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Two Proto-Algonquian Consonant Clusters

John Hewson Memorial University of Newfoundland

In his reconstructions of Proto-Algonquian (PA) consonant clusters, Bloomfield (1925, 1946) reconstructed a pre-aspirated series which included *hp, *ht, *hk, a pre-nasalized series which included *mp, *nt, *nk, and (principally on the evidence of Menomini) a series of pre-glottalized clusters which included *?t but not *?k or *?p (although both /?k/ and /?p/ occurred in his Menomini data — the latter only in a few reduplicated forms). He found no cognates in Fox, Cree and Ojibwa, the other three of the four central languages which he utilized almost exclusively in his Algonquian comparative work, to justify either *?k or *?p.'

There is, however, a Cree cognate to M mahke:?kow 'he is big-faced'. Watkins (1938) records Cree mahkihkwe:w 'he has a large face', (mukikwao) and on the basis of the common PA root *mank-, 'big'2 we are enabled to reconstruct PA *manki?kwe:wa 'he has a big face'.

The PA formative *-?kw(e) 'face, eyes' that appears in this word is of such low frequency, however, that no other fully cognate words are to be found in the presently available vocabularies for Bloomfield's four central languages. There are, however, several words in which the morph occurs in Cree: Bloomfield in his MS lexicon of Cree (Bloomfield MSa)3 gives the following: kaskite:hkwe:w 'he blackens his (own) face'; mihyawe:hkwe:w 'he has fair hair on the face'; kinwa:pe:kihkwe:w 'he has a long snout'; <3cikihkwe:w 'he is scarred on the face'; to:mihkwe:w 'he oils or paints his (own) face'; wa:pihkwe:w 'he is white on the face'; wiyi:pihkwe:w 'he has a dirty face'. Watkins also gives several other examples under 'face'. These examples are not to be confused with reflexes of PA *-i:nkwe: 'eye, face', which also occur occasionally in Cree: Bloomfield gives C ka:wi:hkwe:yiw 'he frowns' (showing PA final *-li 'movement of body part', as in *kwe:9kexkwe:liwa 'he turns his head' > C. kwe:skiskwe:yiw, 0 kwe:kkikkwe:ni), and Watkins gives maci:hkwe:yiw (muchekwayew) 'he makes faces' (with the same final from PA *-li and showing the root *mat~maci 'bad'), and mahkate:wi:hkwe:w 'he has a black face'.

Ojibwa, as we have just seen, has forms in -ikkwe: with the meaning 'head', but there is clear evidence that these are from PA *exkwe:. There are, however, three curious instances of a morph -kki: in the Ojibwa lexicon in Piggott and Kaye 1973: acicikki:5sTn Tie with head lower than feet' acicikki:SsTm 'place s.o. with head lower than feet' acicikki:ka:pawi 'stand on one's head' The root here is acit- 'upside down', and the palataliza­tion of the final consonant of this root shows that the following morph could not be from PA *-exkwe:. But, on the

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other hand, the formative for 'face' in these words shows a different final vowel, and can only be related to the Cree and Menomini formations quoted above if one is prepared to propose a reshaping of this final vowel.1*

The evidence for PA *?k, therefore, is sparse and re­stricted to a single morph of very restricted distribution.5

There is much better evidence for a further cluster with /k/ as second member and with an initial sibilant. Three such clusters are reconstructed by Bloomfield (1946:88):6 PA

*ck *ck *sk

F Sk hk 3k

C hk sk sk

M hk ck sk

0 sk 3k Sk

Sh 3k ?k Sk

To these we may add a fourth, as follows:

PA *sk

F Sk

C sk

M hk

0 Sk

Sh Sk

This new cluster allows us to make the following recon-

(1) *leska:tesiwa 'he is angry'. Montagnais lishkatishiu 'etre fache, irritS' (Lemoine 1901): 0 niSka:tisi 'be angry'.

(2) *leske:leme:wa 'he is vexed with him'. Montagnais nirichterimau 'je le hais comme mon ennemi' (Silvy 1974); F neSke:neme:wa 'he hates him'; 0 niSke:nim 'be angry with someone'.

(3) *leskihe:wa 'he vexes him'. M nshke:he:w 'he angers him'; 0 niSki? 'offend, irritate someone'.

(4) *leskime:wa 'he vexes him by speech'. F neSkime:wa 'he forbids, scolds him'; M nehke:me:w 'he angers him by speech'; 0 niSkim 'make someone angry by words'; Sh nil?Skima T scold him'.

(5) *leskwa:piwa 'he looks vexed'. M na:nehkwapew 'he sulks'; (reduplicated) 0 niSka:pi 'cast angry looks'.

