Osage plural

[Pustet]

Pustet <Pustet at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> schrieb:
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Kommentar:
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Well, in that case, it looks like the "Omaha contamination hypothesis" is the only one we're left with. I brought up borrowing and reduction as possible explanations because I just couldn't believe that LaFlesche was that sloppy.

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> OK -- LaFlesche's strong Omaha background should explain a lot about
> his Osage transcription. But what I was wondering is whether the two
> languages were in a contact situation that made borrowing, i.e.
> complete adoption, of Omaha/Ponca plural -i into Osage possible.

No, not really.  The Omaha-Ponca-Ioway-Otoe area was separated from the
Kaw-Osage area in the historical period by the Pawnee area.  The
impression conveyed by the Dorsey texts is that the Omaha were
primarily
in contact with the Otoe and Ponca and Pawnee, while the Ponca were
primarily in contact with the Dakota and Omaha.

In addition, the only attested instance of this plural pattern (and the
other anomalous Omahaisms) is in LaFlesche's dictionary (but not his
texts) in the early 1900s.  The regular Osage pattern is found in
earlier
materials (limited, but extant), in the LaFlesche texts, and in more
recent work with Osage.

> But actually, the more I think about it the less likely I find it
that
> borrowing took place, or that LaFlesche just sort of confused the
> plural marker in Omaha/Ponca with the plural marker in Osage. There
is
> an alternative explanation: if the original state of affairs is a
> plural marker -pi in Osage, it is conceivable that it was shortened
to
> -i in the course of time.

But Bristow and Quintero find pi ~ pa ~ pe today, and LaFlesche uses
these, not i, in his texts.

It is true that *pi has become i in Omaha-Ponca.  In fact, in the
speech
of the two Omahas I worked with it had been reduced to nil except when
certain other morphemes followed it.  So adha=i 'he went' (in the
1890s)
was adha, but adha=i=the remains adha=i=the, or wadhatha=i=ga=hau
remains
wadhatha=i=ga=hau.  Actually, in the 1890s it was generally
wadhatha=i=ga=ha.  Use of =u in male speech has increased since then.
I
have the impression that Poncas may retain =i in final position, and I
have heard annecdotally of recent Omaha speakers who did.

Note that *pi remains bi in Omaha in (a) names, (b) in songs (at least
in
the 1890s), and (c) in certain morphological contexts, e.g., before
=ama
the quotative (so-called - it's more of a marker of reporting used for
things that can't be personally vouched for), or in the negative plural
=b=az^i.  Rory Larson has pointed out that is generally associated with
indirect/unvouched for contexts, even when nothing follows it, and that
=i
alternates with =bi in some morphological contexts to mark that
distinction.

Anyway, there's no doubt that both the true Osage plural/proximate and
the Omaha plural/proximate are cognate with the Dakotan plural.  They
simply have different modern patterns of allomorphy, and LaFlesche's
Osage
Dictionary, for unknown reasons, but undoubtedly reflecting the Omaha
ethnicity of its compiler, has the Omaha pattern.  This does not seem
to
reflect anything about actual Osage usage at any point.

> Such reductive processes are normal, especially with high-frequency
> items, as Bybee and others tell us, and plural markers are in this
> category.  The Lakota plural marker, which happens to be -pi as well,
> is a case in point: in today's spoken Lakota, the full form -pi is
not
> that frequent. Realizations of the plural marker run the gamut from
> -pi, -p, -b, -m, -mp to vowels or semivowels like -w, -u, -o, etc.

I've often wondered if just this sort of reduction probably explained
the
pattern of plurals in Crow-Hidatsa, where, in fact, vowels like this
are
the main plural marker in Crow.  It could even explain =tu in
Southeastern, e.g., Biloxi, if the -r- here is epenthetic between the
stem
and the plural "vowel."  I assume the various reductions are parallel
rather than old.

It also looks to me like the present inflected future auxiliary of Crow
and Hidatsa, which looks quite different from the situation in Dakotan,
is
linked to it by the habit in Dhegiha of combining =tta (reflex of
*=ktE)
with the standing and other positionals, =tta=miNkhe 'I will',
tta=dhiNkhe
'you will', =tta=akha 'he will'.  In short, the auxiliary pattern in CH
could be a highly reduced variant of an analog of the Dhegiha
construction.  So =tta=miNkhe, etc., reduced to =wi, etc.  In Omaha
=tta=dhiNkhe can certainly reduce in fast speech to =tta=iNkh.

> That Osage -pi is still -pi in LaFlesche's and Dorsey's ceremonial
> texts would fit the overall picture because ceremonial language tends
> to be more conservative than everyday language, in which structural
> reduction happens first. Best, Regina

The problem is that the informal daily speech of the last generations
of
Osage speakers has =pi ~ =p=e (essentially no male speakers recorded!),
not =bi ~ =i.

It is a bit distressing to have the major lexical resource for Osage
contaminated (or maybe hybridized would be a better term) in this way,
and
even more so not to know exactly why, but we have what we have.  I can
attest that Omaha speakers who looked at LaFlesche were generally
pleased
with it.  Still, a good deal about it is not Omaha-Ponca.  It's not
what I
would have come up with myself as a generic, cross-dialect
representation
of Dhegiha, but maybe LaFlesche was groping toward something like that.

Probably for such a purpose one would want to write =pi, even though
Osage
generally has =p=e, and Omaha-Ponca generally have =i.  You'd probably
want to write ptk or maybe ptck, instead of bdg.  How you'd represent
*W
and *R, which come out mn in OP and ptc in Osage, I don't know.  Maybe
b
and d?  You'd want to write all five vowels, even if OP reduces i and u
to
i, and has something more like u for o.  You'd definitely have to write
aspiration, but maybe with h rather than the Osage x ~ s^ alternation.
The second persons of *r-stems in *s^-R-, which come out s^n > n in OP
and
s^t > s^t ~ sc in Osage would be a problem.  I guess they would have to
be
s^d, but the modern reflexes are rather different.





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