WHICH IS IT?

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 4 May 2006 goodtracks at peoplepc.com wrote:
> In LaFleche's Osage Dicionary and Mark S's Omaha Lexicon, both use Dorsey "c" with a cedilla.
> LaFleche's phonetic key has reads:  "C (+ cedilla)  as in thin"
> Mark's pronunciation guide has:  "C (+ cedilla) sounds like s in the word say."
>
> Which way is it? Are they both correct?

About the first thing I remember learning about c-cedilla in Osage is that
nobody but LaFlesche heard it as theta.  But LaFlesche uses c-cedilla for
s and z in both Osage and Omaha(-Ponca) and clearly describes it as
sounding like theta.

When I was reading through the Dorsey files at the NAA c. 1985 I happened,
quite by accident, on a note by Dorsey to the effect that s is pronounced
s, except that some Omahas pronounce it as th(eta), among them Frank
LaFlesche.  It might have been on the first slip of the s's in Dorsey's
slip file.

After that I noticed that Alice Fletcher, whose fairly attrocious Omaha
transcriptions are usually deservedly ignored, often wrote s as th, e.g.,
in transcribing the names attached to the houses in her map of the Village
of Make-Believe Whitemen, i.e., Francis LaFlesche's home town, and the
point of origin of many of the Omahas that Fletcher (and Dorsey) worked
on.  I don't remember an s-example at the moment, though, perversely, I do
remember "Brontee" or bdhaN-thi 'odor arrives'.  Though this might be
rendered 'smelly' it probably refers to the scent of an animal reaching a
character in a clan myth.

My guess is that s was theta (and z was edh) in the dialect of the
residents of the Village of Make Believe White Men.  Perhaps it was Otoe
influence?  It wouldn't need to be, of course, but LaFlesche's mother was
an Otoe, and the stories from the VOMBW residents talk a lot about
interactions with the Otoes.

The final piece in the puzzle is that the pronunciation key for the
LaFlesche Osage Dictionary is essentially the same one he used for Omaha
work, as is the transcription itself.  Since the book was published
postumously, without his help in the final stages, it's just possible he
might have meant to revise the key to indicate that c-cedilla was
pronounced like s in Osage, along with other similar comments.  He may not
even have written the key as such in this instance.  It's the kind of
thing that might have been left to the final editing.

Incidentally, c-cedilla is the standard BAE character for theta.  Dorsey
uses it in transribing Ioway-Otoe theta.  He turns it over to produce a
"sonant" version - z or a muted s.  Dorsey says somewhere in his notes
that he prefers the inverted letters, but he wrote them in ms. with a
little x under the regular letter.  It appears that Francis LaFlesche,
whether on his own or in response to a change in BAE policy, converted the
little x into a dot.  Or maybe it's just a coincidence?  In any event, he
uses under-dotted ptk for Dorsey's turned orinverted ptk, written ptk with
a little x under them in the Dorsey mms.  (And Buechel uses dots to
indicate "lack of aspiration" in Lakota, too, I notice.)

I sometimes wonder if Francis LaFlesche meant to put a little x or dot
under c-cedilla standing for z, but decided that it got in the way of the
tail of the cedilla.  He definitely used the dots with ptk in Omaha.  They
are there in his ms. list of Omaha names of rivers, though they are
missing throughout Fletcher & LaFlesche, including in this list.

Although Dorsey and Fletcher both support theta, it's possible that the
theta was simply a very dental s as Bob suggests.