Rory's Mysterious Omaha-Ponca Fragment

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:
> WagoN'oNze U'dhixide wrote:
> > I will encourage wagaxthoN Rory to enhance his statement in various
> > ways... "here are my 2 two cents", "I'm giving you my two cents",
> > "take my two cents", etc.

I'm not sure what the presentative construction is in Omaha-Ponca.  "Here
is ..." is right for English.

> Aho.
>   "here are my 2 two cents"       Dua'tHE we'dhawaz^ide noNba' wiwi'tta
> tHE.
>   "I'm giving you my two cents"   We'dhawaz^ide noNba' wiwi'tta tHE wi?i'.
>   "take my two cents"             We'dhawaz^ide noNba' wiwi'tta tHE dhiza'
> i ga ho!
>
> But I really just wanted to say "My two cents"!

That's the customary fragment for the context in English.  Sometimes I see
"that's just ..."

> (I'm not sure about the accent on noNba.  That seems to have been
> changed on me recently, with indications from a speaker that it was
> conditional on something we haven't defined yet.)

I notice accent shifting on this in the texts, too.  This is an
interesting thing in Dhegiha that hasn't been worked out.  It might have
something to do with phrase structure and how the shifting form is in
ocnstruction with other forms.  Maybe alternating heavy and light
syllables in phrases?  It may in that way affect suitably shaped
subordinate or modifying elements?  It's not just "two" of course.

> > Around here we are trying to reverse the situation that native Omaha
> > speakers tend to use the English terms for such things. We are in the
> > fourth week of Omaha I, using the immersion approach. The first day I
> > lasted 6 minutes. We are now averaging 40 minutes daily. The
> > differences in performance and competence are noticeable.
>
> And I would like to extend kudos to U'dhixide in this forum.  It is still
> early in the semester, but we have been muddling along with trying to
> actually speak the language in class almost all the time, and the results
> are very promising.  I'm really impressed with his new-found ability to
> keep the class going and even explain what we are doing in Omaha.  His
> hosting of a cookout for the class this past Sunday, in which he and the
> speakers taught us how to make cowboy bread as a lab-- in Omaha-- was a
> high point of the semester.  At the rate the students are learning, they
> should be pretty competent speakers before the course is over.  Hopefully,
> Mark and I will be able to keep up with them!

This is all great news and it sounds like Mark has a good deal to be
proud of!

Incidentally, I didn't mean any criticism or warning by mentioning the
Omaha tendency to use English numbers and denominations and dates, etc.
This is often the case in language communities embedded physically and/or
culturally in other communities and in itself it wouldn't mean that the
language in question was endangered, for example, or inferior.
Cross-linguistically numeral systems are often borrowed, or you find
situations in which native and borrowed numeral systems exist in parallel,
with different domains of use.  And we've all been discussing cases that
show that Siouan numerals have both been borrowed from other languages and
borrowed into other languages in the past.  I gather that numerals are
rather more prone to this than once was thought.

English uses borrowed numerals forms in a number of specialized contexts -
primary, secondary, tertiary, ...; unary, binary, trinary, ...; singular,
double, triple, ... - and I believe the ordinal form second and the
fractional form quarter must be French loans.  I think the more common
numeral sets in Japanese are of Chinese origin, too.  I've heard of cases
where speakes of one Algonquian language used numerals from other
Algonquian languages with better trading connections.