Hochunk HO

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004, Rankin, Robert L wrote:
> As a monosyllabic noun, /ho:/ 'voice, fish' is always long.  I don't
> know its status in the compound.  As I recall from Miner, some of these
> automatically lengthened monosyllables lose their length in larger
> constructs.  Others may not.

Actually, I had looked it up in Miner, if that helps.

> It's an empirical question.  As for the penultimate /a/of Hocangara, I
> assume "Dorsey's Law" vowels are "real" to speakers, and, according to
> Lipkind, short, unaccented /a/ is often [schwa] anyway.

Of course, it's an empirical question, too, but I have the impression from
various sets of examples I've seen over the years that schwa epenthesis in
C=R enclitic boundary contexts like ...k=ra (usually written ...gra, I
think) is alive and well and independent of Dorsey's Law epenthesis within
stems.  Of course, "Hochangara"  is pretty well attested in English
spellings, I think, but I understood the penultimate a to represent a
schwa.  I will definitely cede this point to anyone who has evidence
demonstrating otherwise!  I feel more than a little silly being the person
answering Winnebago questions.  I think Lipkind backs me up, but Lipkind's
vowels are not always easy to interpret.  I don't have Susman and in spite
of the best efforts of Jimm and Bob the file copy of Miner's grammar that
I have looks like it was written in Wingdings.  You can get into Word
Perfect, but you can't get out.