Rib (was Re: Portatives in Omaha-Ponca)

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, Rankin, Robert L wrote:
> > I checked this with one of my consultants, and the word for
> > 'ribs' in Ponca is dhethi, with an aspirated "t."  (He said it was /thi/
> as in /athi/ 'he/she arrived (here)' and not as in /tti/ 'house' when I
> asked him.)
>
> That's pretty interesting. It would be virtually the only word I know of out
> of thousands where the stop correspondences don't seem to match exactly as
> expected for the Dheghiha dialects. The only other case I can think of is
> 'four' which has tt instead of the expected d in Kaw.

There was a case where I thought I heard OP kkide 'shoot' with aspiration
(khide), but I think that was bad hearing on my part.  Maybe I have this
reversed.  I think there are some anomalies in this set - do Chiwere or
Winnebago have g?

Then there's the little known infamous case of ppahe (not sure on stress)
'hill' vs. Dakotan pa'ha, which has an irregular initial correspondence.
This, along with the restricted distribution of the term, suggests a loan
is involved, but the source is obscure.

Also, as far as the attestation of the form in LaFlesche and Dorsey, like
Buechel, these authorities are generally more reliable with the marked
case than the unmarked, e.g., for them, if a stop is turned (over) or
there's a dot or x under it, it's explicity unaspirated (tense), but
unmarked cases are probably aspirated but not certainly so.  This is the
picture for Omaha-Ponca.  For Osage Dorsey sometimes has a turned h in
front of a tense (preaspirated) stop, and, as I recall it, both Dorsey and
LaFlesche indicate a following s^ (c for Dorsey, sh for LaFlesche) with an
aspirate preceding (i or e).  These are also pretty reliable clues.  In
general, the marked/unmarked case rule changes in details with the Dhegiha
language and the linguist/orthography.  Bob can probably clarify the
situations for the languages other than OP better than I can.  I do know
of some cases where an explicit encoding by Dorsey or LaFlesche is wrong
...

In this case, of course, we don't have to rely on heuristics, because Bob
and Kathy actually heard/hear the words.