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

[are2 at buffalo.edu]

I've only ever heard aNgu- (not ugu) with the speakers I work with.
But gdhuba/bdhuga are both still variants today.  Also
wagdhabaze/wabdhagaze, wamuska/wamaNske.  I'm sure there are more that
don't come right to mind.
-Ardis


Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> 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.
>
>
>
>