Odds & Ends of Ioway-Otoe in Omaha Sources

[Koontz John E]

It occurs to me to mention for the benefit of the IO scholars out there
that there are some possible IO song texts embedded in Fletcher &
LaFlesche.  An example would be p. 465:

WakoN'da thani ga the ke  (repeat three times)
Eha thani hiNga we tho he thoe

(repeat whole twice)

This is rendered something like:

Wakonda we offer this tobacco.
Now we are smoking it.

The th (edh) is presumably /r/.  Thani is not the usual word for tobacco
in OP, where it would be nini.  I was particular struck by the final
k[h]e, which F&LaF interpret as the 'horizontally extended' article,
though it is also the declarative.  But except for words that are more or
less invariant all across Mississippi Valley Siouan this text gives F&LaF
considerable difficulty.

How about:

WakhaNda, rani ka re khe
Eha, rani hiNga we ro he roe.

Now is it IO?

There's an OP verb gadhe 'to donate' (a g-stem), which may figure in "ka
re".

There are also a fair number of IO names in the Dorsey texts, and some
songs explicitly identified as IO.

There is an Omaha-Ponca exclamation hiNda(khe) which occurs frequently in
the Dorsey texts glossed as 'let's see'.  I'm always thought it was
remarkably close to IO 'we see (DECL)', where the verb form should be
haNda < hiN + a...da.  OP would have aNdaNbE < aN + daNbE, with a totally
different stem for 'to see'.

There is also a point in the story of Haxige (in Dorsey 1890) that seems
to involve some language humor at the expense of IO speakers, though it
could also simply be a left over from an IO telling of the story.  I
suspect humor, however.  Haxige's brother is killed by the Watermonsters.
He tries to kill the children of the Watermonsters, but only wounds them.
Learning that Buzzard is going to doctor them, he kills Buzzard and goes
himself, disguised as Buzzard.  He shoos everyone out and starts cutting
up the children and boiling them.  The Watermonsters get suspicious and
send the grass-snake to spy on him.  He catches the snake and to gag him
he stuffs boiled watermonster strips down his throat.  The snake returns
to the Watermonsters to report what's happening and can only mutter
"Haxuka! Haxuka!"  Nobody can figure this out at first, but then someone
exclaims "Wait!  He's got something stuck in his throat!  Pull it out!"
I strongly suspect that Haxuka (Haxuga) is IO for Haxige.

JEK