Francis La Flesche and Osage Plural Marking, etc.

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Pustet wrote:
> 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.

Right, I don't think any of the Omahaisms in LaFlesche would influence the
result of this study.

> 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?

Joseph LaFlesche and his children, including Francis, were enrolled
members of the Omaha Tribe.  Joseph's brother (half-brother, I think) also
named Francis, lived with the Ponca and I assume he was enrolled there,
too, though I've read less about him.  The paternal grandfather, Joseph's
father, also named Joseph LaFlesche (or LaFleche) was a French trader, and
his sons, including Francis's father Joseph, followed in his footsteps.
I wonder if the senior Joseph LaFlesche might also have been metis.  Not a
lot is known about him, and Omaha and Ponca tradition tends to assess
ethnic identity based on the father's ancestry.  He is explicitly
identified as French, but a great many people fell into categories
regarded as whitemen (French) by the Omaha and related groups, but Indian
by American authorities.  I assume they would have been metis/mestizo in
French/Spanish categorizations.  I've not encountered anything on Joseph
LaFlesche, Sr., that wasn't basically a footnote to the history of his
sons.

Francis was a native speaker of Omaha and fluent in English as a result of
schooling.  His father is reputed to have spoken Omaha, Otoe, Pawnee, and
French, and to have learned a little English late in life.  Francis
LaFlesche was an acquainted with Dorsey and did some consulting on Omaha
for him, but became associated with the ethnographer Alice Fletcher, who
adopted him.  They coauthored The Omaha Tribe, published by the BAE.  He
was an employee of the BIA, and later the BAE.  As a BAE ethnographer he
worked primarily on Osage, collecting a long series of ritual recitations
and publishing them.  The Osage Dictionary comes out of that and includes
some earlier work from other sources.  He is reputed to have been working
on an Omaha dictionary in his latter years, but I assume this is the
result of some contemporary confusion with the Osage dictionary, which, in
the event, seems to be somewhere in between!

It's generally considered (since it has been recognized) that the Omaha in
Francis LaFlesche's Osage is due to influence from his native language.
After all Omaha and Osage are very closely related, perhaps as close as
some of the more distinct dialects of Dakotan.  It's puzzling, though,
that the texts he recorded seem less influenced in this way.  In those,
however, he had cultural reasons for reproducing the material exactly.  In
some cases at least he had to memorize the material, as the speakers would
not permit recordings or transcription on the spot.  These materials had
to be memorized and reproduced exactly to be ritually effective.

The case of the orthography and its implied phonetics may be a bit
different.  It was originally developed for use in The Omaha Tribe.
There are traces of two stages in its development in that book.  In some
places the tense stops are spelled bp, dt, gk, in others just p, t, k
(identical to the aspirates).  The NAA has one piece of manuscript
material for The Omaha Tribe that I was able to locate, the list of river
names.  In this list tense ptk are underdotted.  But the dots disappear in
the publication.  I assume somebody - probably not Francis himself -
decided to leave them out.  I tend to suspect Fletcher overruled LaFlesche
on the dots, but perhaps it was someone on the staff of the Government
Printing Office or BAE.  There are a few samples of Fletcher's
transcriptions here and there, though mostly not in The Omaha Tribe.  She
writes th for s, for example, confirming that s was [theta] in the WiNjage
village.  In some cases she (and Francis) use the Hamilton transcription,
which has ae for e, e for i, and so on.

> 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.

Yes.  The same was true of the morphology as well, though this not evident
in the texts, as far as I can tell.  The Christian missionary quotations
at the end of LaFlesche 1932 are also pretty much right.  LaFlesche (or
his postumous editor, whoever that may have been?) lifted them from
another source.  Carolyn Quintero has a full copy of that in her files.

Incidentally, the verb

miNkshe
niNkshe
thiNkshe

is the animate 'sitting' positional.  It is typically used as a definite
article (with animate obviative sitting NPs), and as an auxiliary in
various verbal constructions (continuous and future).  It has a mixed ?/r
inflectional pattern rather like the comparable form in Dakotan.  The
Omaha version has aspirated k as [kh], of course, rather than [ksh].
(And for those who don't know the LaFlesche system, the th here is edh,
not aspirate t.)