Ponca

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2002, Alan H. Hartley wrote:
> Thanks: I'd forgotten that I hadn't figured out the -ra in
> Hochunk~Hochungra! (Does ['] indicate stress?) All the examples I have
> from the 18th and 19th centuries have -ra: the plain Hochunk type
> doesn't show up till the 20th.

The ' represents stress (an acute over the preceding vowel).  I believe
that the ra-less version was more common in English sources in the past.

> Does -ra exist in the Dhegiha languages? Of course, people coming
> upriver might well have learned a Chiwere name for the Ponca.

No, the -ra - as Bob points out, it would be -dha in OP (and in Osage, -ya
in Kaw, and -da in Quapaw) - doesn't occur in Dhegiha.  Instead you have
the whole panoply of positional articles.  In Dakotan you get ki(n) and
k?uN.  It's possible that the -ya suffix that some Dakotan nouns take in
free form, vs. nothing in bound form, is related.

So, for -ra or -(a)re to be added to Ponca, the name would have to be from
a Winnebago or Chiwere source.  I'd assume the latter, meaning you'd have
to assume /are/.  Problem:  while I know that -ra is fairly easily added
to nouns in Winnebago, I'm not actually sure if are has anything like the
same distribution (I think not) with nouns in Ioway-Otoe, though I have
seen it glossed as 'the', and this would be the only example I know of in
which it is attached to an ethnonym.  On the other hand, it's perfectly
reasonable that the name for the Ponca might be learned from an Ioway-Otoe
source, given the political topography of the Missouri River people in the
late 1700s-mid 1800s.  Perhaps somebody with more knowledge of Ioway-Otoe
syntax can comment.

JEK