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[Koontz John E]

Bob Rankin and I have been sparring a bit on what the meaning might be of
Dorsey's "breve" or "short sign" over some vowels in the Omaha-Ponca
texts.  He describes it pretty clearly in qualitative terms, but these
were the only terms he had for conceptualizing any kind of phonetic
distinction, and qualitative differences in vowels might well conceal a
length distinction.

So I decided to take a direct approach and I used some awk code and Unix
utilities (MKS Toolkit for Windows 3) to cull the space-delimited words
with breves in them out of the Siouan Archives version of the Dorsey
fonts.  Then I sorted the list so that only unique tokens remained.  Then
I did various ad hoc retranscriptions to break up enclitic sequences more
regularly and repeated the unique tokens thing.

At this point I have a list of about 800 tokens with breves in them.  A
afair number of these are grammatical, e.g., the final i in the *=z^i*
negative tends to be marked short, though not consistently.  Also the
final e in *the* 'the vertical inanimate', etc.  Some are lexical, e.g.,
the e in ppez^i' 'bad' < ppi-a'z^i 'bad' tends to be marked short.  Both
variants of this word exist, incidentally, or all variants, allowing for
breves.  Most of the gramatical tokens are repeats (though different in
form or context), e.g., =z^i, =m=az^i, =az^i, =b=az^i, etc.

It could be quite a while before I get this massaged down to final form,
so if anyone is interested in a preview of it, let me know off list at
john.koontz at colorado.edu.  I don't think the present 800-item list would
be a really great candidate for posting here!  (Though that may surprise
some of you.)

JEK