Word for 'prairie'?

[Rory M Larson]

I'm coming into the prairie discussion a little late,
but I thought of one more possibility that I don't
think has been raised.  In Fletcher and La Flesche,
"The Omaha Tribe", the name for the village around
modern Omaha and Bellevue that the tribe lived in
from 1847-1856 is described.  The gloss given is
"the hill rising in the center of a plain".  In
Omaha, it is given as:

  pahu'dhoNdadhoN

At the end of my first year in Mark's Omaha class,
one of the other students and I were having a little
trouble making sense of this.  The first part is
certainly "hill", and the last syllable is surely
the positional dhoN, which is used for village
establishments.  What comes between ought to convey
the "rising in the center of a plain" concept.

  ppahe-u-dhoNda-dhoN  (I think it's ppa'he, not pha'he.
                        Correct, John?)

  hill-in-plain(?)-GLOB

Generally u- works in the opposite direction from
English 'in'.  It is usually prefixed to a verb,
and implies that the verb's action takes place in,
into, or in the context of, the preceding noun
complement.  That might suggest something happening
in the hill, which contradicts the gloss.  Otherwise,
we have to see ppa'he, 'hill', as being the head of
the NP, with the complement of u- not explicitly
stated.  That would mean

  udhoNda == 'in the center of a plain', or perhaps just
              'in a plain'.

Unless nouns can ever be prefixed by u-, I think we
would have to understand dhoNda as a stative verb
describing a type of land as 'flat', 'level', 'treeless',
'tall-grassy' or whatever.  Perhaps the Dhegihans
referred to plains or prairies using stative verbs,
rather than nouns?

Or perhaps udhoNda simply means
'towering over the surroundings'?

Rory