Attn. Dhegiha specialists.

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Rory M Larson wrote:
> 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?

Yes, though I think it began well before 1929.  LaFlesche did his
fieldwork 1910-1923.

> It makes me think there may have been a pan-Dhegihan movement
> in this period.

That might be going a bit far.  It would be interesting to know how much
each of the groups knew of the others at which periods, however.

> These languages are close enough to be arguably dialects of each
> other.

They different more among themselves than Dakotan, I think, though I don't
know if anyone's set out to compare them consistantly (other than
phonologically).  There are some rather major, but superficial differences
in the inflection of dh-stems, and there are differences in the sets of
articles and their inflectional patterns.  The subordinating conjunctions
and sentence final and initial particles seem to differ strongly from one
dialect to another.  The dative is differently formed in OP vs. Os/Ks.

> Suppose La Flesche was actually vacillating between writing a
> dictionary of Osage (were the Osages supporting his work?) and writing
> a general Dhegihan dictionary.

I have the impression he vacillated between writing a dictionary of OSage
and a dictionary of Omaha-Ponca.  There are persistant reports in the
Omaha references that he was working on an Omaha dictionary, and I assume
these refer to the Osage Dictionary.  He clearly felt able to work with
both languages on similar terms, though a fiar amount of special knowledge
is needed to map even a "purified" version of his vision of Osage to Omaha
and vice versa.  Bu purified I mean with plural/proximate marking and
dh-stem inflections corrected, since he does those correctly in textual
contexts, if not (mostly) in the 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.

People attempt this sort of thing all the time, of coruse, though usually
they produce texts rather than dictionaries.  LaFlesche definitely has a
standardizing orthography for Omaha and Osage, and yet he does differ in
his usage for the two languages, even if we eliminate some vacilation on
forms and take note of the different periods in his usage.

In regard to the sample at hand, the Osage influence is limited to xtsi
for xc^i ~ xti and kotha for kkudha.  However, everything else here is
within the range of his Osage spelling, and even the two probably Omaha
inflected and suffixed verb forms show no more Omaha influence than his
Osage dictionary.  So, I think it is safe to think that he had an idea
that the two languages were essentially similar and had a tendency to
focus on pronunciation shibboleths like ts or ksh or d /t/ for R rather
than on (for us) equally obvious morphological differences.

> 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/.

Well, here Osage has the fuller set of distinctions and should carry the
day.  Unfortunately, he generally writes u and i where Osage has /o/ and
/u/ vs.  /i/.  He does sometimes write o for /o/, but not nearly as often
as /u/, and he does sometimes write iu for /u/, but not as often as /i/.
So he had only a marginal appreciation of the differences in the vowel
systems.

He writes th, gth, bth, xth as in Omaha-Ponca where Osage has dh, l ~ dl ~
gl, br, l ~ hl.  I suspect the usage in his day was in the more
conservative range, but here he goes with the Omaha versions - the
underlying forms in essence, while for pH and kH he writes p ~ psh and k ~
ksh (sometimes kch).  In essence he tends to prefer to overdifferentiate
and phoneticize, except with s ~ z (both c-cedilla) and x ~ gh (both x),
and (mostly) with the vowels, where he takes the OP merging approach for
the most part.

JEK