catawba phonems /r/, /d/, and /n/

[SHEA KATHLEEN DORETTE]

I'm here in Ponca City, not Lawrence, without any Catawba materials with
me for reference, and it's been a long time since I really looked at the
data, but I could make a couple of comments off the top of my head.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, Paul and Blair, but don't /r/, /d/, and
/n/ contrast in the modal suffixes on verbs, with /-re/ being the
independent mode ending, /-de/ the imperative, and /-ne/ the
interrogative?  (A couple of the vowels on these endings might be long, I
can't remember.)  Also, don't some of the mutating verbs mark different
persons with /d-/, /n-/, and /-r-/ or /r-/?  However, since I was never
able to make a full phonemic analysis based on the written fieldnotes and
articles available to me at the time, I think that Blair should have a
better grasp of the phonetic range of each phoneme, based on his recent
conversations with Frank Siebert, as he points out in his reply to this
question posted to the Siouan list.

By the way, I recieved about 3 e-mail questions about Catawba recently at
my America Online address.  I glanced at them and intended to answer, but
found, when I went back to answer them, that they had been erased from my
"new mail" folder on AOL.  (I probably forgot to save them as new.)  I
can't remember the content or who they were from, so if whoever sent the
messages would send them again, either to this address or my AOL address
(kdshea at aol.com), I would appreciate it!

Kathy Shea

On Sun, 3 Oct 1999 Ogalala2 at aol.com wrote:

> /r/, /d/, and /n/ are normally considered three seperate phonemes in Catawba.
>  I have reasons to believe that there may be only one phoneme, namely /r/
> and, consequetly, that [d] and [n] are merely allophones of /r/ as is the
> case with Mandan and Crow/Hidatsa.  I would greatly appreciate any Catawba
> scholar's (Shea,  Voorhis, others?) opinion on this matter.
>