Comanche (fwd)

[Koontz John E]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 1999 11:24:15 -0700 (PDT)
From: dcosta at socrates.berkeley.edu

Long ago you told me that the Omaha word for the Comanche is /ppa'daNkka/,
and that in Omaha at least this means 'stubby head'. You also told me that
Winnebago has a word /pa:jo'ke/ which designates some imaginary Indian tribe.
You still agree with both of these statements?

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JEK:

This looks like a hint that it's time to get the Padouca Papers on line in
the archives of the Siouan list.

I assume that Padouca comes into French from Miami-Illinois.

Osage ppa'taNkka (or hpa'taNhka), glossed, 'Comanche', is attested in
LaFelsche's dictionary in the spelling p.a'doNk.a, using p., k., etc., for
underdotted (tense, preaspirated)  stops and N for raised n.  LaFlesche
also gives taN'kka (doN'k.a) 'short or stubby, as a bear's tail', as well
as to'kka (do'k.a) 'damp, wet, moist', and ppa (p.a) 'head', from which
it is possible to conclude that ppa'taNkka could mean 'stubby headed,
stubby head(s)'.

Omaha-Ponca has (Fletcher & LaFlesche) ppa'daNkka 'Comanche', spelled
Pa'duNka by LaFlesche and glossed Padouca parenthetically, in addition to
Comanche.  I don't believe daNkka is attested in OP.

It's possible that aN and oN here reflect, at least in Osage, a back nasal
vowel oN (cf.  Dakotan uN)  still marginally distinct from aN.  I'm pretty
sure that LaFlesche's uN in the Omaha reference is just nasalized schwa or
influence from the English pronunciation.  He doesn't use uN very often,
and he does manifest some influence from English, once spelling Ponca with
a c in an Omaha context:  PoNca.

Winnebago paajo'ke clearly resembles these forms and Padouca, too.  The
corerepondence would be exact and regular if the Dhegiha forms were Osage
ppa'tokka and Omaha-Ponca ppa'dukka, and the latter of these forms is, of
course, a pretty good match for Padouca, though it seems unlikely that
Padouca was borrowed from Omaha-Ponca, in which this o > u change occurs.

Of course, some Siouanists feel that u here is an exageratedly high vowel
graph for what OP actually has, and other Dhegiha languages seem to have
some tendency to raise o, too, judging from Dorsey's Kansa forms, though I
have to confess that my ear or attention is poor enough that I am not a
able to do more than say that it sounds like u to me in Omaha-Ponca and
like o in Osage.  The tendency to raise o is presumably connected to the
tendency to front u to u-umlaut.  The u-umlaut is unrounded to i (merging
with original i) in Omaha-Ponca and Quapaw, but remains u-umlaut
consistently in Kansa andd Osage.  In a few places Kansa at least has i
where I'd expect u-umlaut or u-umlaut where I'd expect i.

One obvious possibility in cases like this is that the poor
correspondences reflect the process of borrowing a word between languages.
For example, if the source is Osage ppa'taNkka or something similar, and
it was borrowed into Illinois and then French, French might get an
unnasalized form Padouca, subsequently borrowed into English.  The
Illinois form might have been borrowed into Winnebago, too, though I'm
intrigued that it has the regular shift of a to e after velars.  I
wouldn't have thought that to be at all recent.  Perhaps Winnebago
speakers just know that ka should be ke?  This would be an easy analogy to
draw if the loan resulted from borrowing from a Siouan source.

Another explanation might be that the original form in Dhegiha was a
meaningless *ppadokka (borrowed from elsewhere?), subsequently widely
reanalized as ppaddaNkka to give it a meaning.  The comparable term in
Winnebago didn't undergo the reanalysis, though it was probably borrowed
from groups further west.  If Dhegiha did have *ppaddokka at some point,
then this and the Winnebago form would correspond exactly and could
support a reconstruction *hpatohka, though inheritence seems less likely
with this term than borrowing.

To complete the linguistic story, the initial ppa of Padouca and its
congeners recalls the initial ppa of Pawnee and its even more various
connections. However, so far this is like frequent occurrences of *raS or
*(k)tokto ~ *(k)takta in ethnic names:  an interesting coincidence, as
assuming a connection doesn't seem to lead to an further clarification of
the rest of the forms in question or of their total meaning, and the
groups involved are rather disparate, and hence not likely to suffer from
name transference.

On the latter point, there is a school of thought that argues that the
term Padouca originally referred to the Plains Apache groups and was only
transferred to the Comanche as they (largely, but not entirely) replaced
these Apache.  I guess under the circumstances it might have applied to
the Kiowa and other (non-Siouan) western Plains nomads, too, though this
is not attested or argued anywhere that I know.