cross-linguistic metaphors (fwd)

[Rankin, Robert L]

I'm pretty sure the -ska of wazhiNska and ieska is the one meaning 'clear' (also 'white'), as in the Kansas place name ni hni ska 'clear spring'..  So wazhiNska would be 'clear thinker' and ieska 'clear speaker' (interpreter).  As for the other skas, who knows?  The secret is to realize it means 'clear' as well as 'white'.

Bob

________________________________
From: owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU [owner-siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU] on behalf of Bryan James Gordon [linguista at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 2:58 PM
To: siouan at lists.Colorado.EDU
Subject: Re: cross-linguistic metaphors (fwd)



But since this is a Siouanist list, what about Siouan and other native North American languages?  For Omaha, we have wazhiN-ska listed in the Stabler-Swetland dictionary for 'smart/intelligent', along with 'wise', 'knowledge', 'clever' and 'sober'.  wazhiN seems to mean something like 'disposition', 'will', 'mentality' or 'anger', perhaps like the early Germanic meaning of /mood/.  ska means 'white', and is also said to mean 'clear' or 'bright', although I've never been able to make that connection.  So the term actually seems to mean something like "white-disposition", with the main implication of wisdom and sobriety of conduct, not so much what we're looking for here as the ability to grasp ideas quickly.  No word is listed for 'stupid', and the closest I can get is 'foolish', which merges with groNriN, 'crazy', as the opposite of wisdom and sobriety.

What if the -ska in wazhíⁿska is not the same as "white"? There are also other words, like tápuska, iyéska, which confer the impression that it might be nothing more than an agent-nominaliser, perhaps historically related to shkoⁿ "active/move/do" (which would go some way towards explaining the apparent part-cognate-part-loanword set hethúshka iróska ilóⁿska where some languages have s and others sh). I think I recall hearing some words in Macy that indicated a productive use of this suffix on verbal predicates that don't show any signs of taking -ska in either Dorsey or the Swetland-Stabler lexicon. I've even heard an interpretation of "pahaska" (Pawhuska) as meaning "person who stands forward" instead of "white head/scalp", although that might be a creative back-formation.

On the other hand, however, the Báxoje word for translator is "ich^é brédhe" "speaks clearly", which hints that clarity if not colour may well have something to do with the semantics of this family of concepts. I think what we need is either luck in finding a section of discourse documented that confirms or rejects the hypothesis, or a native speaker who has the relevant intuition.

- Bryan