postural verbs, verbs of motion

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Justin McBride wrote:
> Okay, here's a truly ignorant question or two.  An Osage friend of mine once
> told me that 'waz^az^e' was an Otoe word originally.  I had never heard this
> before.  Has anyone else ever heard this or anything like it?

I haven't heard that before.  I'd tend to be skeptical, because the name
occurs in several of the Dhegiha groups as a clan or subclan name.  It's
one of the standard pan-Dhegiha clan names, in fact:  Honga, Ponca, Osage,
and Kansa.  There are some others less well known, but equally
well-distributed, e.g., Washabe (Hunt Police Standard), Light-colored
Buffalo Bull, Stiff-Legs, etc. Anyway, the Omaha-Ponca instance of the
Osage clan is among the Ponca.

The closest equivalent outside Dhegiha is waz^az^a as a band name among
some Dakotan groups.  This would be more or less regular as a
correspondence, if *z^V'z^E were an expected root pattern, but it's not.
There are some *z and *z^ sets within Mississippi Valley, but, as Matthews
pointed out, they're anomalous.  It looks like the normal pattern is
post-accentual voicing for essentially voiceless fricatives.  The
exceptions are few and hence interesting, or result (in Dhegiha) from some
perturbation like *y > z^, which converts all *y-initials to z^-initials.
Because of this, I tend to think that the waz^az^a band name might be a
loan from Dhegiha.

There is a Dhegiha stative verb *was^o's^e 'brave, generous' - one of
those interesting wa-initial statives - that sometimes gets confused with
waz^a'z^e, but it's probably unrelated.

I seem to recall - but I'd have to confirm - that Miner gives the
Winnebago version of Osage as woras^, which is consistant with *yas^- as
the root, but offers yet another vowel in the prefix.

> Also, I have seen in a couple of places a word like 'nialus^ka' or
> something to that effect (forgive me if I messed that up, I am having
> difficulty recalling the word) used as the "Osage word for Osage," but
> I can't be sure of where I even came across it.

Dhegiha terms for 'man' (in the sense of 'human') are based on nikka-,
e.g., OP nikkas^iNga ~ nias^iNga.  The root nikka- - I don't know that it
occurs indendent of various compounds - is sort of a parallel of Dakotan
wic^ha-, but not cognate with it (by any regular processes).  It would
come from *nihka- or *riNhka-, whereas Dakotan wic^ha- looks like *wihka-
(or possibly *wiya-.  Obviously there's a potential for an irregular
connection.

I assume s^iNga is some how connected with OP s^iNgaz^iNga 'baby', in
which z^iNga 'little' matches Dakotan c^hiNc^a < *yiNka.  I don't know if
s^iNga is a doublet of z^iNga, but I suspect it might be.  (I've seen
somewhere that the Osage call themselves 'the little ones', but I don't
know the actual Osage of that.)

I'm not sure how to account for OP nias^iNga, but I suspect it might be a
backformation from nikkas^iNga, perhaps on the assumption that kk is from
kki- , the reflexive.  I think that nias^iNga does tend to be applied to
'other people' as opposed to nikkas^iNga 'related people'.  I'm not sure
the semantics work for that and I may be off target on the meaning.  It's
not easy to figure this out from the texts what distinction, if any,
exists between the two terms.  It's not a regular phonological reduction,
say, for fast speech.  I have the impression that Omahas and Poncas aren't
precisely sure when they use one term or the other, though I suspect some
regular principle is involved.  It's certainly an interesting question
from a lexicographical point of view.

The word nialus^ka that you cite isn't familiar to me.  There is Os
iloNs^ka : OP hedhus^ka for the Hethushka (or Omaha or Grass or Hot)
Dance.

> The popular story around these parts is that 'Osage' is a corruption
> of the words for "middle water" (isn't that similar to the word for
> China?).

?Jung Gwo 'middle country'  I'm blanking 'middle' in OP!