Omaha fricative set

[Rankin, Robert L]

> . . . When she pronounced s.i, 'seed', the breath was not slammed through it like that; the s seemed to be of the muted type, and the vowel trailed off in a more relaxed way.  Also, there seemed to be a qualitative difference in the vowel to me.  In si, 'foot', the vowel was closer to the /i/ sound in "deed".  In s.i, 'seed', it seemed to approach the /I/ sound in "did".  

> That's what I've been assuming up until now too, supposing that the muted s. and s^. forms occur only before n, or in certain other nasal contexts where their manifestation is phonologically constrained.  But if they are popping up arbitrarily, then they do need to be distinguished.

I think you'll find that pretty quickly you can get them to "hear" distinctions in Omaha among all the vowels of English.  The I of "bit" will be distinct from the I of "beat", etc.  Unaccented A or nasal A will sound like the A of "sofa" if you point it out to them.  And the distributions may not have the restrictions that they have in English.  Dorsey wrote these distinctions, but unfortunately they don't seem to correlate with anything phonemic.  Omaha has reached the stage of "personal dialects", and introspection will probably just provide confusion.  I'd really suggest running the experiments with recordings using speakers who haven't thought about the discussion to find out whether you have something real or not.  I doubt there's anything there, but I could be surprised.

For /bixaN/ vs. /bighaN/ try 'to sit on and break' and 'to blow on a fire to start it'.  Those are minimal pairs in Kaw, although Kaw appears to have a /aN/ vs. /oN/ distinction too.

Bob