Tonkawa horses

[Wallace Chafe]

Hi Bruce,

A cursory look at Hoijer's materials didn't bring up a greeting. I don't
think it's something that's likely to come up in texts of the kind he
collected, and his dictionary is just Tonkawa-English. However, you
yourself might want to take a look at University of California Publications
in Linguistics 73 (1972).

I'm wondering what you have for Caddo. The regular greeting is kuha?ahat,
with an accent (high pitch) on the u. (? is a glottal stop.) That's the
slow speech form. In fast speech, which is normally used for greetings, the
intervocalic h's are lost, so it's kua?a:t (again with an accent on the u).
It means something like "just good". (The adjective "good" is ha?ahat,
without the prefix ku-.)

Best wishes,
Wally

> Do you happen to know whether Hoijer recorded any type of greeting in his
> _Tonkawa Texts_, or do you have a copy of them handy that you could look
> through?
> 	I'm doing a project to find a greeting (preferably "hello") in every
> tribal language of Oklahoma, and now I'm down to two:  Tonkawa and Plains
> Apache.  So, if you know of any greeting that Hoijer may have recorded in
> Tonkawa, please let me know!