Francis La Flesche and Osage Plural Marking, etc.

[Pustet]

Pustet <Pustet at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> schrieb:
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Kommentar:
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Hi John

Thank you for your explicit comment - this is interesting. As for this strange "Osage" plural marker i, I didn't pursue the issue any further in the paper because I was busy enough with the person markers, and fortunately, the number suffixes didn't turn out to be that important for what I had in mind when writing the paper, i.e. investigating active-stative marking in Lakota and Osage contrastively.

>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.)

I don't know what kind of Omaha-Osage contact situation LaFlesche was in, if any, but could borrowing be an option in explaining his strange "Osage" plurals?

>There are a number of other Omahaisms in LaFlesche 1932, including use
>of an orthography based largely on Omaha-Ponca phonetics.

Plus, the transcription is full of inconsistencies. As for the possible influence of Omaha-Ponca phonetics on LaFlesche's transcription, what you say suggests that he tried to work his way through Osage phonetics on the basis of an Omaha-Ponca template. I could imagine that linguists who have different native language backgrounds, when working on the same language, might come up with slightly different transcriptions. My own typological work with speakers of languages from (almost) all continents shows me, again and again, that in practice, a sound that occurs in two different languages, and is transcribed by the same IPA symbol, is not likely to have the very same acoustic/articulatory properties in the two languages.

Best,
Regina






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