Winnebago info

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 1 Jan 2003, David Kaufman wrote:
> Upon my relatively brief perusal of the Winnebago Grammar so far, I
> did see that n seems to replace r after a nasal vowel.

Miner consistently wrote this as n-hacek, and I think Lipkind may have had
a different-from-n treatment, too.  However, a number of sources do just
write n, and I'm not able to comment on the alternatives.

> I wasn't aware of the m and w, and I also did not know about a special
> nasalized r (but doesn't the r change to n after a nasalized vowel?).

This analysis was offered by Terry Kaufman in some material on
Proto-Siouan phonology he prepared in the 1960s.  This material hasn't
been much consulted, but he provided a xerox for the Comparative Siouan
Dictionary project which is in the Siouan Archives.  What I've actually
seen is a sort few pages of summary notes on Siouan and Proto-Siouan
phonologies, without cognate sets, which David Rood received earlier and
and distributed to his Historical Siouan Seminar a year or so earlier.

It was w ~ m and r ~ n *before* nasal vowels.  The shift of r to n or a
special nasalized version of r distinct from both r and n after nasal
vowels is a separate, additional phenomenon.  The tendency of m and n to
be variants of w and r (or w and edh, etc., depending on the language) is
widespread in Siouan, but there are usually a few exceptions one way and
the other, w before nasal vowels, or m before oral ones, and so on, that
make it difficult to press the generalization too far.  Winnebago
represents a case in which either such exceptions are lacking, or,
perhaps, given the lack of knowledge of the language, they haven't been
properly noted.

> I am reminded of the Hidatsa (although this may include other Siouan
> languages too) trait of m and w being allophonic as well as (I think)
> b and n especially when in word initial position.  Apparently in
> Hidatsa m comes out in the "careful" slow pronunciation instead of w.
> Hidatsa also seems to have a habit of making -voiced consonants into
> +voiced in medial positions, e.g., p > b, k > g.  (John B, please
> correct me on any of this if I'm wrong.)  Is this also a trait of
> other Siouan languages?

Both Crow and Hidatsa have rather different patterns of conditioning for
the oral and nasal sonorants - different from each other and different
from the rest of Siouan.  Kaufman's unpublished work is as close as anyone
has come to looking at the matter across the whole family without taking
it for granted that all languages have nasal stops and that nasality is
primarily a consonantal feature.  The more I heard about nasality in
various Siouan languages the less I feel I understand it.