(6) *So:skwihSinwa 'he slips'. F So:SkwihSinwa 'he slips and falls'; C so:skosin 'he slips, slides'; M su:hkihsen 'he slips'; 0 So:SkoSin 'slip and fall"; Sh SoSkwiSinwa 'he falls on a slippery place'..

(7) *So:skwene:wa 'he lets him slip from his hand'. C so:skone:w 'id,'; M so:hkonew 'id.'; F So:Skone:wa 'he lets go of him'.

(8) *So:skwenamwa 'he lets it slip from his hand'; C so:skonam 'id.'; M so:skonam 'id.'.

(9) *nepe:skiwa 'he is given to sleeping'. C nipe:skiw 'he is given to sleeping'; M nepe:hkiw 'he sleeps much'; 0 nipe:Ski 'be a sleepy head'.

20 (10) *kelaweskiwa 'he is a liar'. C kiya:skiw 'he tells a

lie'; M keno:hkew 'he tells a lie'; 0 kaki:nawi3ki Tie' (reduplicated).

(11) *kwe?ta:ci:skiwa 'he is easily frightened'. C kosta:ci:skiw 'he is easily frightened'; 0 kotta:ci:Ski 'be easily frightened'.

(12) *kemo:teskiwa 'he is given to stealing'. C kimotiskiw •he is a thief; M kemo:tehkow 'he is a thief, he steals habitually'; 0 kimo:tiSki 'be a thief.

(13) *ki:waSkwe:pye:skiwa 'he is addicted to strong drink'. C ki:skwe:pe:skiw 'he is a drunkard'8; 0 ki:waskwe:pi:3ki 'be an habitual drunkard'.

(14) *tahkwanke:skiwa 'he is given to biting'. C tahkwahke:skiw 'id.'; 0 takkwanke:Ski 'id.'.

In terms (l)-(5) a root *lesk- 'vex' is seen; in (6)-(8) a root *So:skw-9; in (9)-(14) a formative (AI final) *-eski 'given to, inclined to'.

In addition to these there is also the word F akay:Skwa, C kiya:sk, M kaya:h, 0 kaya:Sk 'gull, herring gull'. This word was discussed at length by Siebert in his 1967 article on discrepant clusters. Siebert commented (1967:54): "Among the discrepant sets of PA '*Xk', there are for the present no solutions readily apparent for *kaya:Xkwa 'gull' and *neleXkwa 'my gland', and they remain in the group of reshapings due to unknown cause". It is clear that, as far as concern Bloomfield's four central languages, 'gull' may be reconstructed as *kaya:skwa, and that with this solution the set is no longer discrepant for these languages. This is still not a complete solution to the problem posed by this word, however, since Abenaki group shows an hk cluster here (e.g. Siebert fives Penobscot kahkw 'gull') whereas there is evidence that the normal reflex for new *sk in the Abenaki group is sk not hk: Rasles gives several items with the stem nesk- under 'facher', and Szabo (personal correspondence) gives Maliseet [kal6:sko] "he lies, tells lies' (cf. 8 above) .

As well as the Menomini variants hki and hko that one finds in such words as esi:?ta:hkiw and esi:?ta:hkow 'he is given to doing so' (*eSi 'thus' + ?ta: 'pseudo TI final indicating action relative to object' + eski) the variants cki and cko are also found in Menomini, as in the following: M kiawe:ckiw 'he is of jealous disposition'; ku?syaceke:ckiw and ku?syackee:ckow 'he is of bashful disposition'; wane:hkeckiw and wane:hkeckow 'he loses his memory'. There is apparently no pair showing either the variation hki~cki or hko-cko, but the following pair differ only in the root syllable, and may be compared to the forms above with the root *eSi: M we:ne?ta:ckow 'he is a dirty, messy worker' (<*wi:n(i) 'dirt' + ?ta: 'psTI' + eski); M mace:?ta:hkow 'he does things badly' (*maci 'bad' + ?ta: 'psTI' + eski). Bloomfield (1962:138) suggests that the vocalic alter­nation in this morph is probably related to common patterns of alternation in Menomini and mentions (227) that the

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"vowel is optionally replaced". He also proposes (15.16) that the variation in the cluster is distributionally determined, and that hk is found if "the last consonant of the underlying stem is c,n,p,s,t"; otherwise ck is used. For pseudo TI finals in ?ta: a further discrimination must be made: hk is found "only when c or s precedes". Even then, there is a small irregular residue, and the motivation of the alternation is by no means clear: perhaps a combination of consonant symbolism and consonant harmony.

Given that ck is an alternation for regular hk in M reflexes of *eski, we may also reconstruct sets where M shows ck as in the following: (15) *kya:we:skiwa 'he is given to jealousy'; M kiawe:ckiw

'he is of jealous disposition'; 0 ka:we:Ski 'he is given to jealousy'.

