OP u- and udhu- Verbs [also Variation and C-Cedilla]

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> Alright, I'm going to have to backpedal a little bit here. Of our two
> speakers, one prefers aNgu'-[root], while the other accepts either but
> seems to favor ugu'-[root]. ...
>
> Perhaps this is just a bleeding of the accented second syllable vowel
> into the unaccented first syllable, as seems to happen in several
> similar morphological situations ...

That seems like a reasonable explanation to me.  One thing we lack for
Omaha and Ponca is any real appreciation of the amount of personal and
other lectal variation within it.  Dorsey only offers the aNgu-
alternative in the texts and his draft grammar, as far as I know, but
often levels things without comment.  I do know that there is some
variation in Omaha, let alone in Omaha-Ponca, and some of the more
surprising variations are quite old.

A couple of examples:

Modern OP has gdhe'baN 'ten', for expected gdhe'bdhaN, but I have seen
what amounts to the latter form in an Omaha word list from Long
Expedition.  (Thwaites, I think?)   The interesting thing is that the
modern form is attested in both Omaha and Ponca, though the two groups
were separate by the time the gdhe'bdhaN form was attested for Omaha
speakers.  You have to assume that both groups had gdhebaN by then, or
that contrary to my understanding the two communities were still one
linguistic entity after that.

The alternants bdhu'ga ~ gdhu'ba for 'all' and xdhabe' ~ xa'bdhe for
'tree' are both mentioned by Dorsey and still exist as far as I know.  I
gather that a particular speaker uses one variant or the other and in my
admittedly very limited experience speakers hardly notice which one a
person does use.  Anyway, they don't seem to attach any particular
significance to one or the other.

One other point concerns the mysterious c-cedilla as "th" (in thin) in the
work of Francis LaFlesche - both for Omaha and Osage - which he uses for
what Dorsey writes as s and z.  Dorsey does use c-cedilla for a theta in
writing Ioway-Otoe, and Dorsey (or BAE usage) probably account for
LaFlesche's choice of the symbol.  There is a sheet in the Dorsey archives
in which Dorsey mentions off-handedly that some Omahas use theta for s and
that Francis LaFlesche is an example.  I've also noticed that in the
transcriptions of Alice Fletcher for names of people in the "Village of
Make-Believe Whitemen" s pretty consistently appears as th.  So, this was
either a LaFlesche family trait, or a general one of the group of people
living in this village.  In regard to the former possibility, one of
Joseph LaFlesche's wives was a speaker of Otoe.  Whatever the relevance of
that factor, one has to assume that /s/ as [<theta>] was perfectly
acceptable usage for at least some Omaha speakers.

As far as merging s and z as c-cedilla, I tend to assume that Francis
LaFlesche actually distinguished the sounds as [<theta>] and [<edh>] and
also distinguished the latter from the "r" or "l" sound /dh/ that is
written th in so many systems for writing Omaha-Ponca, Osage, etc.
However, he either didn't care about the orthographic issue of
representing the distinction, or couldn't come up with a solution he
liked.  I suspect the former.  He normally writes dots under the sounds
that Dorsey handwrote little x's under and published as inverted letters,
so one can imagine that extending that scheme to c-cedilla might have
presented at least some annoyances, but he was not the kind of martinet
who would have rejected any solution but writing a nearly invisible dot on
top of the cedilla.  Obviously he could have put the dot over the
c-cedilla or used another symbol, but for some reason he didn't.  Before
his dot period (sorry) LaFlesche wrote geminates as bp, dt, gk, etc., but
I haven't seen any cases of zs.  LaFlesche was familiar with the Hamilton
system and probably several Dorsey systems and I think that these all use
s and z.  So the long and the short of it is that LaFlesche cared more
about asserting the use of an interdental or very fronted dental over the
use of a less fronted dental or alveolar than he cared about representing
voicing.