Osage

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

John,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply!  Let me briefly
restate the two hypotheses I raised in my last post,
and your own view as I understand it.

1) By the Sacred Legend, the Dhegihans originally
   lived east of the Mississippi, in the Ohio Valley.
   At some point before contact, they crossed the
   Mississippi and differentiated into three subgroups:
   the UmaNhaN, or 'Upstream People', who went north,
   the Ugaxpa, or 'Downstream People', who went south,
   and the NiukaNska, or 'People of the Middle Water',
   who lived in between, and became the Osage and Kaw.
   (I think this is the standard popular assumption.)

2) By the Sacred Legend, the Omahas and Quapaws were
   living as one people in the Ohio Valley, together
   with the Ioways.  The Osage and Kaw were already
   settled in the lower Missouri.  This situation
   (minus the Ioways) was reflective of an earlier
   situation where common Dhegihan territory covered
   both the lower Ohio and the lower Missouri,
   together with a section of the Mississippi
   connecting these.  At this time, the name
   NiukaNska, or 'People of the Middle Waters'
   applied to the Dhegihans in general, because
   they lived right at the point where the biggest
   river systems of temperate North America
   intersected.  All commerce between the northern
   Rockies and the Appalachians, and between the
   Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, tended to
   pass through them.  Then some catastrophe,
   presumably a military defeat, forced the eastern
   Dhegihans and associated Ioways to flee to the
   western side of the Mississippi.  The crossing
   itself was disastrous, and the refugees split
   into two major groups temporarily lost from
   each other.  On the west bank, the refugees had
   no recognized territory of their own for
   subsistence, and spent a few hard years bulling
   themselves into the margins of other peoples'
   territories as they gradually reorganized
   themselves into the UmaNhaN and Ugaxpa tribes.
   The tradition of being the 'People of the
   Middle Waters' was abandoned by the humiliated
   refugees, but retained by the undisturbed Osage.
   (This is Rory's pet hypothesis.)

3) The Sacred Legend is a nineteenth century
   concoction designed to explain how linguistically
   related tribes such as the Osage and Quapaw came
   about with respect to the Omaha.  It's claims of
   an earlier homeland in the Ohio Valley are false,
   as is its account of the crossing.  In fact, the
   Dhegihans differentiated in about the area of
   southwestern Minnesota and northwestern Iowa.
   From here, the Osage, Kaw and Quapaw moved south,
   leaving the Omaha-Ponca in their ancestral
   homeland.  (This is John's view, as I understand
   it.)


First, I think John's view has much to recommend it
in terms of geographical parsimony.  If we can place
the Dhegihans here, with the Dakotans in south-central
Minnesota, the Winnebago in eastern Wisconsin, and the
Chiwere in eastern Iowa, then we have all four branches
of MVS neatly wrapped up in a compact area.  Within
this area, dialect gradients can nicely explain
features that link Dakotan with Dhegihan and Winnebago
with Chiwere, and that link Dakotan with Winnebago and
Dhegihan with Chiwere.  Further, we might also be able
to recognize a common MVS archaeological culture in
the Effigy Mound culture, which covered a good section
of that territory.  Is this your thought too, John?

On the other hand, I have to confess to being more
credulous than John is regarding the value of early
accounts based on a people's oral history.  It's not
that I believe in taking them at face value-- I
recognize that a lot of 'history' can be invented by
rationalizations.  However, I think that a lot of the
rationalizing has to do with trying, more or less
honestly, to reconcile local oral traditions with
the larger and better documented body of knowledge
known to the literate community.  Both traditions may
be quite valid, but getting their reference points to
connect is tricky.  The fact that parts of the story
as written may be untenable does not mean that the
account is completely fabricated; more likely it just
means that the author mistakenly attributed the
traditional account of one event or place to another
event or place known to the current literate
community.

That being said, let's discuss some of the specific
arguments.

> There are difficulties here for a modern student.  For example, why are
> all these tribes together, though already differentiated?  There are ways
> that this might happen, but perhaps it represents a literary encoding of
> the recognition that they are lingusitically related, coupled with a lack
> of realization that such a relationship normally arises due to
> differentiation from a common source language.

Why should it be a difficulty that these tribes
should be together?  (I assume you're referring
to the Ioways being with the Dhegihans.)  We don't
know enough about the history of the tribes before
contact even to be sure where they were, much less
to rule out possible social relationships between
them.  Even if we assume that the Ioways were
Oneota and based up in Iowa, just one group of
Ioway visitors that made an impression at the time
could easily have ended up in the Sacred Legend.
And if the Sacred Legend is no more than a naive
rationalization of language differentiation (which
seems intrinsically unlikely to me), why should it
include the geographically distant Quapaw and the
linguistically rather distant Ioways while ignoring
the Osage and Kaw, and the geographically proximate
Dakotans and Winnebagoes?


