Winnebago Vowel Length (Re: Helmbrecht Paper: Terminology 'modal prefix')

[DANKER, KATHLEEN]

On Mon, 8, Jul 2002, John Kuntz wrote:
"I suppose working with Winnebago speakers, it must be clear that
their perception is that the h is organic."

This was certainly true of the late Felix White, Sr., with whom I
worked for several years.  When I would ask him to spell out taped Ho
Chunk phrases, he would regularly reinsert h sounds that had not been
pronounced.  He wrote the h sound in the syllabary with a star symbol
which he said stood for "the breath."  This had religious
significance for him because it was connected with the breath of the
creator and the sacredness of the Ho Chunk language.

K.D. Danker


>On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, R. Rankin wrote:
>  > The verb 'eat' ordinarily implies 'eat SOMEthing', so I'd expect
>  > waruuc (or waaruc or whatever it is) ...
>
>One of the little appreciated aspects of Winnebago vowel length is that it
>is somewhat variable.
>
>My understanding is that Winnebago lengthens monosyllables, so, whatever
>the implicit length of ruc^, it would be ruu'c^ (or ru'uc^, as Miner would
>position the accent).  I don't know if adding enclitics affects this, so I
>don't actually know if it's ru'c^-s^aNnaN or ruu'c^-s^aNnaN, for example,
>when you add the declarative.  I do know that the declarative is s^a(N)naN
>after consonants, naN after vowels, which seems like a good candidate for
>an unusual phonological rule, if anyone is collecting them.
>
>This verb doesn't inflect regularly, so it's not possible to see if the
>first person, say, is *haruu'c^ or *haru'c^, revealing whether the stem is
>inherently long or not.  In fact, the first person is haa' c^, the second
>person raa'c^, which will no doubt strike the Dakotanists as familiar
>looking.  But, the inclusive is given by Miner as hiNnu'c^, and the
>wa-form (or activity form, perhaps) is waru'c^ in the same source, so I
>think we can take this as an underlying short-stem |[ru'c^]|, to the
>extent that it has a stem ...  And, looking around, this is a common
>pattern:  CVV'C : haCV'C.  I haven't yet noticed any CVV'C : haCVV'C.
>
>Now, the next step is to look at the inflection of the wa-form, and in the
>first and second persons Miner gives waha'c^ and wara'c^, not, for
>example, *wahaa'c^ and *waraa'c^.  So it seems that the length of haa'c^
>and raa'c^ is also due to monosyllabicity, rather than inherent length,
>though these are certainly candidates for contracted forms.
>
>A further step, is to look at wa+ha+ruc^, which, as expected by analogy
>with Dhegiha is 'table' ('something to eat on').  This is waaru'c^, which
>is what you expect if you start with Pre-Winnebago (a lot like Chiwere or
>even Dhegiha, though the root is different there) *wa-a'-ruc^e and apply
>first deletion of final e after simple stops, then Dorsey's Law (no
>effect), and then Winnebago Accent Shift.
>
>A point to make here is that everyone who works directly with Winnebago -
>and Helmbrecht is no exception - takes the approach that morphemes like
>the locatives ha, hi, ho, or the pronominals ha A1, hiN P1, hiN A12, etc.,
>are h-initial, but lose these h's when something precedes them.  So wa-ha
>is waa-, for example.  From a comparativist point of view, however, a more
>likely scenario is that Winnebago just adds an epenthetic haitch to the
>start of words that begin underlyingly with a vowel.  Notable exceptions
>are verbs that we think of for comparative reasons as *?-initial, like
>*?uN 'to do', which is uNuN in Winnebago.  (First person, incidentally, is
>ha?uN' - glottal stop, short stem vowel.)  Another kind of exception seems
>to be initial long vowels, like aagi' 'be ready', or at least
>monosyllables like aa' 'arm'.
>
>I suppose working with Winnebago speakers it must be clear that their
>perception is that the h is organic.
>
>There are some interesting wrinkles to that situation, however.  First,
>the first person does lose its h in contractions usually, e.g., per
>Lipkind ha < ha + ha.  But notice that now we would expect to have haa
>with an epenthetic h before long a.  In fact, checking the inflection of
>ha-verbs in Miner, I do find mostly haaCV'... first persons, e.g., hac^i'
>'to live on' vs. haac^i' 'I live on', but you have to be careful, because
>an underlying n-stem, for example, will behave differently, e.g.,
>hanaNxguN' 'to listen' vs. hanaNaN'xguN 'I listen'.  There is normally a
>shift of accent in an n-stem first person, e.g., naNaNs^e' 'to take away
>from' vs. naNaN's^e 'I take away form'.  There is also haniN' 'to live'
>and 'I live', but Miner gives 'I live' as haaniN' in his first IJAL
>article on Winnebago accent, so the dictionary entry is probably a typo.
>
>Then consider the verb 'to eat' mentioned above.  The wa-form had the
>first person waha'c^, not waa'c^.  No loss of h here.  Perhaps of interest
>here is that though Dhegiha simply lacks any initial in all the first
>person pronouns, e.g., OP a A1, aN P1, aN A12, Ioway-Otoe, a close
>relation of Winnebago, has ha A1, hiN P1, hiN A12.  Neither the Dhegiha
>languages nor Ioway-Otoe have epenthetic haitch.  (In fact, the closest
>case I can think of is in Shawnee.)  So perhaps h-initials in first person
>pronominals have a sort of half-way status between organic and epenthetic.
>
>Another interesting h-context is the causative, which is a suffixed ha
>A1, ra A2, hi A3.  The inflection of 'to kill', for example, is t?ee'hi
>'to kill' vs. t?ee'ha 'I killed'.  Note also t?ee'wahi < t?ee'-wa-ha-hi 'I
>killed them'.  But both h's are lost after a consonant, e.g., ceebi' 'to
>consume' vs. ceeba' 'I consume', but ceebwa'hi 'to consume something'.
>I'm not sure why the two different accentual patterns for monosyllabic
>root causatives.
>
>JEK