Product Code Database
Siouan ( ), also known as Siouan–Catawban ( ), is a language family of North America located primarily in the Great Plains, Ohio River and Mississippi valleys and southeastern North America with a few other languages in the east.
() – Extinct language
Siouan languages can be grouped into Western Siouan languages and Catawban.
The Western Siouan languages are typically subdivided into Missouri River languages (such as Crow language and Hidatsa language), Mandan language, Mississippi River languages (such as Sioux language, Chiwere language-Winnebago, and Dhegihan languages), and Ohio Valley Siouan languages (Ofo language, Biloxi language, and Tutelo language). The Catawban branch consists of Catawba language and Woccon language.
Charles F. Voegelin established, on the basis of linguistic evidence, that Catawban was divergent enough from the other Siouan languages, including neighboring Siouan languages of the Piedmont and Appalachia, to be considered a distinct branch. Voegelin proposes that Biloxi, Ofo and Tutelo consistute one group which he terms Ohio Valley Siouan. This group includes various historical languages spoken by Siouan peoples not only in the Ohio River Valley, but across the Appalachian Plateau and into the Piedmont regions of present-day Virginia and the Carolinas. Some of these groups migrated or were displaced great distances following European contact, ending up as far afield as present-day Ontario and southern Mississippi. Collectively, Siouan languages of Appalachia and the Piedmont are sometimes grouped under the term Tutelo language, Tutelo-Saponi, or Yesah (Yesa:sahį) as the language historically spoken by the Monacan, Manahoac, Haliwa-Saponi, and Occaneechi peoples.
With respect to vowels, five oral vowels are reconstructed: and three . Wolff also reconstructed some consonantal clusters .
In Siouanist literature (e.g., Rankin et al. 2015), Americanist phonetic transcriptions are the norm, so IPA * is Americanist *š, IPA *j is Americanist *y, and so on.
The major change to the previously-proposed system was accomplished by systematically accounting for the distribution of multiple stop series in modern Siouan languages by tracing them back to multiple stop series in the proto-language. Previous analysis posited only a single stop series.
Many of the consonant clusters proposed by Wolff (19501951) can be accounted for due to syncopation of short vowels before stressed syllables. For example, Matthews (1958: 129) gives *wróke as the proto-form for 'male.' With added data from a larger set of Siouan languages since the middle of the twentieth century, Rankin et al. (2015) give *waroː(-ka) as the reconstructed form for 'male.'
Unlike Wolff and Matthew's proposals, there are no posited nasal consonants in Proto-Siouan. Nasal consonants only arise in daughter languages when followed by a nasal vowel.Some Siouan languages have however developed a phonemic contrast between the non-nasal sonorants w- and r- and the corresponding nasals m- and n-. These historical developments are presented in the following article:
In the 19th century, Robert Latham suggested that the Siouan languages are related to the Caddoan and Iroquoian languages. In 1931, Louis Allen presented the first list of systematic correspondences between a set of 25 lexical items in Siouan and Iroquoian. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wallace Chafe further explored the link between Siouan and Caddoan languages. In the 1990s, Marianne Mithun compared the morphology and syntax of all the three families. At present, this Macro-Siouan hypothesis is not considered proven, and the similarities between the three families may instead be due to their protolanguages having been part of a sprachbund.
|
|
