Iskousogos (Re: Siouan etymology?)

[Rankin, Robert L]

> eskans aques
> hkaNze akha
> Kaw    the

> "(it's/they are) the Kaws"

> I've written hkaNze rather than kkaNze to emphasize the potential for
treating a tense stop as a a preaspirate.  I don't know the historical
distribution of aspiration of (e)s- in Spanish.

It's very widespread, so I suspect that dialectally it's rather old.  It
is a characteristic found in Andalucia and Extremadura in Spain and in
various places all over Spanish America.  There's evidence of it at
least since the 17th century.  If it was characteristic of early
expeditions to the Plains, the pronunciation would have been something
like [ehkansaqueh], with the initial e- epenthetic.  It may actually be
from the Coronado expedition.  I can't remember, but it's covered in
Mildred Wedel's discussion.  Since Osage still has hp, ht, hc, hk for
OM, PN, KS and QU pp, tt, (cc), kk, and since Siebert recorded hp, ht,
hk in Quapaw in 1941, it seems fair to say that this pronunciation
underlies modern pp, tt, kk in all Dhegiha dialects.  But exactly when
the gemination assimilation occurred is hard to say.