> There are also some etymological problems.  For example, Ohio actually
> comes from something like Seneca ohi:o?  'Beautiful River' (the
> Allegheny), probably via French, because the English pronunciation acts
> like a spelling pronunciation of a fairly accurate rendition of the
Seneca
> name in French orthography.  If it did come from a name used by this
> wandering collection of Siouan tribes, what process would explain its
> transmission into English?  For that matter, if a suitable process
exists,
> why wouldn't it transmit the Osage equivalent Opha=p=a instead?

Thanks to you and Wally for this information!
This is definitely relevant, but not necessarily
a counter-argument.  So English got Ohio from
the French, who got it from the Seneca, whose
name for the entire Ohio River, including the
Allegheny, was ohi:yo?, probably originally
meaning something like 'Great River', or 'Rio
Grande'.  Now, am I understanding correctly
that Osage Opha=p=a is fully cognate with
Omaha Uha=i, and is also the name for the Ohio
River?  If so, then the question is where the
Dhegihans came up with their name for it.
The Omaha form might easily have come from a
rationalization of the English pronunciation,
but the Osage version could never have arisen
by that route.  It could have come about by
recasting the Omaha into Osage, but why should
the Osage adopt a name for the Ohio River from
the Omaha, who had never been near it, and at
such a late date that the Omaha had learned it
from the Anglo-Americans?  This avenue seems
improbable.

If the resemblance of the Omaha term Uhai to
the English form Ohio is not pure coincidence,
then the name of the Ohio River must have been
common to both Dhegihans and Iroquoians, with
both rationalizing a single 'international'
name into something plausible in their own
respective languages.  For the Iroquoians, it
was rationalized as 'Great River', and for
the Dhegihans it was rationalized as something
like 'Roadway', or 'They Pass Through on It'.
If we accept this, then there are two main
possibilities:

  1) The Dhegihan term is primary.  It was
     reduced from something like Opha=p=a
     originally to something like *Oha=i in
     that wing of Dhegihan closest to the
     Seneca, who picked up the name from
     them and rationalized it to ohi:yo?.

  2) The Dhegihan name is a loadword from
     Seneca or some other source.  In that
     case, the wing of Dhegihan most closely
     involved with the Ohio River rationalized
     the term as Uha=i or whatever, and passed
     it back to the Osage, who recast it into
     their own dialect as Opha=p=a.

Either way, we tend to place the Omaha on
the Ohio River, and east of the Osage.


> While we might be inherently suspicious of an attempt to explain Omaha
> 'upstream' and Quapaw (Okaxpa) 'downstream' in such simple terms, we
might
> be even more suspicious if we knew that the Quapaw name is just one of
> five Quapaw village names, another of which is IMaha(n) (imaNhaN), also
> meaning 'upstream'.  The Imahan villagers later joined the Caddo,
> interestingly enough.  It's not even clear, though it may be true, that
> the name Okaxpa ~ Quapaw originally applied to all the Quapaw people, as
> opposed to just the residents of Okaxpa village proper.  It certainly did
> after the remaining three villages merged with the Quapaw village proper.

Of the Okaxpa and the ImahaN Quaxpa villages,
which was upstream and which downstream of the
other?  If they are in the order expected,
then all this means is that it was common to
refer to any group of related people who lived
upstream of you as the 'Upstream People', and
any who lived downstream of you as the
'Downstream People'.  This could be equally
used to refer to closely grouped villages or
far-flung ethnic kindred.  I don't see anything
here to arouse great suspicion.


> Unfortunately, the Dhegiha groups seem to be very chameleon-like.  They
> look pretty much like their contemporary neighbors, to the extent that
> their early villages have been securely identified.  Some of them, at
> least the Osage for certain, maybe the Omaha (with the Ponca) and Kaw
seem
> to be Oneota associated, but the connections are tenuous, and the overlap
> of territory with the more securely Oneota-affiliated Ioway, Otoe, and
> Missouria makes it difficult to be sure which village sites belonged to
> whom.

Why should the Dhegihans be more chameleon-like
than the Chiwere?  One possible answer to this
question would be that they were refugees from
another archaeological province who moved into
Chiwere territory and had to adopt a Chiwere-like
mode of life.


