Affrication Diminutive Marker (Re: butterfly)

[Kathleen Shea]

I've found that it's true that speakers of Ponca tend to use both the
dental-stop variant and the affricated variant of words interchangeably or
recognize only one as the "real" form.  However, I have noticed that there's
some productive use of the distinction to create new vocabulary.  I have
only one consultant right now, Uncle Parrish Williams--and I really need to
check with more speakers--but he firmly maintains that ttu means 'blue' and
c^c^u means 'green.'  He says that maNs^c^iNge is 'cottontail' (maNs^tiska
'jack rabbit'--with oral, not nasal i) and that maNs^tiNge is the general
word for 'rabbit.'  He flatly rejects wathis^ka 'creek, brook' in favor of
wac^his^ka.  However, he says that waxc^a ~waxta are "about the same" and
both mean 'flower, fruit,' although I thought that one time he said one
meant 'flower' and the other 'fruit.'  Similarly, he once said there is a
difference in gradation between the forms of the intensifier xc^i and xti
'very, real,' but, when I last asked, he
said they were pretty much the same.  In Ponca, du'ba 'some' (contrasting
with duu'ba 'four,' by the way, which has a long vowel) and j^uba 'few' are
distinct in their meanings.  The uncomfortable homophony that John mentions
between wac^hi'gaag^e 'to dance' and c^hi 'to have sex with' is often
avoided in Ponca by substitution with the more "polite" term naNthe 'to
dance' (literally, 'to kick').

It's also true that Ponca makes use of affrication of dental stops for a
diminuative effect, or "baby talk" (what John calls "grandmother speech"),
as in "Dha?e'c^hewadhe!" 'You poor thing!' (said to a child) compared to
"Dha?e'thewadhe!" (said to an adult), with the same meaning.  This brings to
mind a "xuube" joke that I was told:

A woman sees a little nest of baby mice and says to the other people nearby,
"J^u'ama j^NaN'baia!" ("Du'ama
daNaN'baia!") 'Look at these!'  To which her husband replies, "J^am!"
'Damn!'

Kathy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Koontz John E" <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>
To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 11:47 AM
Subject: Affrication Diminutive Marker (Re: butterfly)


> On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Mark-Awakuni Swetland wrote:
> > currently my two speakers working with the UNL Omaha language class go
> > back and forth between wati'ninika and wachi'ninika ... The second form
> > is new to me since working with these particular speakers.
>
> It's really pretty intertesting the number of variants for various things
> available among the now fairly small set of Omaha and Ponca speakers.  It
> shows the weakness of working with single speakers instead of communities
> in trying to draw a picture of something as big as a language.
>
> Anyway, as has been mentioned before, Omaha-Ponca seems to have a form of
> diminutive marking that involves changing dentals to affricates:  d tt th
> t? to j^ c^c^ c^h c^?.  In the new Popular Orthography, this would be d t
> tH t' to j ch chH ch', I think, with capitals here for raised letters.
> For some words both variants are available, at least within the community
> as a whole, whereas for others only one form is attested.  What I've
> sometimes referred to as grandmother speech shows up in some Dorsey texts
> and seems to involve very heavy use of this process.
>
> Other examples of the process include du'ba ~ j^uba 'some', iNthaN ~
> iNc^haN 'now ~ right now', wathis^ka ~ wac^his^ka 'creek', c^c^eska
> 'small', iNc^haNga 'mouse', maNc^hu 'grizzley', maNs^tiNge ~ maNs^c^iNge
> 'rabbit', wac^higaghe 'to dance', (historically unrelated to former) c^hi
> 'to have sex with', t?e ~ c^?e 'die' (only in grandmother speech example,
> if I recall) and so on.
>
> Speakers encountering a variant unfamiliar to them tend to reject it out
> of hand as wrong, so this is probably not a productive process today.
>