Awahawi / Amahami

[Koontz John E]

Alan Hartley asks:
> I've been assuming that Amahami & Awahawi are etymologically related and
> that there is a synchronic or diachronic relationship between -m- and
> -w-, or that the -m- and the -w- represent variant spellings of one
> Hidatsa consonant. (The -n- in some forms is difficult; maybe it's a
> copyist's or printer's error.)

A number of the Siouan languages have alternations of w with m and r/l/d
with n conditioned by the nasality of the following vowel, or come close
to a situation like this.  Crow and Hidatsa are unique in Siouan in having
(in the modern languages at any rate) no constrastive nasals, either as
vowels or resonants.  However, both languages have conditioned contexts in
which their resonants normally assume nasal values, and informal
transcriptions of both often have nasal resonants in other contexts.  I
believe the conditioned environment for nasalization in Hidatsa is initial
position.  In Crow it is when two resonants occur adjacent to each other.
I believe that the explanation for nasals being transcribed in other
contexts arises from the non-contrastive status of nasality in these
languages.  Speakers can produce a degree of nasality in all resonants
without perceiving it as a mispronunciation as there is no need to keep r
or l and n, for example, apart.  The degree of nasalization in a resonant
might well vary with the speaker or even with instances of a particular
word from a particular speaker.

John Koontz