Proto-Siouan language

Proto-Siouan, sometimes known as Proto-Siouan–Catawban, is the reconstructed ancestor of the Siouan languages. Although the attested daughter languages are largely native to the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada, Proto-Siouan is believed to have been originally spoken in and around the Ohio River Valley between 3000BC and 2000BC before splitting off into the Eastern and Western Siouan languages. Siouan-speaking peoples were eventually displaced or assimilated after losing several wars of conquest against their northern Iroquois neighbors during the 17th century, though their presence along the American Eastern Seaboard is supported by toponymic and onomastic data.
Proto-Siouan phonology had five oral and three nasal vowels, each distinguishable by length, and a complex set of consonants including a four-way stop distinction. The language also distinguished between at least two tones, high and non-high, though a falling tone may have also been present. Grammatically, the language was head-marking with simple agglutination. It has been reconstructed with an active–stative morphosyntactic alignment and subject–object–verb word order. The language also had a fairly complex morphophonology, using sound symbolism, phonesthemes, and apophony as ways of conveying semantic meaning, sometimes in combination.
As early as the first half of the 19th century, linguists have attempted to develop a broader understanding of the Siouan languages' relationships to other indigenous languages of the Americas. Early successes linked the larger Western Siouan family to the Catawban family, composed of two poorly attested languages, Catawba and Woccon, and there has been some acceptance of linking the family with the Yuchi language indigenous to eastern Tennessee. Wider attempts to link the language family variously to the Iroquoian, Caddoan, and Muskogean languages as well as a number of other language isolates have largely met with criticism and are not widely accepted.

History

The Proto-Siouan language is the reconstructed ancestor of the Siouan languages. The interrelatedness of the language family was first identified in 1836 by Albert Gallatin, a Genevan-American ethnologist and Founding Father, who named it after its most-widely recognized members, the Sioux. In 1881, the Swiss-American scholar Albert Gatschet worked on documenting the Catawba language of South Carolina and commented on its similarity to the Siouan languages of the Great Plains of the United States and Canada. Two years later, Horatio Hale similarly linked the Tutelo language of Virginia to other Great Plains Siouan languages in his 1883 description of the tribe.
In 1816, the work of the German scholars Johann Adelung and Johann Vater first described the relationship between Catawba and Woccon using primarily a side-by-side word list. Twenty years later, Gallatin built significantly on their work, describing the relationship as phylogenetic and relating these languages to the Siouan family. Work published by Frank Siebert in 1945 is considered to have definitively proven the relationship.
Although historians have identified at least twenty-five Siouan-speaking ethnic groups, it is difficult to estimate the number of languages spoken, as dialectal differences and, in some cases, scant attestations make determining the precise number difficult. David Rood and John E. Koontz estimate that there are between fifteen and eighteen attested Siouan languages. Robert L. Rankin puts the number as simply "more than fifteen".

Origins

Dating

Proto-Siouan was probably spoken around 3000BC, splitting off into the Eastern Siouan and Western Siouan languages around a thousand years later. Earlier efforts to date the language differed drastically from one another, from the end of Pleistocene to around 800AD, but archeological records and research into shared vocabulary has yielded a more narrow estimate of around five thousand years ago. Glottochronological dating of the Eastern–Western split has yielded mixed results. Robert Headley estimated that the Eastern and Western Siouan languages split around 1150BC. By contrast, the mathematician Thaddeus C. Grimm employed a methodology developed by the American linguists Morris Swadesh and Robert Lees, and estimated the same split occurred around 2285BC, though another one of his calculations argued for 5000BC. Rankin argued that this split should be dated to roughly 2000BC.
Archeological evidence has also supported the 3000BC date for Proto-Siouan. The gourd species Cucurbita pepo, for example, has been used as one basis for this estimate; evidence that cucurbits were beginning to be domesticated appears in the archeological records between around 3400BC to around 2300BC. The Siouan languages share a commonly-derived term for the plant across great geographic and phylogenetic distances, such as in the case of the Mandan language, formerly spoken in North Dakota, and the Biloxi language, formerly spoken in Mississippi and Louisiana. The Proto-Siouan term for these cucurbits has been reconstructed as *hkó:-re and its descendants include Crow kakúwi, Mandan kóore, Biloxi akó:di, and Osage hkohkó ma.
Several other terms for plants have helped linguists frame the Proto-Siouan period, as well as reconstruct lower phylogenetic relationships within the greater Siouan family. For example, the Siouan languages do not share a common term for 'corn'; thus, the first divisions of Proto-Siouan must precede its introduction from Mesoamerica around 200 AD. The Mandan term, kóoxą'te, was borrowed into Hidatsa and Crow after the Mandan probably introduced either the plant itself or agricultural techniques related to its cultivation, while Ofo and Biloxi borrowed their term from a Caddoan language. Because of the disparity in terminology, the four major divisions within Siouan proper – Missouri River Siouan, Mississippi Valley Siouan, Ohio Valley Siouan, and Mandan – must have already occurred before the turn of the 11th century, since corn as an agricultural effort only reached the upper Mississippi Valley around that time.
It is likely that Mississippi Valley Siouan was beginning to split into its subfamilies around this time as well. For example, the Dhegihan languages adapted a borrowed term from the Southeast – perhaps from a Muskogean language – with a suffix; this nominal suffix, *-se, was reanalyzed in several languages by folk etymology to -zi meaning 'yellow'. By contrast, Ho-Chunk and the Dakotan languages borrowed the word for 'gourd' from an Algonquian source as their word for 'squash' and derived 'corn' from it using a suffix, such as -heza perhaps meaning 'striped'.

