Word for 'prairie' in Hochunk.

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> Yes, and the leading h- is epenthetic, occurring only in WI/HC with these
> initial forms.  It's probably that, if we are seeing contracted forms with the
> moo- words, contraction took place before epenthesis, since that postdates the
> break with Chiwere.  So you wouldn't have to account for the /h/.

The epenthetic h's always disappear when something precedes them.
Winnebago grammar apparently knows that this h is present only in initial
contexts.  As I recall both Lipkind and Marten comment on this.  I don't
remember Sussman or the sketch part of Marino well enough to remember if
they also note the behavior.  The examples of alternation that I remember
from inflectional and derivational prefix morphology might be suspect of
being inherited, but there are lots of examples with the locatives
involving compounding in Miner and elsewhere, not to mention behavior with
things like the indefinite article, and I suspect this alternation is
simply best seen as productive.

It's interesting that the speakers that Henning was working with were able
to recover most of the fairly obscure (to me) moo < maNaN + (h)o examples,
apparently quite easily, even though I think some could fairly be
characterized as lexicalized.  The examples I cited were all from Miner.
Miner had a few more I didn't mention.

I regret that potential loanword, too, alas, though I would have been
happier with something more along the lines of (non-occurring) *mooskac^.