Biloxi update

[Rory M Larson]

> I'm also wondering if, since Biloxi is the farthest afield of the Siouan
languages, it is also the most divergent?  I know in the case of Cherokee
it became the most divergent of the Iroquois family because of its fairly
early shift farther south.  Wonder if the same is true of Biloxi in the
Siouan family.  It'll be interesting to compare Hidatsa, in the far north,
with Biloxi, in the far south, to see how much these two Siouan languages
have diverged.

My sense of this agrees with Bob's.  About 10 or 15 years ago,
before I had actually tried to learn any Siouan languages, and
before I had come up with a method of fiddling with straight
glottochronology results by calibrating them on Indo-European
languages, I tried doing a Siouan glottochronology.  I obtained
(uneven) sources for six Siouan languages, including a Lakhota
dictionary; the Stabler-Swetland dictionary of Omaha; La Flesche's
Osage dictionary; an old Hidatsa dictionary and grammar; Einaudi's
Grammar of Biloxi; and two little pamphlet booklets on Iowa-Oto.
I counted only the cases between any two languages where I could
find words with matching definitions, and if any pair looked
conceivably cognate I called it a match.  I recall that my results
put Omaha and Osage very close together, perhaps splitting about
1400-1600 AD; Dhegiha and Iowa-Oto next closest, perhaps splitting
about 800-900 AD; and Lakhota very close to this, perhaps splitting
about 700-800 AD.  (This would have been MVS, which I now believe
to have split a good deal earlier.)  Biloxi was more divergent,
apparently splitting off about 500 BC.  Hidatsa was by far the
most dissimilar; my estimate at that time put its split at about
3000 BC.

Rory