Autonym of Mosopeleas-Ouesperies-Ofos

[Rankin, Robert L]

> What would be phonetic interpretation of the autonym of the various eras of the Mosopelea-Ouesperie-Ofo language?
 
1) What is to made of the nasal attestations of the name: "Mons8pelea" and "Onspee"?
 
The nasal vowel, [oN] would be part of the original pronunciation.  In Siouan languages a nasal consonant, [m] or [n] nearly always implies the presence of nasality on the following vowel.  Otherwise the consonants would have been [w] and [r] or [l].  Transcribers often wrote the nasality as a feature of the consonant rather than the vowel.  
 
2) What does "-pelea" "-perie" represent? Is it likely a part of the autonym? Was it likely dropped from the autonym by the time the tribe became known as the Ofo, when they lived on the lower Missisippi?
 
There is no authoritative answer to this.  IF moso- was the root, these would be suffixes of some kind.  Within Siouan there are numerous possibilities for things like -pe or -re or -ri, etc.  The bottom line is that no one can be sure just what they might have signified.  Dave Kaufman has discovered that in Biloxi -re/-ri is used to mark nominals at first mention in a discourse.  Whether it is used with ethnonyms or place names is anyone's guess.
 
Note that we don't really have a good meaning for the moso- part.  It certainly did not mean 'dog' in any Siouan language.  The name "Nation du Chongue" or "dog people" came from a Muskogean MISinterpretation of the word [ofo] after it had lost its M, and S had become [f].  [ofo] was too similar to Choctaw [ofi] 'dog' for them to overlook.  The original Siouan meaning of *moNso- is unknown.  (There is at least a resemblance to *maNs- 'metal, copper', later 'iron', but that's just guessing.)
 
The -pe portion of the ethnonym was still pronounced when these people came in contact with the Tunica, because Swanton found it on their term for the Ofos, namely <ushpe>.  
 
The association of Mosopelea with the Ofo would be entirely speculative if it weren't for two factors:  (1) Swanton's discovery of the several variant forms of the attestation stretching from the upper reaches of the Ohio, downstream to the Mississippi and south to Louisiana, with phonetic changes evident at each stage of migration, and (2) the term refers to the Ofo in two distinct forms, Tunica "Ushpe" and Ofo [ofo], both from the same Swanton ethnonym.  
 
Bob