Although the modern Siouan languages are mostly spoken in the Great Plains, scholars believe that Proto-Siouan originated in the Ohio River Valley. Earlier scholarship, namely the work of the American archeologist James Bennett Griffin, argued that the Siouan homeland was somewhere in the Allegheny Piedmont in modern-day Virginia and North Carolina during first contact with European settlers. Siouan-speaking peoples had a wide area of influence in the eastern regions of the modern-day United States. Horatio Hale noticed that several toponyms in the Appalachian region appeared to be of Siouan origin, especially between modern-day Virginia and North Carolina. Other onomastic data has helped to confirm this view. The oral history of modern Siouan-speaking peoples also provides some support; John R. Swanton gathered a number of accounts from speakers which indicated a homeland east of the Ohio River, and the Hidatsa people indicated similar origins to Washington Matthews. A Kaw chieftain recounted to James Owen Dorsey that his people originated in modern-day New York abutting the Atlantic, which they called the "Great Water".
It appears that the push westward was the result of several wars of conquest over hunting grounds by the Iroquois pushing southward from their own Urheimat in the Finger Lakes region of Western and Central New York. Successive Iroquois victories caused a massive displacement of Siouan-speaking populations, probably occurring during the 1600s following an increase in European colonization efforts on the American Eastern Seaboard and the start of the Beaver Wars. However, the push was not instantaneous nor universal; the Lakota are attested near modern-day Chicago in 1648, putting estimates of their migration over the Mississippi River sometime around the turn of the 18th century. Other members of the Siouan family, however, were adopted by the Iroquois; the Tutelo people, for example, were formally adopted in 1753, settling around Cayuga Lake, one of the Finger Lakes, in 1771. They remained with the Cayuga people during their subsequent migration to Canada following the American Revolution.
The displaced tribes' migration from the original Urheimat obfuscated the relationship of some of the languages, with some such as Biloxi and Ofo being pushed into, and influenced by, the Lower Mississippi Valley sprachbund. The Ofo language, indigenous to modern-day Ohio before being forced out by the Iroquois, was thought for many years to be a member of the Muskogean languages of the Deep South, in part because it contained the phoneme which is absent from all other Siouan languages. In 1908, Swanton met an Ofo speaker, Rosa Pierrette, living among the Tunica people in Marksville, Louisiana. His work linked the language to the Dakota language in the Great Plains. Similarly, Gatschet's published work on Biloxi, then found in the Gulf Coast regions of modern-day Mississippi and Louisiana, placed it phylogenetically in the Siouan family; his work was later supported by Dorsey's ethnographic work on the tribe in 1893.

Phonology

Vowels

Reconstructions of Proto-Siouan's vowel system indicate five oral vowels and three nasal vowels, each of which had contrastive vowel length. The vowels reconstructed for Proto-Siouan are as follows:
It is possible that an earlier form of the language, known as "pre-Proto-Siouan", may have had nasalized forms of *e and *o, but these may have been lost as the result of a merger with the oral forms. Because most Siouan languages mark for vowel length, vowels in Proto-Siouan have been reconstructed as having both long and short forms, though the modern understanding of vowel length in the family's extinct members has proven difficult as earlier research did not typically account for length at all. Length in Proto-Siouan was probably somewhat predictable and had different effects on tone in the daughter languages.
Nasal vowels are notable in Proto-Siouan in part due to the typologically-rare absence of nasal consonants. All examples of nasal consonants in modern Siouan languages are explainable through series resonants followed by nasal vowels; for example, when *w is followed by a nasal vowel, it may become.