in the Dorsey texts, making me
suspect that these missing forms probably do exist in Omaha-Ponca, but
chance not to be attested in the texts.

Further afield, at least some cognates exist in Winnebago and Dakotan, but
it seems that in the latter there may be only a few forms, mostly fossils.
I'm not sure what to make of Winnebago.  In spite of having several
reasonable dictionaries and word lists for Winnebago, and at least three
grammars, there is a great deal about Winnebago that remains mysterious,
in the sense that various morphological subsystems (e.g., reflexives of
2nd conjugation verbs) have never been addressed, and, of course, there is
essentially nothing on available on syntax, though this is not unusual for
a Siouan language.  I tend to suspect that the analogs of 'suddenly' in
Winnebago are productive and more or less as extensive as those in Dhegiha
or Ioway-Otoe. 

By the way - at least the Wisconsin Winnebago seem currently to prefer
Hocak (representing Hooc^aNk or Hochank shorn of its diacritics).