Affrication Diminutive Marker (Re: butterfly)

[Koontz John E]

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.