Number 'nine' in Chiwere.

[Rory Larson]

Sky,

Here’s where I really wish we still had Bob around, as the study of loan words from neighbors in the east was one of his specialties.  I’ll toss out what I can here, and maybe someone else will have other ideas.


Ø  Nine, grä̇bena – tscheh – uïningkä̇

Ø  (the whole run together); i. e.,

Ø  ten less one; they also say,

Ø  schangká

I looked up ‘nine’ in Carolyn Quitero’s Osage Dictionary, and the first (long) term is the only one she seems to have listed:

                lébrą hce wįįke

Dhegiha *gr- generally goes to l- in Osage and Kaw, but apparently in Maximilian’s time the leading /g/ was still present.  His ‘ä’ and his ‘eh’ apparently both represent what we write as /e/, while the ‘e’ between the ‘b’ and the ‘n’ presumably represents schwa.  The ‘n’ in the first word would be /r/ followed by a nasal vowel.  In Omaha, the corresponding word for ‘ten’ at that time was grébrą, now shortened to grébą.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Maximilian’s ‘ch’ here.  That should be a voiceless velar or palatal fricative of the sort we generally write with /x/, except after s when I think the whole sequence ‘sch’ is pronounced /š/.  (Our German colleagues can correct me here.)  So then ‘tsch’ should be pronounced /č/.  But in Carolyn’s Osage orthography, ‘c’ is pronounced /ts/.  The pre-aspirated sequence hc- seems to equate to the tense stop tt- in Omaha, which would make hce the potential particle that in Omaha is tte and in Dakotan ktA.  Carolyn uses ch- as a post-aspirate where Omaha has the post-aspirated stop t ͪ  (t + raised h).  So Maximilian’s tscheh might be interpreted here as (ts = c) + (ch = x) + (eh = e), which would get us cxe, or che, the ‘standing’ positional that in Omaha is t ͪ e.  In the former case, the first two words would translate as ‘would-be ten’, and in the latter case as ‘ten standing’.  You may have a good enough sense of Maximilian’s orthography to choose between these.

Maximilian’s uȉ would be our /wi/.  Presumably his ningkä is Osage ðįké, equivalent to Omaha ðįgé, ‘none’ or ‘missing’.  So the whole sequence would essentially be ‘ten with one missing’, as he says.  Carolyn’s version wįįke doesn’t show the n/ð, but I don’t think that should be much of a problem.  In Omaha, that sound is often dropped before the similarly pronounced positional ðįk ͪ é, so I assume that that is all that happened here.



Ø  That got me to thinking about two things.  First, this looks to me like the “grä̇bena – tscheh – uïningkä̇” was the original term for nine and that “shangká” is the interloper.  It makes sense to me that the first version would be the original since it is an actual translation for nine in that language.

Perhaps, but it could also be that the ‘native’ term was reinvented in Osage.  The expression is unpleasantly long to be used commonly as we do, and it suggests a finger-counting system.  It’s likely that post-Mississippian peoples just didn’t need to count that high very often until white traders arrived, and some groups of speakers may have forgotten the older (borrowed) term and reinvented a sensible native replacement that initially had to be cumbersomely explicit.



Ø  Maximilian’s entry for “one” is ”uïnchtschä” and you can see a portion of that in the “tscheh” in the above term.

Carolyn Quintero has wį, wįxce for ‘one’.  The root for ‘one’ in Osage and Omaha is wį, which can also be used loosely as the article ‘a’, ‘an’.  To make it explicitly the numeral ‘one’, it seems that an intensifying ending is added onto it.  In Osage, that ending is xce (presumably not the same as the potential particle hce).  In Omaha, the more explicit term is wįáxči, presumably a diminutized form of wįáxti, in which the suffix -xti is a common intensifier.  What the accented /-á-/ in the middle is doing, I’ve never been able to figure out.  Otherwise, the Osage form here is the same except that its suffix is -xce instead of -xci as I would expect.



Ø  Ok, that was more of a “hey look at this, you may find it interesting” tidbit of information.  Here is the second thought that struck me.  It is the “uïningkä̇” portion of the term which looks related to the Otoe-Missouria “ninge” which is along the lines of no or none and has even been translated as “have none.”  That definitely fits with Maximilian’s mention of “less one.”  Then that got me to thinking again about the Otoe-Missouria “ninge” which I’ve seen (and heard) as also being pronounced “ninye.”  And then that got me to thinking about the term for nine that was given to me by a tribal member which was “nanye” and now I am wondering if that is a possible variant of ”ninye/ninge” and could be a potential long-lost relic of the original Otoe-Missouria term for nine which could very well have been something along the lines of “ten less one” as well before “sanke” moved in.

Ø

Ø  Of course I am basing this on me turning my head to the side while looking at it and banking a bit on the similarities between Otoe-Missouria and Osage but this still has drawn my attention and I wanted to get some feedback from you guys to see what you think.

Ø

Ø  Thoughts?

I think that’s a very promising idea.  Rather than figuring out a sound shift rule to get us from /niⁿ/ to /naⁿ/ though, perhaps we could suppose that the /naⁿ/ came about from the effect of a longer sequence that once existed before the ninye, presumably involving ‘one’.  Maybe the original was something like iyáⁿki-niⁿge, which impatiently tonguetwisted speakers radically collapsed to náⁿge, and from there to your nanye.

Do you happen to remember which syllable of nanye was accented?

Best,
Rory

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