Attn. Dhegiha specialists.

[Rory M Larson]

>> Also, the time the chair
>> was given to Curtis coincides very closely with the time the
>> dictionary was published.  I wonder if Francis La Flesche
>> was not involved in redacting that inscription?

> Good thought.  I wonder.  It never bothered La Flesche to mix languages
(OS
> and OP) in the OS dictionary.  I don't suppose it would have bothered him
to
> give the Osage for an inscription he was asked to provide in Kaw.  That's
> certainly worth pursuing.
>
> Bob

So we have an Omaha linguist who publishes an Osage dictionary
under a U.S. Vice President who is part Kaw.  And wasn't there
an oil boom that made the Osages notably wealthy around this time?

It makes me think there may have been a pan-Dhegihan movement
in this period.  These languages are close enough to be arguably
dialects of each other.  Suppose La Flesche was actually
vacillating between writing a dictionary of Osage (were the
Osages supporting his work?) and writing a general Dhegihan
dictionary.  This might be like us trying to write a dictionary
of "Southern".  We would get the words and expressions that were
special to our subject language, as well as some of the phonology,
but we would probably keep our standard English spelling for most
of the common words, even though the pronunciation was different.
If La Flesche was approaching Osage, and perhaps Kaw, in this way,
from a standard Dhegihan orthography based on Omaha, it might
explain some of his apparent tendency to mix languages.

In this case, he should have tended to keep the Omaha version of
spelling where Omaha had the full phoneme.  Thus, Os. or Kaw /o/
would come out as OP /u/, and Os. /-/ and Kaw /y/ would come out
as OP /dh/.  But if the other language seemed to throw in an extra
phoneme, as with the affricativization of dental stops, this
would be prominent enough to record; thus Os. /xtsi/ rather than
OP /xti/.  Words and expressions, however, should always be in
the target language.  Thus, /kodha/ and /okas^e/, which to my
knowledge don't exist in OP, would prove that the Osage (or Kaw?)
dialect was intended.

That would leave us with the /i=ha/ ending, which appears to be
pure OP, either contradicting this rule, or else acceptable at
that time in Osage or Kaw.

Does Kaw have the words /koya/ and /okas^e/?  And does it
affricatize dental stops before [i], e.g. /xtsi/ rather than
/xti/, as in Osage?  And finally, how does it construct "we want",
or "we hope"?

Rory