a phonetic mystery

Jimm G GoodTracks jggoodtracks at juno.com
Wed Mar 21 14:36:18 UTC 2001


John:
I believe that there are implications/ applications of this for Jiwere~
Chiwere.  I say this, because on occassions, the elders corrected me on
pronunciations.  Because of lack of a trained linguistic hearing, I never
noted such fine articulations.  Several words that I recall being
corrected on were:
phaa 	~   [paa (~paa'ge)] = nose of human; head of an animal  vs
pha	~   [pa	= bitter]

thaan(~)i ~   [taa'ñi  = winter]
than(~)i   ~   [ta'ñi   =  soup/ deer meat soup]

I will leave an further discussion of such applications in Ioway-Otoe to
Louanna & Jill if they wish to comment.
Jimm

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001 01:53:26 -0700 (MST) Koontz John E
<John.Koontz at colorado.edu> writes:
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Shannon West wrote:
>
> > > It had nasalization associated with the morph preceding ktA.
> > > If I recall correctly, Winnebago or Chiwere preserves the [iN].
> >
> > Okay.  I'm not sure I'm following this, so correct me if I'm off
> in left
> > field.  Would this be what is going on in Assiniboine:
> >
> > wayaga - he sees
> > wayagiNkta - he will see
> ...
> Yes.  This is it, precisely.
> >
> > It goes on and on.  A lot of verbs with stress on the first
> syllable seem to
> > be suseptible to this A--> iN ablaut (?) when -kta appears.
>
> In theory, any verb that has a ~ e (or aN ~ e) [or as some write it
> A or
> AN] should have iN as a third alternant before ktA.  Often, but not
> always, A will be unaccented even when it is in the second syllable.
>  In
> fact, unaccented "epenthetic" a in C-final roots is independent of
> A,
> though it's strongly correlated with it.  The best survey of this is
> Pat
> Shaw's dissertation.
>
> The two major analyses are:
>
> wayagA + kta => wayagiN-kta  (or A => iN / __#kta)
>
> or
>
> wayaga + iNkta => wayag-iNkta
>
> As far as I know, only the first of these has ever been seriously
> entertained by Dakotanists.
>
> Also, while from a Dakotan perspective it makes sense to see a and
> aN as
> the underlying final vowels, elsewhere in Siouan it's e that is seen
> as
> the underlying vowel.  For one thing, only Dakotan does anything
> with aN;
> for another only Dakotan uses a in what amount to citation forms.
> In OP
> essentially all e-final stems ablaut.  Most languages follow the
> Dakotan
> pattern in which only some stems with the suitable final vowel
> ablaut.  I
> suspect other Dhegiha languages follow the OP pattern.  I'm not sure
> about
> Chiwere.
>
> JEK
>



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