Attn. Dhegiha specialists.

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Kathleen Shea wrote:
> My first reaction, since we've recently had the dedication of the Dole
> Institure for Politics here on campus and Kansas symbols are fresh in
> my mind, was that the inscription might be an attempt to render the
> Kansas state motto (since 1877) into Kansa from Latin:  "ad astra per
> aspera," usually translated 'to the stars through difficulties.' Of
> course, the Kansa version wouldn't have to have the word for "star" in
> it, but might mean something like "to the farthest reaches through
> striving."  ....

The motto idea is excellent, though I don't think this text can represent
the Kansas state motto.  I wonder if the Kaw tribe has a motto?  I think
some plain old detective work without linguistics in mind might help here.
I suspect that there must be a newspaper article somewhere on this chair,
or some correspondence.  I'd guess LaFlesche's BAE correspondence would be
relevant if the time frame was correct.  However, I think he was retired
by this point.


> ...  The only resource I have at hand is Fletcher and La Flesche's
> _The Omaha Tribe_.  This morning I did call my 90-year-old Ponca
> language consultant, Uncle Parrish, who had just gottten back to his
> home in Oklahoma from a trip.  I spelled out the syllables of the
> inscription to him, which he painstakingly wrote down, and then I
> tried to pronounce it to him in various ways, without it resulting in
> his being able to recognize very much.  He did remark that we Poncas
> would say "maNthiN" instead of "maNniN."  (I told him that the words
> could be Kansa, Osage, or Omaha-Ponca, since we think that La Flesche
> himself or his writing system had probably been the source for the
> writing.)  Naturally, it was very difficult for us to hear well and to
> communicate about this over the phone.

I think this tends to confirm the difficulties with MA-NI being a second
person, and also the general Osage tenor of the vocabulary.

> I'll try to address some of the comments raised earlier.  Yes, the
> "TH" indicates that at least some of the inscription must be
> Omaha-Ponca or Osage, which I understand has edh intervocalically and
> word-initially, as in the Osage /kkodha/ 'friend' that Carolyn
> Quintero pointed out.  And, by the way, I have seen the word /kkodha/
> (written "kola," as I recall) written in at least one Ponca song that
> was shown and played on tape to me several years ago by Henry Collins,
> ...  I remember remarking at the time on the word "kola" 'friend' and
> his telling me that it was an alternate word for /khaage/ that
> sometimes ocurs in Ponca songs. ...

This is interesting!  I've noticed that the vocabulary and even morphology
of songs is rather eclectic.  Things occur there that are rare in narrated
text, like the postposition =ha, and there are old or maybe foreign words,
as Kathy suggests.  There are even songs that have such different sets of
sentence final markings that they seem to be adapted from other SIouan
languages.  I remember one song with eska as a sentence final marker.  I
think I remember Bob remarking once that this was the Kaw quotative.

> ...  It makes me wonder if the inscription could be a quote from a
> well-known song, or even Curtis's family song, if he had one.  ...

Another excellent suggestion.  It seems to me that many song genres and
modern Hedhus^ka songs especially are very brief, and lacking in elaborate
use of conjunctions.  This could be a the entire lyric of a song, though I
have no idea if it fits teh requirements of a lyric.

> "MO-NI" could have the second person reading 'you walk.' On the other
> hand, I have observed that [dh] sometimes alternates with [n] in the
> pronunciation of /dh/ in Ponca speech, although the only example I can
> think of right now might exemplify a difference between Ponca and
> Omaha pronunciation, as in the word for the trickster /is^tinikhe/
> (Ponca) versus /is^tidhiNkhe/ (Omaha).

This is one of my standard examples, certainly!

> And by the way, I have never heard /s^/ or /h/ before n in r-stem
> verbs pronounced as the realization of a second-person prefix or
> before /naN/ and /namaN/, the habitual marker, in modern Ponca, as
> also John Koontz says he hasn't in Omaha.

No, exactly.  That was one of the surprising things about the s^n vs. n
example Rory offered.  However, I think Rory has probably now heard more
spoken Omaha from more various speakers than I ever did.

> The main issue that I would like to raise is why we haven't considered
> the possibility that "C" could be La Flesche's c-cedilla without the
> cedilla (to look more "American"?) and so could ambiguously represent
> /s/ or /z/, as La Flesche does consistently in _The Omaha Tribe_ and
> elsewhere (e.g., in ",ci" for both /si/ 'foot' and /zi/ 'yellow'),
> despite his saying in the "Phonetic Guide" in the opening pages that
> c-cedilla "has the sound of th in thin."

In regard to that c-cedilla = th, I think (a) I recall reading a note from
Dorsey that the LaFlesche famil pronounced s as theta, though it has been
a while since I thought about that, and (b) I know that Alice Fletcher
definitely wrote th for s (thee for si 'foot', for example) in
transcribing the names and various incidental vocabulary for the residents
of "The Village of Make-Believe Whitemen."  I suspect this is a dialect
feature of that village/band.  An additional factor here is that Dorsey
(and the BAE?) used c-cedilla to represent theta.

