The Casa tribe, homeland, and language

[Rankin, Robert L]

That's a bit hard to say.  Some have tried to derive Ofo words like angofa or anglif from French, and, while /ang/ is the first part of various Fr. words referring to the English, it is also the pan-Siouan root for 'man, person'.  The sibilant at the end of French 'anglais' was and is not normally pronounced except in the feminine.  All in all, I've never been very sure we have a good handle on the chronology of this change.  Nor is the phonetic trajectory very clear, although I've speculated that it may have been *s > theta > f.  I'm not aware of any European transcriptions that have a sibilant in Ofo that later became [f].  

________________________________

From: owner-siouan at lists.colorado.edu on behalf of Rory M Larson
Sent: Mon 2/19/2007 10:11 AM
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: RE: The Casa tribe, homeland, and language



> Probably something like Ofo */khoNfa/  with oN representing the o with the raised n after it.  Accent would be on the oN.  It could possibly have an initial a- or i-, but probably not.  I haven't found the etymon outside of Dhegiha and suspect that it's borrowed in any other Mississippi Valley Siouan languages that have it.

Bob, is there a timeframe issue on this?  My understanding was that Siouan /s/ => Ofo /f/ fairly recently.  If Travis is looking at "Casa" in early French records from around 1700 or so, would this have been before or after the sound shift?  If /moso/ => /ofo/, I would think it would be before.

Rory