Oglala (was Re: Locative Postpositions)

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Alan H. Hartley wrote:
> > It occurs to me that there is likely to be a connection between Oglala
> > (OP Ubdhadha) and the Niobrara (OP NiN Ubdhadha), but I'm not sure in
> > which direction (or how), and the ethnonym is not a formal locative.
>
> That's really interesting! So Riggs' posited connection of Lakota oglala
> with a Dakota word for 'scatter' is groundless? (He cites ohdada 'to
> scatter one's own'.)

Various little stories (not always the same one) that provide a context
for 'scatter one's own in' are the source usually cited.  I've always
thought such things smacked of folk etymologizing, though, of course,
they're rife in explanations of the names of Dakotan groups and must be at
least occasionally true, or even mostly true.  If nothing else, they
reveal the Dakota philosophy of band naming and are consistent with
patterns elsewhere in Siouan, e.g., in Crow.

They also provide an assertion that the form in question appears to be
interpretable to native speakers, if not wholely explicable.

If the form is indeed correct (as it is here, but isn't in s^ahiyela
'Cheyenne' ?< 'speak redly', really 'little Cree'), then you are pretty
much stuck with the form and the explanation, in the absence of some
really good explanation from another source.

In the case of Oglala we do have a possible alternative explanation, but
I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.  For one thing, there's the
switch from g (Dakotan) to b (Omaha).  There are cases where Dakotan has
substituted gl (*kr) or bl (*pr) for forms that other languages suggest to
be *pr or *kr, or at least generated alternative forms.  'Bug' is one such
set, for example, and you can find others, especially among the stative
verbs.

Bdhadha is said to mean 'spreading out' (becoming a wide and shallow,
i.e., a braided stream?) in reference to this stream name in Omaha-Ponca.