>> In this view, the Dhegihans must have been very much centered on the
>> big rivers, which might explain how a 'water-monster' would come to be
>> so important in their mythology.  In fact, this 'water-monster' might
>> very well represent the River itself, seen both as a crawling snake
>> and as the central god of their daily existence.

> On the other hand, 'watermonsters' are standard fare in southeastern and
> adjacent mythology and are generally taken to represent alligators.

I think these myths would have to be compared in
more detail.  But in general, why would a people
from Iowa and Minnesota have a mythology about
alligators?


>> There are some advantages to this hypothesis linguistically as well.
>> For one thing, it would give us good grounds for a dialect difference
>> between 'West Dhegihan'-- Osage and Kaw-- and 'East Dhegihan'-- Omaha,
>> Ponca and Quapaw.  The latter are distinguished by the complete
>> collapse of MVS *u into *i.

> On the other hand, this is a relatively simple change, and in other ways
> Omaha-Ponca and Quapaw are not very much alike.  For example, Quapaw has
> k? and x? for *k? and *x?, while Osage and Kaw have k? for both, and
Omaha
> has ? for both.  I think the first three also have the *niNke 'round'
> article where OP has dhaN.  But then OP agrees with IO and Wi in having h
> for *ph in 'I say'.  I think Quapaw does, too, but Osage and Kaw have ph
-
> [ps^] in Osage.  In general, I think we're not yet sure how or if we can
> subgroup Dhegiha, apart from Omaha + Ponca and Osage + Kaw.

The collapse of MVS *u into *i may technically
be a relatively simple change, but its effects
are catastrophic.  It means that every morpheme
in the language that was formerly distinguished
from another only by [u] vs. [i] is now
indestinguishable.  If a couple of rare
consonants like k? and x? collapse, it's fairly
trivial, but for two vowels to collapse,
especially ones so common as [u] and [i], is
devastating.  I agree though that this doesn't
conclusively link Quapaw more closely to OP
than to Osage and Kaw.


>> As a rule, languages that have a high interface with speakers of
>> foreign languages tend to break down phonologically and grammatically,
>> becoming more word centered and syntactically chaotic.

> I'm not sure if I agree with this concept of breakdown, though of course
> there would be traces of the contact.  Maybe you're thinking of
> pidginization?

I'm thinking of what's likely to happen to
the phonology and the subtler aspects of
grammar when a high proportion of the
people speaking the language are non-native
speakers who speak it poorly.  I don't know
if you would call that pidginization, but
the effects would be in that direction.


>> This seems to be what we are seeing in our respective Dhegihan
>> languages, and probably accounts for why we are having so much trouble
>> making sense of them.

> I don't consider any of the Dhegiha languages to be notably chaotic.  I
> admit to having trouble understanding all kinds of things, but I think
> it is just me and my neophyte status with the language.

See our discussions of -i/-bi, proximate and
obviative, the vs. athe.  We do not really
understand these things, and yet we cannot
reliably produce a third-person indicative
statement until we do.  I've been immersing
myself in the Dorsey texts for the past year
and a half.  You wrote a 3"-thick scholarly
grammar of OP back in the 1980's.  I have
trouble understanding all kinds of things
too, but we aren't strictly neophytes any
more, and in this case I don't think the
problem is just us.


>> Comparing Omaha-Ponca to the (originally) more insular Dakotan
>> languages ...

> Dakota is also at an interesting crossroads, geopolitically speaking,
and,

What sort of geopolitical crossroads do you
have in mind here?

> personally, over the years I've come to think that it looks like someone
> who wasn't familiar with some of the finer nuances of proper Siouan
> morphology has been at work simplifying it.  It's not as devoid of
> irregular inflection as Mandan, but they've been working on it. And
what's
> with those second datives and reflexives!

I'm not sure we're connecting on what I was
trying to get across.  I would predict that
a language which, for a very long period of
time, was spoken almost exclusively by native
speakers, would be complex in the sense of
having a highly developed reportoire of
grammatical subtleties, but that this grammar
would tend to be regular.  A language that
had been swallowing a lot of foreign speakers,
or especially one that had seen expansion and
then remixing of people speaking substantially
different dialects, would be complex in the
sense of having a great deal of irregularities
resulting from fragmented and partially
abandoned grammatical forms, yet reduced
phonologically and grammatically simplified
in the sense of becoming more dependent on
crude word order.  I don't know about Mandan,
but Dakotan seems to me more like the former
type, and Dhegihan more like the latter.


Rory