Ponca

[bi1 at soas.ac.uk]

as an interesting doilaect aside in the area of Bristol (Bristow or
Bristoe in older writings) in Western England there is a
pronunciation which makes final -a into -ol. So India and China are
pronounced Indiol and Chinol.  There is a complicated joke about
three girls called Vera (Veral), Vena (Venal) and something
else, but I can't remember the details.

BruceOn 10 Feb 2002, at 16:44, Rankin, Robert L 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


Dr. Bruce Ingham
Reader in Arabic Linguistic Studies
SOAS