Pa Snuta (Eggheads?)

[Koontz John E]

John Ludwickson drew my attention to the Omaha-Ponca legend of the pa
snuta.  Dorsey, in a letter to the M. Anatole Bamps, published in the
Proceedings of the International Congress of Americanists, 3rd Session,
1879, pp. 760-766, mentions them, pp. 760-761.  (There's a lot else of
interest in this letter, by the way.  It's more or less "email from JOD.")

"The Omaha say that there was once a people in this land before the
Indians came.  They were the "Pa" Snuta, a tall race, with immense heads
(oblong).  They were very wise.  They had guns.  They knew not the Great
Spirit; that is, they used to say, "We will do as we please. The Great
Spirit has nothing to do with us."  So the Great Spirit at last sent a
flood upon them to punish them; and all died.  Afterwards the Indians were
made, and dwelt in this land."

I'm certain I've seen another reference to them, in Howard or maybe
Fletcher & LaFlesche, but I can't seem to relocate it.  In any event, I
suspect there are others on the list better qualified to comment on the pa
snuta as legendary beings and on parallels to them among neighboring
people.

I've been thinking more about the etymology of pa snuta myself.  I think
the term must be ppa' snu'tta - pa' snu'ta in the practical orthographies.
Dorsey essentially glosses this in repeating the description "(they had)
immense heads (oblong)," which he presumably had from his source(s).  That
is, ppa' 'head' and snu'tta 'immense (oblong)'.

Snu'tta doesn't occur in the Dorsey texts, or Swetland's UmoNhoN Iye of
Elizabeth Stabler.  It's easy to think it might have something to do with
snede' 'long', but that would be an unusual pattern of derivation.

Looking further afield I have found the following in Bob Rankin's
unpublished lexicons:

Ks sto'sta 'oval, elliptical (JOD), pear shaped (MR)'
Qu stokka' 'oblong, elliptical'

In the Quapaw entry Bob Rankin includes one of Dorsey's comparisons, which
is Omaha sno'kka (or snu'kka in the more familiar approach to Omaha-Ponca
vowels).  The Dorsey texts contain only a small art of the OP vocabulary
collected by Dorsey.  There seems to have been a lot just plain word
elicitation and hearing and remembering, too.

Os "snu'-k.a" 'oval, egg-shaped'

This is a LaFlesche form, which as we have discussed before, means
Omaha-Ponca influenced, and I suspect in Osage guise it would be something
more like *sto'hka.

Further afield, in Miner's Winnebago Field Lexicon:

Wi soro'c^ 'narrow and high, like pottery shape; be cone-shaped'

In the context, Ken Miner cites a derivative (ks^ee)so'roc^ 'pear', i.e.,
'elliptical (apple)'.  Elsewhere he lists c^iiso'roc^ 'a tripod house'.

In Jimm Good Tracks Ioway-Otoe-Missouria list I found:

IO t^ro'ka 'egg-shaped, elliptical' (using t^ for theta)

There's a bit bit of variation here in the form of the stems.

*sro'h-ka is suggested by Qu stokka', OP snu'kka, and Osage sto'hka.
Probably also IO t^ro'ka, though I'd expect something like (?) t^rohka or
(?) t^rokha in that case.  A PMV form like *srok-ka would also be a
possibility, but I don't see any evidence for it elsewhere.

The Kaw form sto'sta may be a reduplication *sro'(h)-sro(h).

*srot-ka would explain OP snu'tta.

This is because PMV *tk > PDh *tt.   This is illustrated in forms like OP
z^a'tta 'forked' < *z^a't-ka vs. Te z^a'ta 'forked', Wi -z^ac^ 'spread out
at top like a bucket' < *z^a't-(a). For a more organic instance of *tk, or
at least one more consistantly formed, consider OP we'tta 'egg', Te i'tka,
Wi hiic^ge', all from *i'tka (or maybe *i't-ka).  OP has a prefixed *wa-,
a frequent characteristic of unpossessed forms in Dhegiha.

Note that -ka is being used above as a formant for stative verbs, although
it also appears potentially in *i'tka 'egg' as a noun formant.  (There are
clear examples of *-ka as a noun formant, but let's not go down that side
path.)

*sro't- (maybe actually *sro'te or *sro'ta) is suggested by Winnebago
soroc^ and underlies *sro't-ka, too, of course.

This leads to a possible Dakota congate, which is slo'ta ~ slol', as in

Te slol...ya' 'to know, have knowledge of anything or person', a causative
formed from the dependent stem slol-.

Buechel also lists

slo'ta, apparently extracted from ie'slota 'one who tells the truth,
perhaps'.  I believe this turn of phrase means not that the person may or
may not be telling the truth, but that Buechel is not sure whether 'one
who tells the truth' is a satisfactory gloss.  I'd suggest 'one who speaks
knowledgably' as a possibility.

Both these forms are consistent with *srot-, the root suggested in the
Winnebago, and in OP snu'tta < *sro't-ka in ppa' snu'tta.

This explanation of slolya' may seem a bit odd.  It's not the first
attested instance of 'egg-headed' as an adjective for 'intelligent' (or
perhaps 'over-demonstrative of intelligence') in the world, but it might
seem to be a bit rendolent of European culture. How reasonable it is in
the context might depend on whether the head is seen as the seat of
intelligence in Siouan cultures and I don't know if this is true or not.
However, Dorsey's account of the ppa' snu'tta is also consistant with a
gloss of 'smart people' or 'people too smart for their own good'.  Since
snu'tta is so far attested only in this phrase, one might imagine the
whole phrase to be adapted from some other language, perhaps from a form
like (Dakotan) *pha slotka, though I don't know of any actual attestation
of such a form.


John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz