OSAGE OTHOGRAPHY

[Justin McBride]

> HVvBV  Hu-a (fish symb)  THV-HV
> ZHO-KU-La(fish)  Av-KV-TSE  Av-KU-Tha (fish).
> Hanba hua thaha    (lit:  Day coming when)
> Zhukinla angatsi ankatha/o   (lit:  Together we go we go forth)

Wow.  That's news to me, too!  It must be a very new development.  When I 
visited their classes a few months ago, they were just using a Roman 
alphabet with no special characters other than a hyphen and an apostrophe 
(well, and maybe a superscript n, but I can't remember).  I seem to recall 
that they were using all caps.  I don't think they distinguished between x 
and <gamma>. Nor did they distinguish between preaspirate hp, ht, hk, and hc 
and their plain unaspirated counterparts p, t, k, and c in the orthography, 
thus blurring the contrast between 1st person and 3rd person forms of 
certain verbs.  For example, TON-PE stood for both htoNpe 'I see' and toNpe 
's/he sees.'  From what I saw, that confused some of the students.  But 
otherwise, most of the class appeared to understand the writing system and 
could easily read it.  I wonder what prompted the change...

-jm