Subject: OP Text Archives

From: Koontz John E <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 08:59:35 -0600 (MDT)

Here are the files (two in one zip).  A couple of points:

- First few texts in 1890 were "lost" when the card decks were lent to a
programmer as samples.  The published versions still exist of course!

- Accented y (in Windows view) represents accent over the preceding vowel.

- U-umlaut (I think it was) (in Windows view) represents raised n,
indicating the preceding vowel is nasalized.  Some nasalized vowels after
n or m are not marked by Dorsey.  This would be ogonek, or the Polish
nasalization hook in Americanist linguistic usage, but the Omahas and
others prefer non-diacritic solutions to this sort of thing, and raised n
is what Francis LaFlesche (an Omaha in Federal service) was using in the
early 1900s.  Tilde, which a Portuguese speaker might consider obvious, is
avoided by Americanists because it combines ill with the acute for accent,
not to mention things like grave or cirucmflex for various tones or pitch
contours in languages where these are factors, e.g., Kiowa.

- This text suppresses the difference between tense or geminate stops (pp,
tt, cc, kk) and aspirated ones (ph, th, ch, kh).  Dorsey represents it
only sporadically, and as I intended this version for pre-XML Web use, I
gritted my teeth and consolidated.  The Omahas and Poncas are now willing
to see the distinction made, but at first were rather opposed.  For
minimal pairs, e.g., ppi 'I came back' vs. phi 'I arrived there', tti
'house' vs. thi 'to arrive here', etc.  The th in these texts is dh (edh),
which is functionally the r (or l) in this language.

- Sh and zh are s-hat and z-hat (esh and zhee).  Ch or c, whichever I used
are cc/ch (tense and aspirated "ch").  I think I used gh for the voiced
velar fricative and x for the voiceless, but I may have merged them as x,
which was an early preference by Omahas.  The contrast has virtually no
functional load, but seems to be phonemic.

I think the field markers will be clear!

John E. Koontz
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz