Osage

[David Costa]

> 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.)

It may be of interest to people that the Shawnee and Miami names for the
Ohio River essentially translate as the 'Kansa River'. That is, that it
contains a root which is otherwise the same root as found in both languages'
names for the Kaws. This might indicate that the presence of Dhegiha
speakers on the lower Ohio extended into more recent times than we think.

>> 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?

The Great Lakes Algonquian tribes all have water monster legends. Even the
Cheyennes have one. I think it's safe to say that any identification of this
water monster with alligators is a later, post-contact attempt to assign an
English name to the monster. (That said, tho, in the earliest contact times
apparently there *did* used to be alligators in the lowest stretches of the
Ohio river, and there are known specific words for 'alligator' in Miami,
Shawnee, and Unami Delaware.)

> 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.

Not necessarily -- Cheyenne probably has never been acquired by many second
language speakers, yet it has a lot of highly irregular, unpredictable
morphology. We know enough about Algonquian historical phonology to know
that this is entirely the result of several waves of very severe sound
changes sweeping over Cheyenne, creating a lot of surface opacity in the
morphology, which, for whatever reason, the speakers never saw fit to
regularize. Another example might be the Louisiana isolate Chitimacha,
probably never learned by many 'new' people, which is characterized by
surprisingly short words, and a lot of irregular and usually nonproductive
morphology. I think we have to be extremely cautious about making
generalizations on these typological grounds, at least where the pre-contact
histories simply are not known.

David