butterfly

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Rory M Larson wrote:
> Casting out the 'comb' word, Bob has offered an
> interesting list of wildlife terms that use /nikka/:
>
>   Quapaw: /ppiza nikka/   'lizard'
>           /ttitta nikka/  'blue jay'
>           /z^aNnikka/     'gnat'
...
> Does anyone know what Quapaw /ttitta/ and Kansa
> /wakkuje/ mean?  Are they nouns or stative verbs?

Well, 'bluejay'!  It's been a while since I thought about that.  I wrote a
paper on bird terms in 1988, actually.

Santee has tete'nic^a 'bluejay', actually, in Riggs.
Miner gives j^eej^ec(?e) 'bluejay'.

These, and one assumes Quapaw ttittanikka fits in, reflect the bluejay's
"jay" call, "A raucous call that has many variations and that can be
given at various intensities ...  At lower intensities, used as an
assembly call that attracts other Jays, as in courtship flocking; at
higher intensities, used as an alarm or mobbing call."  (Stokes 1979:141)

What's of special interest, of course, in the present contect, is that
element nic^a in the Santee form.  I'm pretty sure that's nic^a, not
nic^ha, and I suspect it's a contextual variant of *yiNka 'little'.  I
think that's regularly c^hiNc^a' 'child' in Dakotan.  I suspect that in
contexts that allow *y to be intervocalic, it can be rhoticized and the
resulting *riNka would appear as ni(N)c^a in Dakotan.

This element could also be nic^a < *riNke 'to lack', but I don't see how
that would work.

Winnebago, which merges *r and *y regularly, has niNk as a diminutive, as
in wake'(niNk) 'raccoon', s^uNuNgniNk 'puppy', and so on.

Of course, whether or not nic^a is 'little', it's clearly a good match for
the Quapaw nikka.  It would be a regular match if Quapaw had nika.

What I'm wondering, is if it actually does have nika.  As I recall
Dorsey's very phonetic scheme of recording stops results in a series of
Dhegiha orthographies very different in approach from LaFlesche's.
LaFlesche uses the same set of symbols for both Omaha-Ponca and Osage
(allowing for errors and the mutilation of the system in The Omaha Tribe):
bdg for lax stops, p. t. k. (underdots - omitted in the published material
of The Omaha Tribe) for the tense stops, and ptk for aspirates.  His only
concession to Osage phonetic reality is to write psh and ksh for ph and kh
(his p and k) before e and i.  One has to assume that he actually heard
the system as it exists logically.  Perhaps the mechanics of this was that
he understood the Omaha-Ponca system of contrasts and perceived the
working of the system in Osage based on his perception of the cognacy of
forms there with forms in his native Omaha-Ponca.  In recording Osage he
considered any but the most egregious differences in pronuciation to be
trivial.

Dorsey, on the other hand, tends to write ptk for anything voiceless
aspirated, p. t. k. (turned letters in print or under-x in ms) for
anything voiceless unaspirated, bdg for anything voiced, and so on.
LaFlesche is systematic, but Dorsey is phonetic.  He would never record
anything but a lax stop as voiced, but his treatment of voicless lax,
tense, and aspirated stops is rather variable, though it is fairly
consistent within a given language.  The problem is that within a
particular language he sometimes merges two series.  In his Omaha-Ponca
materials he tends to merge the tense and aspirate series.  Since Quapaw
mostly has lax and tense stops as voiceless, it is the lax and tense
series that tend to be merged.  In editing Dorsey's forms, when faced with
a ptk Bob Rankin has to regularize on ptk or pp tt kk, and the
regularization rules may well produce occasional glitches.  Maybe nikka in
some cases should be nika?  I know that in working with OP I tend to
assume pp tt kk for ptk, but sometimes ph th kh is intended.

Presumably something like this explains ppiza, too.

I'm simplifying of course.  Dorsey never had any problem hearing the
voicing of lax stops in Omaha-Ponca and Kaw.  Sometimes he heard voicing
in Quapaw, too.  In OP Dorsey came to realize that pp tt kk contrast with
ph th kh and started marking the former with subposed x (turned letters in
print).  He missed quite a few, but what he marked is a big help.  In
Osage he sometimes hears and marks preaspiration with a turned h before
the stop.  Aspiration is mostly clear in his Osage because he writes px tx
kx or pc - kc to indicate the velarization of the aspiration.  And, of
course, as anyone who has to deal regularly with Dakotan materials knows,
you can frequently predict where aspiration will occur from a
consideration of part of speech, location of the stop in the word and
root, and recognition of particular grammatical and derivational
morphemes.  It almost works ...

JEK