Odds & Ends of Ioway-Otoe in Omaha Sources

[Koontz John E]

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

On Fri, 20 Jul 2001, Jimm G GoodTracks wrote:
> Meanwhile, "ranyi ka re ke (thani ga the ke)", may be = wagiruthe
> (receive s.t. from another).  And usually, " ranyi hinrap^owi = (we are
> smoking tobacco)".  So then, that is not quite a match for the 2nd
> phrase.  I will have to work on that one.

The loss of ny in ranyi is to be expected and I understand that ny is
pretty much in complementary distribution with n, ny occurring before
front vowels.

Otherwise, maybe the song is just more or less Omaha-ized, like the Big
Turtle one?  For gadhe see the LaFlesche Osage dictionary, p. 257b
(popular page number!) under 'donate'.  I've looked in your dictionary and
this doesn't seem to have a cognate in IO.

The hiNga might be hiN=nya 'they smoke' from hiN 'to smoke'.  Recall that
ny got converted to Ng in the Big Turtle song after a nasal vowel.  But
the we might also be the =wi plural.  I'm not sure how much of we ro he
roe to take as words and how much as vocables.  This is a point on which
I've been baffled ever since I first tried to make any sense of the songs
in Fletcher & LaFlesche.

> I have a question, namely, how might one take the musical notation in
> Fletcher &LaFlesh, to render it into a mellody.  Once, I had a piano
> teacher do a rendition on piano of such an Otoe transcription.  It was
> better than nothing, but still left much to be desired.

I think we're stuck with it.  It's all there is, and if it doesn't match
what is preserved today, there's not much we can do about it. If there was
anything out of the ordinary in the intervals or timing, I expect it got
lost.  I have the impression that no really serious modern anthroplogical
musicology has been done for Siouan groups.  There's been some song
collecting and some attention to translations of songs, but nothing much
on the musical systems.  On the bright side, there are some old recordings
and I suspect the tunes have been better preserved than the lyrics in some
cases.