Ioway baxoje, paoutet, etc.

[Koontz John E]

This is very helpful.

On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, RLR wrote:
> The transcriptions of the Ioway self-identifier with apparent stop
> consonants, e.g. "paoutet", etc. on some early French maps, should be
> taken with a grain of salt.
>
> 1.  French had no "ch" sound, either phonemically or phonetically and
> had not had since about the 12th century. They had no "dj" sound either.
> So they had to write any such sound they heard in some other way. In the
> modern language the spelling conventions tch and dj are most often used.
> But in the 17th century there was no real standard.

However, I have seen both tch and dj (or, I think, dge) in early 1700s
French transcriptions specifically of Ioway-Otoe. On the other hand, it
occurs to me that a version with t might well be a Miami-Illinois version.

> 2.  In Canadian dialects of French (and perhaps those in the areas of
> France from which most colonials came) the stops /t/ and /d/ are
> pronounced as affricates [ts] and [dz]. It may well be that a spelling
> like "Paoutet" for the Ioway represented [paxotse] and was thus the
> closest they could get to the ch that they heard from speakers. We would
> need to check for such transcriptions by English speakers.
>
> Bob