Francis LaFlesche and Osage Plural Marking, etc.

[Koontz John E]

This is a comment for Regina Pustet, actually, whose new IJAL article
comments on the puzzling difference between the Osage plural in LaFlesche
1932 and in subsequent work.

The Osage plural (or augment) marker is =pi, usually fused with the male
or female declarative as =p=a (=pa) or =p=e (=pe).  This is attested from
the late 1800s on, at least.  The plural morpheme appears in the LaFlesche
1932 Osage dictionary in an entirely Omaha-Ponca form as =i (and maybe
sometimes =bi, which occurs in Omaha-Ponca in certain circumscribed
contexts).  This is not Osage usage.  It is one of several pervasive
"Omahaisms" in LaFlesche's presentation of Osage here.

I do not know the explanation of these, other than the obvious possibility
that LaFlesche had a sort of an Osage-in/Omaha-out approach to remembering
Osage.  In his defense, the dictionary was published posthumously, so he
may not have gotten to do all the editing he'd have liked to do, and,
also, I believe things are essentially correct in his Osage texts, which
contradicts the "Omaha-out" suggestion.  The plurals are also right in
Dorsey's Osage text.  (Unfortunately, the texts in question are ritual
texts, and so somewhat limited in variety as to vocabulary and
morphology, which means they haven't attracted the attention that the
Omaha texts have.)

There are a number of other Omahaisms in LaFlesche 1932, including use of
an orthography based largely on Omaha-Ponca phonetics.  So bdg are used
for ptk, for example.  He did distinguish c (ts) (as ds), and he did mark
ph/kh as psh and ksh (most of the time) before i and e.  He somewhat less
consistently represents ph/th ~ ch/kh as p/t ~ ts/k (without underdot) in
other contexts.  (In fact, ph and kh are px and kx where not psh and
ksh, somewhat recalling the situation in Teton.)

The underdot is used with tense stops (or preaspirates)  pp/tt ~ cc/kk and
ejectives.  Ejectives are conceptualized as a tense stop plus an exploded
(preglottalized) vowel.  LaFlesche had difficulty distinguishing Osage u
([u-umlaut]) from Osage i, though he often writes iu or ui for u (and
sometimes i).  He also writes i for u.  The two vowels merge in Osage.
Not hearing u properly, he often writes o as u, following the phonetics of
*o in Omaha-Ponca.

LaFlesche records s : z as c-cedilla, which represents theta : edh as
explained in the pronunciation key.  I guess the key really only mentions
theta, but there was certainly an edh variant, too.  Only not in Osage.
The pronuniciation key was lifted from his Omaha work and seems to
reflect the pronunciation of the dialect of Omaha spoken in the WiNjage
village where LaFlesche was raised.  Most Omaha-Ponca speakers and all
Osage speakers have s : z.

The edh here almost certainly contrasts with the other, better known "edh"
that Omaha-Ponca has for r or l.  That may be really something like a
retroflex l, though opinions differ.  Anyway, it is l-like in many places,
as the Osage version is rather r-like.  Anyway, the r or l that comes out
"edh" is not a voiced interdental, though it is acoustically similar to
American English voiced th in various contexts.

As far as I know, no Osage speakers have an actual theta or edh for
LaFlesche's c-cedillas.  They have s or z and always have, as far as the
records show.  Of course, there were a lot of Osage speakers at one point,
so who knows.  It doesn't seem likel, however, that LaFlesche actually
encountered anyone with that usage.

For some reason LaFlesche chose to merge s and z (or theta and edh) in his
c-cedilla scheme.  He also merges x and gh (gamma) as x.  He does
distinguish esh and zhee as sh : zh.  The functional load of voicing in
fricatives is low in Dhegiha (though everyone distinguishes, for example,
si 'foot' vs. zi 'yellow').  The same low functional load combined with a
few contrasts occurs in the rest of Mississippi Valley Siouan.  But since
zh comes from both *z and *y, there are more cases where merging sh and zh
would get you in trouble.  Or maybe it just feels distributionally wrong
to combine them.  Initial *y and hence initial zh is much more common than
initial voiced fricatives.

One other Omahaism of note is that LaFlesche inflects th-stems (the second
edh) as bth-/(sh)n-/th-, mostly, whereas Osage actually does something
like br-/sht- ~ sc-/dh-.  Given his orthographic predilections, this might
have been written bth-/sht- ~ sts-/th-, and, in fact, sometimes it is.

Otherwise, he sometimes writes p < *W in instrumentals and elsewhere as m,
the Omaha-Ponca version, e.g., Osage po comes out mu (or pu).

LaFlesche may also have an Omaha-Ponca tendency in his definitions of
words, but it is hard to be sure, because a lot of what bothers modern
Osage speakers about his definitions is not really Omaha influence, but
the influence of old fashioned educated English or old fashioned Western
regional English, and specifically the English used in Native American
contact situations.

One final note:  LaFlesche often annotates a form as "Om[aha] same"
which is very helpful to students of Omaha-Ponca.  A certain amount of
caution has to be used with this, however.  For example, t.se 'buffalo'
is, of course, t.e (tte) in Omaha, even though t.se is marked as "Om.
same."

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz