Siouan Long Vowls

[Rankin, Robert L]

> What Bob is saying is what I was trying to say.

That's what I sorta figured. I had to take the available opportunity to nag
people a little more though. :-)

> If accented <=> long, then being able to place all accents on the second
mora wouldn't justify writing length in the prototonic cases.

Or wouldn't justify writing accent! Take your pick. the question is whether
one of those can occur without the other. I maintain that both can in most
Siouan languages.

> When I ask for examples, what I guess I'm asking for is help
> with ear training.  I don't require minimal pairs, of course,
> since we all know how difficult these are to provide in Siouan
> languages.  We're just grateful
> for the ones we find. What I'm looking for is examples of any
> CVV'CV vs. any CV'CV

Those would be like the ones Jimm and Kathy posted from Chiwere and Ponca
respectively, I guess.

It might be more productive to assemble a list or paradigm of forms with V+V
at morpheme boundaries, both pre- and post-tonic. In some languages like
Dakotan these may collapse to a short version of V2. Or they may remain
long. Or they may remain long but attract accent forward. But it would be
good to have some specific forms to elicit with, say, wa+a, wa+o, wa+i, etc.

Posttonically, it might be instructive to look at Dhegiha imperatives in
-a'. Gaaghe 'make, do' + -a 'imperative' is...what?
gaagha'  or
gagha'   or
gaghaa'
gaaghaa' ???

Or any verb form that ends in a vowel followed by -azhi 'neg', etc.

> any CV'CVV vs. any CV'CV

You might have to go to Crow to find that :-)

Actually, it might be worthwhile looking at postverbal enclitics followed by
the female speech marker, -e, in some Dhegiha langs.

Sorry for the diffuse answer. As you say, it's all work in progress and I
haven't made enough progress to satisfy myself.

Bob