Fw: OK and more Ofo/Biloxi.

[R. Rankin]

> Just to throw a little extra wood on the fire, on two points that have been
> circulating. First of all I don't think we'll ever know for sure the origin of
> OK. All the explanations seem rather fanciful. But there's a Caddo exclamation
> "ukkih" which means something like "wow!" and it probably qualifies as well as
> most of these other suggestions.

 I wonder of this has any connection with the Choctaw [ho:keh] Pam was
 discussing?  The Caddo and other Caddoan-speaking groups were certainly in
 Louisiana at the time of the DeSoto expedition (Wally has a nice paper in an
 anthology about the Caddoan place names in the Spanish accounts).  I only bring
 it up here because there is pretty clearly some Caddoan influence in Biloxi and
 Ofo, to wit, the word for 'corn'.

 Ofo:                        a-cé ki           'corn'
Biloxi:                     a-yé:ki           'corn'
Pawnee:                     ré:k  su       'corn'
Pawnee:                     ni kii s         'corn' (Gilmore 1919)
Arikara:                     ne:    s^u?    'corn'
Wichita:                      té:    s ?       'corn'
Caddo:                          ki  si?       'corn'

Ofo c (=ch) is a regular reflex of earlier *y, so a Siouan form *a-yé:ki can be
 compared to a possible Caddoan prototype something like *Ré:kisu? where R is my
 indeterminate sonorant covering the n/r/t correspondence set. This term for
 'corn' is unique to the southeastern Siouan subgroup.  Tutelo, the other
 attested language in this Ohio Valley Siouan subgroup, does not share the term,
 reinforcing the notion that the borrowing went from Caddoan to Ofo and Biloxi,
 not the other way around.  In any event, Tutelo, Ofo and Biloxi in the South,
 like Mandan, Crow and Hidatsa in the Northwest, had apparently separated from
 the rest of Siouan well before the in­troduction of any domesticated cultigen
 except the gourd.

 I'm afraid *Re:kisu? is my own Haas-style "boxcar reconstruction" from the
 Caddoan cognate set.  At least various of the pieces seem represented across
the
 family!  Biloxi and Ofo initial a- in these items would be the normal reflex of
 the noun prefix *wa- after initial labial resonants had been lost, so it is
 separable.  Caddoan -su? at the end of the term may have been interpreted as su
 'seed' by Siouan speakers.

 So, if Caddoan was in touch directly or indirectly with Biloxi and Ofo, could
 Caddo ukkih be connected with Choctaw hokeh.  (Recall that Choctaw has no
 distinction between o and u and between e and i.)  The phonemic match is
awfully
 close.  As Pam says, the Choctaw form looks as though is it based on the verb
 'be'.  Is the Caddo form made up of native morphology, or is it a stray term
 that could have been borrowed?

 Bob