Meaning of Siouan word "Shke-ma."

[Tom Leonard]

> > Spoken:
> > S^upHi'(a)de aN'he (the rest are song vocables)
> >
> > When I got to where you were, they were fleeing
>
> That's reasonable.  And if the pronunciation is -de rather than -di,
> we should probably be reading it as 'but' rather than 'when':

The "(a)" is dropped in this particular song, probably to make the word fit
the melody. That's a common practice. Nearly every one I spoke to in this
regard said "(a)" when speaking the word. Also, the pronounciation is
definitely "de", not "di".


> How sure are we of the 'ears' translation?  We've been told by our Omaha
> speakers that nitta' is 'ears', while ni'tta is 'living'.  These are
pretty
> close, distinguished by accent, apparently, in modern Omaha, and perhaps
by
> nasalization in niN'tta, 'living', according to Dorsey.

My mistake. It is "nitta' ". They were rather insistant that the name is
Bear Ears.

>  /ni'tta/ sounds nothing like /s^ki'ma/ except for the vowels, and I don't
think phonetic
> confusion can be stretched far enough to explain such a substitution.

I don't think we have an actual "substitution" here. It was interesting to
find several people immendiately recognizing "s^ki'ma" as "a mistake" or not
sounding quite right. One Ponca man ventured hi'ma (which he translated as
"teeth") but he was rather up front in qualifying that as a guess.

As I mentioned previously, I really don't know why the word is sung as
"s^ki'ma" (or sometimes "s^ti'ma"). We don't know if the singers on that
particular recording learned the song "incorrectly", or learned it from
someone that "didn't have it quite right", or their version was "correct"
with a translation lost in antiquity. Singers in that particular generation
learned songs without the use of tape recorders, etc. They typically had one
shot at learning the tune from one of a handful of older singers. Then they
would teach the song to the other singers in their own generation. In short,
something might have gotten lost in the sauce. "S^ki'ma" might have also
been thought of as an untranslatable ancient word (there are plenty of those
examples in the Ponca language) and it's meaning or validity never
questioned. We just don't know for certain.

The trouble with this particular song, as is the case with many others, is I
don't have a rendition of the song with the word "nitta' ". Nearly every
rendition I've heard uses "s^ki'ma". Fluent Ponca speakers are quick to say
"that ain't right", but the song is still sung with "s^ki'ma" or "s^ti'ma".

This is fairly indicative of something I learned a long time ago about the
Ponca language. In songs and in names the rules seem to fly out the window.
I imagine there must be some pattern or set of rules for  word abbreviation
in songs and names but I've never been able to get a handle on it. Elders
have been quick to point out such abbreviation is "something strange" but I
have yet to find anyone that can explain it. I usually get: "hmmmm....you're
right.....I don't know".

Plus, as you can well imagine, there is a huge difference between how a word
is sung and how a word is spoken - sometimes it's like the difference
between night and day. Imagine trying to learn English from songs on the
radio.

> I don't know much about Ponka songs, but exactly what is the definition of
> a  vocable, and how do we know one when we hear one?  How arbitrary or
> conventional are they supposed to be?  Why do we have that slight
variation in the
> ending of the two lines, OI vs. YA?

A vocable is a meaningless phoneme (?) that's used to carry the melody of
the song, similar to la-la-la in English songs. It would be difficult to
explain, in brief,  how a vocable is recognized. That would take an epistle.
I think you can say there are "stock" vocables or vocable patterns that seem
to be used in many songs. In general, these are predictable, usually occur
at certain places in the song structure, and are recognizable in the general
context of Ponca music. The variation can be due to individual singers
rendering the song.

Can vocables be confusing when trying to translate songs or conducting
linguistic analysis? You bet.