Conjugation Of A Sentence in Tutelo-Saponi

[Rankin, Robert L.]

> Question here.  How does the unaspirated vs. aspirated distinction in Southeastern square with the unaspirated vs. pre-aspirated vs. post-aspirated trichotomy that I thought was established for MVS?

It is indeed established on the basis of cognates and synchronic alternations in MVS.  You end up having to reconstruct C, hC and Ch sets.

> I had understood from long ago that pre-aspiration (e.g. ʰt-) had shifted forward to merge with post-aspiration (e.g. tʰ-) in Dakotan, had stayed the same in Osage, and had changed to tense (e.g. tt) in Omaha, Ponka and Kaw.  Was there not this three-way distinction in Proto-Siouan and Southeastern?

Proto-Siouan, yes, but we simply don't have good enough transcriptions to be sure of OVS.  I've shown in a paper that Biloxi definitely had at least two series.  Ofo had post-aspirates fide Swanton's transcription.  Of all the linguists and amateurs who transcribed Tutelo no one was perceptive enough to transcribe aspiration until Edward Sapir wrote down a page or so worth of words and a couple of sentences in the early 20th century.  He transcribed both vowel length and aspiration right off the bat, but his sample is very small.  Aspiration followed certain voiceless stops.  We can infer its presence further from the fact that some p's, t's and k's are always  written voiceless, by every transcriber, while others vary with b, d, and g.  We assume these latter were unaspirated.

OVS aspiration insofar as we understand it at all, seems to have a slightly different distribution than in MVS.  It seems to be linked to accent syncronically more than in MVS, where the link was broken early.  This tends to be confirmed by Sapir for Tutelo, who transcribed 'hot' as kathe rather than the expected khate.  This could have simply been a mistake, of course.  There are a scattering of hC transcriptions in Hale and perhaps one or two others, but they remain mysterious.  It's a great pity that we didn't realize there were still at least three fluent Tutelo speakers on Six Nations into the 1970s.

Bob
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