Oral ~ Nasal Correspondences

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, RLR wrote:
> I don't know the 'blue' term, ...

I'll look it up.

> but 'bear' and 'bean' are at least disyllables ...

The last syllable of bear is sort of "non-contrastive" in Siouan, of
course, though 'bean' is nicely complex (cf. OP hiNbdhiNge).  It was
'blue' (or 'grue') I was thinking of, since it's something like *hto(ho)
(cf. OP ttu).

> and the semantic matches are quite precise.

That's a good point.  Short cognates are better when the correspondence of
meaning (and even form) are fairly exact, as they are in all these cases
('bear' and 'bean' - 'blue' is a separate case, especially until I track
down the forms).  Nothing like c^e and ki, both referring to some body
part, to raise suspicions, especially with lots of other stuff attached to
them.

> So we're not dealing with the same kinds of chance resemblance problems
> that often plague distant genetic comparisons. The interesting thing
> about 'bear' is that it would have to be so early, since it's all over
> Siouan in one form or another.

Yes, and why would one borrow a term for 'black bear'?  They're all over,
too. And these are two families that are not normally considered to be in
heavy contact at any point in their histories. One further point is that
I'm not sure how far south Ursus (Euarctos) americanus (or Ursus
horribilis (?), either) ranges.  And didn't you (Bob) just mention to me
in some context that Jane Hill thought UA might well originate much
further south than previously thought?

JEK