JOD's terrible 'teens'

Thu Feb 4 13:57:43 UTC 2010

Yesterday in a conversation with one of my UNL speakers, Grandma Delores 
Black recalled hearing her eldest grandmother counting to ten in the 
conventional way, then using the kki edi followed by a second number for 
the teens.

gtheboN kki edi shoNkka => 10 kki edi 9

with the kki edi variously glossed as 'also', 'and' or something similar.

Grandma Delores recalled her mother using the current agthiNshoNkka form.

I did not specifically ask about 12, since it has a non-agthiN pattern 
today

shappe noNba
six two

I will try to elicit this set again from the other speakers with an eye 
towards what Grandma Delores described.

Uthixide

"Rankin, Robert L" <rankin at ku.edu> 
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02/02/10 08:57 PM
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RE: JOD's terrible 'teens'

Sounds to me as if they didn't use '19' very often.  After all, we don't 
either except in dates from the 1900s.  They don't use glebaN agi shaNkka 
or something similar?

I did a Siouan Conference paper back in the 80s (or maybe it was the 70s) 
on Siouan counting and tried to show that the words correlated with the 
signs for the numbers in the Plains Sign Language.  This was a partial 
quinary system of finger counting beginning with the little finger of the 
left hand and ending with the little finger of the right.  This explained 
why Dakotan for '9' is 'one in the palm'.  I don't know how the finger 
counting system would work above 10 however.  It would be interesting to 
find out.  I don't recall ever seeing the PSL signs for numerals in the 
teens. 

The 'nine' word itself is a bit of a mystery.  It's found in both Siouan 
and Algonquian as 'shankka' or the like.  Ives Goddard thinks it's Siouan 
originally but I've speculated that it's Algonquian originally.  Nobody 
wants to claim the little bastard.

Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU on behalf of Mark J Awakuni-Swetland
Sent: Tue 2/2/2010 10:45 AM
To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
Subject: JOD's terrible 'teens'

Aloha All,

I am working through Dorsey's numbers in the teens. 

He has several definitions for the base number that are not always all 
used on a number. For example:

nineteen

the other nine

the extra nine

again nine

I was wondering what y'all might make of this.

Mark

Mark Awakuni-Swetland, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
and Ethnic Studies (Native American Studies)
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE 68588-0368

http://omahalanguage.unl.edu
http://omahaponca.unl.edu
Phone 402-472-3455
FAX: 402-472-9642

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