Sacred Syllable

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2001, Rankin, Robert L wrote:
> ORdinarily this couldn't be related to Winnebago /gu/ since Omaha /u/ is
> invariably from /o/ (and actually pronounced [o] about half the time in my
> Omaha notes from ca. 1973). Nor can Winnebago /g/ be related to Omaha <k>
> (/kk/), only to Omaha /g/. So the Omaha reflex for the WI sacred syllable
> ought to be /gi/ if no sound symbolism is involved. I haven't run across
> anything suggestive in my own work, sorry to say.

I lost track of the vowel correspondence.  Apologies again.  It would be
potentially possible for a Winnebago g to match an OP kk if the match was
due to, say, borrowing.  That said, I wouldn't ordinarily expect that to
be the case.  Speakers of Siouan languages in the old days seem to have
had a fairly accurate appreciation of the regular correspondences.  Very
occasionally they mismatched consonants in obvious borrowings. Mismatched
vowels (Wi u : OP u) are a bit more common in borrowings, I think, though,
again, usually speakers got it right.

> In this particular term though, I think probably <ku> is the standard root
> for 'make a hollow sound' that is found in 'drum, box, cucurbit, etc. Kind
> of makes sense that the earth might rumble when coughing up rocks. Winnebago
> should have /ko-/ for that root.

I thought about the 'hollow sound' sense and decided that for 'sound of
gun', 'sound of bow', 'whirring noise', etc., it was probably something
else.  I remember making something very much like "ku" (or khU - voiceless
- or kyU) to represent the sound of gun myself, as a child.  So I omitted
examples of 'hollow sound' from catalog deliberately.  However, they were
pretty uniformly lexicalized to the extent of having an instrumental
prefix of some sort and so were fairly distinguishable from the
exclamatory set.  The 'manifestation of rock' examples might be 'hollow
sound' or they might be 'sound of shooting or rushing or whirring'.  It's
hard to say with only textual evidence.  I assumed the latter, but then
forgot to include the 'manifestation of rock' in my catalog.

JEK