Anyone strongly influenced by the LaFlesche orthography is going to be
saddled with the unfortunate c-cedilla convention, and so I definitely
considered what the implications might be of the letter in the
inscriptsions being C, whether it represented an apical fricative or a
velar stop.  It was at this point that I examined the image Bob supplied
closely and concluded that all the potential C's were actually G's.

Kathy's observations on the procs and cons of the C's being K's concur
exactly with my thoughts on the matter.

> ... La Flesche inconsistently represents the tense stops of Osage in
> _The Omaha Tribe_, where he doesn't use subscript dots (with the
> exception of one place that John noticed?), for example, /kk/ as "k"
> in "WakoN'da" ('God') on page 65 and "gk" in "Gka'washiNka" 'Little
> horse' (a personal name) on page 64, unless I haven't noticed a
> consistent pattern for his written Osage.

I think that Gk is used only in certain name lists, probably prepared at a
particular point in time and inserted in place in the text.  The comments
on language in Chapter 15 includes p. 606 bpixoN as the first person of
bixoN 'to break with the weight of the body', which suggests that this
part was done at about the same time, though, for example, the same page
has pahe- for ppahe 'hill' instead of bpahe.

The list of river names pp. 89-94 was the one section of The Oaha Tribe
that I found in my quick scan of the LaFlesche papers at the NAA.  It did
use dots under k for kk, etc., though these dots do not appear in the text
in The Omaha Tribe.  I assume this list was not actually considered to
form part of the manuscript for The Omaha Tribe, if that still exists, but
was a separate creation that got included in it and was subsequently filed
separately.

This definitely tells us that LaFlesche (and Fletcher) used several
different orthographies at various times, and that the usage in The Omaha
Tribe involves several different systems combined without any great
attempt at consistancy.  In addition, some of the systems were applied
without much consistancy within themselves.  The system in the Osage
Dictionary is the "final" system, the most developed, and the most
consistantly applied.

> As far as the length of the first stem vowel in Osage /koNdha/ (Ponca
> "gaNaNtha" ' to wish, want, desire,' or in one instance, 'to try to
> become' as in, "Gini gaNaNtha(a)!"  'Try to get better!' (imperative,
> female speech), written in the practical orthography adopted by the
> Ponca Nation), I think that it probably is long (/oNoN/).  At least it
> is in the Ponca counterpart, I would say.  John raised this question
> about length.

At this point I'm somewhat inclined to see KO^NONTHA as an attempt to
write something like the Omaha kkaN aNdhaNdha 'I hope' form, but then the
following I of IHA would have to mean that the object was plural i.e., 'I
hope (for) these things', which doesn't seem to fit with the top part
being the complement.  Of course, I assume that the 'I hope' form aimed at
is the Osage equivalent, whatever that would be, not the specific
Omaha-Ponca form.  Over the years I have grown cautious, and I no longer
assume Osage will turn out to be Omaha-Ponca pronounced with an Osage
accent.  On some points it is grammatically and lexically quite different,
as this inscription has so far tended to confirm and illustrate.  Thus,
essentially only MA-NI is recognizable in Omaha-Ponca terms and the N
seems to render the form incorrect to the ears of Omaha-Ponca speakers
anyway.  The rest of the lexicon seems to be Osage forms that do not exist
in the same meanings in ordinary Omaha or Ponca speech.

> I've been transcribing some stories recently, and in all the person
> forms, most of which have the accent on the first--or stem--syllable,
> I seem to hear a long vowel.  Even in the I-you form, where the accent
> shifts to the portmanteau person prefix /wi-/, I think I hear a long
> /aNaN/:  /wi'kkaNaNbdha/.  However, in the inclusive form that occurs
> in one of the stories, I definitely hear a long vowel:
> /aNgaNaN'dhai/ 'we want.' This could be explained by the presence of
> an infixed inclusive person marker /aN-/ in this doubly inflecting
> verb, which I think is present, but even in the third person, where
> the accent often shifts to the following stem vowel in verbs, it
> remains on the first, as shown in John's example using /gaNaN'dha/ of
> a type 1 g-stem active verb at his website under "Morphology," an
> indication that the first stem vowel is long, having "attracted" the
> accent:  gaN'=dha=i 'he/she heard it' (sic).

While very interested in the length observations, I find that accent is
generally confined to the first simple form in a compound stem, so I
wouldn't expect it to advanced onto dha in gaN'=dha=i, even without
length.  This is Omaha-Ponca's version of the "no accent on enclitics"
rule in Dakotan.  There are a few peculiar exceptions.  If it weren't for
examples like wi'kkaNaN=bdha, it would be easier to see length as
secondary and conditioned by accent.