(16) *keSya:we:lencike:skiwa 'he is given to envy'; M kesiawe:nehcike:ckiw 'he is of envious disposition'; 0 keSa:we:nceke:Ski 'he is of envious disposition'.

The frequency of PA *eski and the existence of *lesk-and So:skw- increase the likelihood of finding reflexes for *sk in other Algonquian languages, a step which is important for determining the status of such a reconstruction.

In this regard, for example, it should be observed that Bloomfield's reconstruction *St must be reconsidered: putative reflexes are found only in Cree, Ojibwa and Delaware, and only in a single morph: *-Stikwa:n- 'head', as given by Bloomfield (1946:88). Recently, Pentland (1977:225) has added further evidence against *St, suggesting that the proper reflex of this morph in Ojibwa is -htikon, and reaffirming the appraisal of Michelson (1933:39) that 0 oStikwa:n 'his head' is an "almost certain loan-word in Ojibwa from Cree".

Reconstructions of limited productivity are necessarily suspect: there is always the possibility of basing an erroneous reconstruction on discrepancies that arise out of borrowing. As far as concerns the evidence given here for *?1, it rests on reflexes from a single morph in M, C and perhaps 0 and in the paradigmatic correlations of *ht, *hk and *nt to *?t, *?k. The evidence for new sk is more broadly based on reflexes from at least three morphs in F, C, M, 0, Sh, and the Abenaki group.

NOTES

1 In 1925:150 Bloomfield commented: "A PCA ?k seems to be demanded for M -?kw- 'eye', as in pohki?kow 'he is one-eyed', but I cannot give correspondences". In 1946:89 he commented: "There were perhaps other clusters with k. M has qk, as in poohkeqkow 'he is one-eyed'". The lack of a *?p cluster is not surprising: Greenberg (1970:127) has pointed out that it is common for languages with ejectives to have a gap in the bilabial series. It is well known that Proto Semitic lacks an emphatic (i.e. glottalized) bilabial. And the lack of evidence for *b in Proto Indo-European has been pointed out

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as a justification for Paul Hooper's (1977) recent rein-terpretation of the traditional voiced plosives of PIE as an earlier preglottalized series. 2 As in C mahkikama:w, F makikami:ya:wi, 0 mankikama: 'it is a large body of water'. PA *mankikamyiya:wi (C and 0 forms haplological). 3 I am grateful to C.F. Hockett for providing me with a xerox copy of this MS. In my citations from it I have amended Bloomfield's phonetic symbols to correspond to his presentation of Cree forms in Bloomfield 1946; e.g. for 'ts' and 'u' in the MS, I write 'c' and 'o'. " Bloomfield (1958:84) gives -kki: 'face' for Ojibwa, but fails to give adequate supporting evidence. 5 It is also possible that Miami apSiagwata Tittle faced' (Voeglin 1938), in the element -agwa-, also reflects the same formative found in C, M and 0. The evidence, however, is inconclusive. 6 Siebert (1967) discarded Bloomfield's *ck and began to write *sk in its place. In his 1975 work on Powhatan, however, he returned to using *ck once more. The evidence of the new cluster proposed here suggests that Bloomfield's *ck is indeed the most appropriate representation for the cluster. ' In these reconstructions C, F and M examples are normally from Bloomfield MSa, MSb, 1975; Ojibwa forms are from Bloomfield 1958, and Piggott and Kaye 1973. 8 There is ample evidence from the other languages that a vowel contraction (*i:wa > i:) has taken place in this Cree root: PA *ki:waskwe:pye:wa 'he is drunk' gives C ki:skwe:pe:w, F ki:waskwe:pye:wa, M ke:waskwepi:w and 0 ki:waSkwe:pi:. The sense of the root *ki:waskwe:- is 'dizzy, silly, crazy' as in C ki:skwe:w 'he is silly or crazy', 0 ki:waskwe: 'he is dizzy', and C ki:skwe:win 'dizziness, foolishness', 0 ki:waSkwe:win 'dizziness, vertigo'. Vowel contraction in Algonquian tends to be somewhat sporadic: even the well-known contraction mentioned by Bloomfield (1946:92) is, as Bloomfield notes, of irregular occurrence. Not to be confused with So:Skw- 'smooth'. Since the two roots have fallen together in F, C and 0, however, semantic blending of 'smooth, slippery, slide, slip' has taken place in these languages. M, however, still distinguishes so:skw-and su:skw- 'smooth' from so:hkw- and su:hkw- 'slip'. Even the form given is certainly in error, since t •+ £/_i in PA. This lapsus is amended by Siebert (1975: 298) in his Powhatan study, where he comments "Bloomfield's ...PA cluster /*St/, supported only by Cree and Ojibwa and found only in one example /*weStekwa:ni/ "his head', is isolated and appears to be of tenuous validity".

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