Omaha, Jiwere long vs. short vowels.

[Rankin, Robert L]

>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 completely agree with Jimm. I've heard long vs. short vowels in the
recordings of Franklin Murray, Truman Dailey and Lizzie Harper made by
Vantine and by Jill and Louanna. I remember unaccented long vowels too, as
in [greeraa'briN] 'eight'. As in Omaha, they can alternate in paradigms,
i.e., just because a word has length in one of its allomorphs doesn't mean
it will have length in other, inflected or derived, forms, especially if
accent shifts (see John's paradigms of the past couple of days).

I think a good guide to long vowels in Jiwere might be Miner's Winnebago
Dictionary. Winnebago has added "Dorsey's Law" epenthetic vowels in clusters
with sonorants and has moved accent to the right, but otherwise I bet the
long vowels correspond pretty exactly.

In Omaha a guide might be Frida Hahn's doctoral dissertation, done under
Franz Boas. Hahn was a native speaker of German, a language that has a long
vs. short vowel distinction. Her hearing was no doubt more accurate than
most of ours for that feature.

Bob