local reactions to language family terms

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 3 Jun 2007, Mark J Awakuni-Swetland wrote:
> Yes, it can be an emotion-driven mess.
...
> In a recent grant application I described an O/P dictionary project...
> with the O/P reflecting Dorsey's classification. When I approached the
> Southern Ponca for a letter of support their first comments were about
> that designation. They requested I change the project title to "Omaha and
> Ponca" so as to reduce the impression that the Ponca are somehow part of
> the "Omaha".

Thanks, Mark!  I'm glad to hear some Ponca views of this.

Just for the record, I've always intended Omaha-Ponca as a sort of "tight" 
coordination construction, like Crow-Hidatsa or Eskimo-Aleut or 
Serbo-Croatian, or, escaping the surly bonds of linguistics, 
Canadian-American as in "Canadian-American Relations."  I definitely never 
meant one term to modify the other, e.g., as a modifier-modified 
construction like Anglo-Norman, etc.  Admittedly most of the tight 
coordinations like this that come to me are names of linguistic groupings!

As far as the relative order of things, I put Omaha before Ponca because 
the rhythm worked better for me than Ponka-Omaha.  I definitely didn't 
intend to put Omaha first or, on the other hand to refer to something like 
the Omaha form of Ponca, etc.

For what it is worth, OP seems safer than PO as a two letter abbreviation, 
since that leaves OM and PO for Omaha and Ponca alone, when they is 
needed.

I don't have any problem with the expression Omaha and Ponca per se, but 
in practical terms, there seems to be only one language being shared by 
these two or actually three (Omaha, Northern Ponca, Southern Ponca) 
political groups.  Although some interesting things surface (sometimes) 
when you look at the nominal affiliation of speakers in the Dorsey corpus, 
there are even more noticeable differences in the sample that seem to have 
nothing to do with Omaha vs. Ponca.

I suspect there really are small real differences between the two 
communities since speakers always implied that they could tell one from 
another, and Omaha speakers often suspected that my strange pronunciation 
could be accounted for by Ponca influence.  (Sadly, a serious English 
accent was more like it.)  However, while I have some slight idea of where 
some those differences might lie, gained from comments by Tom Leonard and 
more recently from Kathy Shea's extensive work, I don't know that I would 
like to be put on the spot about them, and a lot of the ones I know of are 
fairly recent in origin.

I think I've mentioned that the wide distribution in both communities of 
gdhebaN 'ten' from earlier ghdhebdhaN (as recorded by the Long Expedition 
and clearly the original form, cf. Dakotan (wi)kc^emna).  This suggests 
that the boundary between Omaha and Ponca may have been fairly permeable 
in the 1800s.  The same applies to the change of s^n to n in certain forms 
(the same ones).  Unfortunately, we don't have anything like a dialect 
survey at any point in time for Omaha (and) Ponca.

Anyway, I hope I can keep getting away with Omaha-Ponca, though anything 
on the subject ought to begin by explaining the terminology.

There's no harm that I can see in using the terms Omaha and Ponca to refer 
to the results of working with one community, but it becomes problematic 
if the generic content of the Dorsey corpus is used.  And, oc course, in 
the present paucity of material, I don't think any Omaha speakers should 
hesitate to consult "Ponca" material and vice versa.  And I very much 
hope that anyone noting differences will report them!