Muskogean and Biloxi/Ofo

[R. Rankin]

> Well, I decided to just share one observation about final Western
> Muskogean /i/ as [e] (I don't recall noticing that Haas had said this
> about Choctaw...).

She said it about Biloxi in '68.  I'm saying it about Choctaw.

> First, just to clarify re what Bob's talking about below, this certainly
> does not happen in either Choctaw (Ct) or Chickasaw (Cs) with long /i:/.
> as in borrowed words like Ct tiih / Cs tii 'tea' or other (not too
> common) words like the Cs interjection kii 'oh!' -- in these words, /i:/
> is [i:].

That's true, but, on the other hand, maybe that's because there's an internal
rule in Choctaw that in fact raises long, internal [e:] (or diphthong [ey]) to
[i:].  I'm thinking of *tayki 'female' that is phonetically [te:k-] in some
languages but [ti:k] in Choctaw.  Final position in the word or phrase was where
I got it most often.  I'm not sure whether any of these forms had -h or not, I'm
afraid.  I'm one of those who had a hard time hearing it at least at first,
although it's certainly there underlyingly.

> However, there is a final [e] that's very important, and that I think is
> a real problem for phonemics. This is the last sound in the Ct (rarely
> also Cs) verb ending often written "hoke" [ho:ke:], which does something
> like affirm the truth of the preceding (and is thought by some to be the
> source for English okay -- this is really in some dictionaries of
> English!). I honestly don't feel that we understand the best
> phonemicization of this. I write this ending, when it occurs in Cs (not
> often), as -hookay. The ay# just shows I am puzzled (but ay can be
> pronounced as [e:] elsewhere, e.g. in áyya'sha 'they are there').

As Pam knows, /ay/ > [ey] or [e:] in Creek quite regularly in closed syllables
and it's pretty common elsewhere in Muskogean, although I can't quote details
off the top of my head.  But most of these ay > e(y) changes are internal, and
in closed syllables.  The final [-e] remains a bit of a problem.  I wonder if a
rising-falling sentence intonation on [hoke] in Choctaw could be influencing
length and quality?

As an aside, I used to baffle students on oral exams by asking "In Chinese "ma-,
ma^, ma`" and "ma" with different tones all mean different things.  OK, in
English you can say "Yes." "Yes?" "Yes! Yeeees (with hesitation signaling
...but...) and "Yayis! all with different tones and meaning different things
(statement, question, emphatic statement, partial agreement, etc).  Now, why
isn't English a tone language like Chinese?"  You get the most amazing
non-answers to that question, and most students never think to mention that the
English utterances are all entire sentences, with sentence-intonation contours.
Oh well, it's also true that some of those English "yeses" have qualitative
differences in the vowel.  I guess that's my point about the Choctaw.

Bob