Chiwere Popular Orthography

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2001, Lance Foster wrote:
> Koontz John E wrote:
> > The problem with stop + h combinations (ph, th, ch, kh) is that they are
> > the most natural way to write aspiration, which is essentially always a
> > factor in Mississippi Valley languages.
>
> ok..if th and ch should be avoided as they are "the most natural way to write
> aspiration", then what do you say about their use in Jimm's system then as far
> as che and thi?

I guess the answer is that while I consider using <theta> and <c-hacek>,
reserving h for aspiration, to be perfectly natural and reasonable, others
don't.

> I still have a problem with whether the b/p in b/paxoje was originally
> supposed to be "snow" (ba) or "head" (pa)

I believe it is unaspirated (because people write baxoje as well as early
"pahoute"), so ba (or pa), not pha, hence ba 'snow'.  And I'd write 'snow'
ba (or pa - one or the other, not both) and 'head' pha.

For what it's worth, Omaha-Ponca has maxude, which is basically consistent
with baxoje, since ma is 'snow'.  If it were 'head' it would be ppaxude.
Of course, you can't rely on what happens in a loan (which I assume this
is), because the loan might involve a reinterpretation (changing to 'head'
if the speaker believed this to be the meaning) or go by phonetics, in
which case perhaps ba (heard as [pa]) might be mapped to ppa, and so on. I
assume this is a loan because it's unlikely a contemporary ethnonym, even
a fairly venerable one (attested by at least 1700?) would be unlikely to
be inherited from, say, Proto-Mississippi Valley.  Almost by definition,
the current ethnic groups would not have existed at that point.

I might add as a final note that though Baxoje seems to be fairly clearly
interpretable as 'gray snow' there's a possibility that something else is
involved.  The name might have been modified to support a folk etymology,
or might simply have some other meaning currently obscure.  Ethnonyms are
often subjected to folk etymologically-founded modifications.  On the
other hand, the name may simply encode an emphemerally based description
of a place, converted successively into a village name and then an
ethnonym, just as it seems it might.

It's always difficult to determine what names that are analyzable but
something of a non sequitur might refer to.  It's even harder if the name
is ambiguous with some more lasting verity.  For example, are the Omahas
UmaNhaN 'upstream' because at some point an ancestral group lived in a
place upstream of something since forgotten (some other village? a
prominent landmark?) or because they were upstream of all other Dhegiha
groups (except the Ponca!)?  The latter is the usual assumption,
especially given that Ugaxpa (Quapaw in OP form) means 'downstream', but
it gives one pause to learn that the Quapaw (in the larger sense) included
a village called ImaNhaN 'downstream'.

It's not even clear to me that the present name Ugaxpa (etc)  originally
applied outside of the one of five contact period villages called Ugaxpa,
though I've debated this back and forth with Bob Rankin, who thinks it
might have applied more widely even at contact.  But in any case it's
clear that names like "upstream" can be of a more or less local origin,
and I would assume that 'gray snow' must have some similar local
explanation if Baxoje is to be analyzed as such.