Ponca

[Alan Knutson]

I always thought that r-loss in English was pre-consonantal and prepausal
and never intervocalic, leading to a contrast between fa:tha (from farther)
and fatha (from father) (excuse orthography, pls), and as I understood that
r-insertion was a hypercorrection (as h-insertion in Cockney) leading to
something as grating as Waursaur (as in the commercial) for Wausau.


At 04:44 PM 2/10/02 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Ordinarily, when I see <ar> in older orthographic rendering of Indian names,
>I just assume it represents [a], as in "Arkansas" or "Harjo", Creek for
>'brave'.  This is almost always true in the South, where post-vocalic R
>didn't have a phonetic value, but it was true of various other R-less
>English dialects too (Boston, NYC, etc.). It's true that sometimes it might
>be a diacritic for length, but I don't think it has to be.
>
>On the other hand, there were people who said "sofer" for sofa and Cuber for
>"Cuba", which, I suppose was a hypercorrection, although it may have been a
>geographic dialect pronunciation of word-final schwa.  Presumably they'd
>have said "Dakoter" too.
>
>As for "Ponca", there is really no regularly-occurring suffix or enclitic
>with a /dh/, the nearest thing to [r] in Ponca, that would explain the
>spellings.
>
>Bob
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Alan H. Hartley
>To: Siouan
>Sent: 2/10/02 11:40 AM
>Subject: Ponca
>
>Lewis & Clark frequently (but by no means always) write the name with
>[r] which I've usually taken to be a spelling indication of the length
>of the preceding [a]. But there are several cases in which it seems more
>than that, e.g., Ponceras, Poncaries.
>
>Does this ring a bell with anyone?
>
>Alan