Monday's recordings

[Rankin, Robert L]

I don't think a [e] vs. [E] distinction would be helpful until you have a good grasp of what the long/short vowel distinction sounds like in monosyllables.  The comparison with Dakotan heya is also a possibility.  We should all be aware that, confronted with homonyms, people WILL be willing to make up non-existent distinctions to try to disambiguate them for us.  I had that experience in Kaw with ppa 'nose' and ppa 'bitter'.  When I played them back a week later without telling Mrs. Rowe which was which, she couldn't tell them apart.  All the analysis of Omaha phonetics going on is really interesting nonetheless.
 
Bob

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson
Sent: Tue 10/3/2006 3:08 PM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Monday's recordings



Mark wrote:
> Sorry. I was hoping to examine Alberta's he/hE utterances to "see" if there was a distinction that I could not hear. 

> Auntie called later last night to say she recalled "nits" as hEsoN'. When I asked her about "pale antlers" she confirmed hesoN' but I still could not hear a clear distinction between the two. 

Well, inadvertant to the list or not, I had been thinking about posting on this anyway.  I had suggested a couple of years ago that Omaha might recognize a distinction between /e/ and /E/, based largely on the minimal pair: he, 'horn', vs. hE, 'louse', where to my ear the latter sounded more like the /E/ in "pet".  The speakers are apparently able to distinguish these two terms, at least some of the time.  The difference of "cot" vs. "caught" in English might be an analogy of how subtle and sporadic it is.

Last night, we had our elder speaker pronounce these terms for us again.  Most of the time there seemed to be little or no difference.  When she pronounced them very carefully, though, it seemed to me that there was a difference, but not necessarily exactly what I had thought before.  For he, 'horn', the vowel came out sharp, clear, and short, rather like the vowel in si, 'foot'.  For hE, 'louse', the vowel seemed to linger and change a bit, as a diphthong.  It could be construed as starting with /he/ and gliding toward the center, as he[A], with the final part of that glide very brief and optional.

So now I'm starting to think that there is probably no phonemic difference between /e/ and /E/, but that there is a difference between these two words, such that 'louse' could be spelled he'a, with the final vowel de-emphasized almost to nothing, and only rarely even perceptible.  When it can be heard, the shift from /e/ to /A/ passes through the range of /E/, which is why my English ear could parse it that way.

If this interpretation is correct, it would appear that the Omaha word for 'louse' is a straight match for the Dakotan term, he'ya.  If so, I wonder if we can get this straight from MVS, with *he'a remaining in both language groups, but with epenthetic /y/ being recognized in the spelling for Dakotan, and the final syllable being almost but not quite dropped in Omaha?  Or would one language have borrowed it from another in more recent times?  Would there be any constraints with what we should expect for the development of epenthetic /y/ in MVS?  How would this compare with the 'speech' term, i'e / i'ye ?  Do other MVS languages tell us anything?

Rory