Proto-Siouan ( ) is the reconstructed ancestor of the Western Siouan languages, also called Siouan proper. 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 around 2000BC, when it split off from Eastern Siouan languages, also called the Catawban languages. Although Siouan-speaking peoples were eventually displaced or assimilated after losing several wars of conquest against their northern Iroquois neighbors during the 17th century, their presence in and around Appalachia is supported by studies of placenames and other proper names in the region.
Proto-Siouan phonology had five oral and three nasal vowels, each with long and short variants, and a complex set of consonants including a four-way stop distinction. The language also distinguished at least two tones, high and non-high, though a falling tone may have also been present. Grammatically, Proto-Siouan demonstrated subject–object–verb word order and was head-marking, as agreement fell on the head rather than on modifiers or dependents. The language also used simple agglutination, meaning that it stacked a few affixes together with different meanings rather than using a single affix to convey several different meanings simultaneously. It had an active–stative morphosyntactic alignment, where the subject of a verb with no object was often treated grammatically like an object, especially if the subject had no agency in the verb. The language used sound symbolism, such as combinations of sounds that indicated some category of meaning and changes in vowel quality as ways of conveying meaning, sometimes in combination.
History
The Proto-Siouan language is the reconstructed ancestor of the Western Siouan languages. The language family was first identified as an interrelated group in 1836 by Albert Gallatin, a Genevan-American ethnologist, who named it after its most widely recognized ethnolinguistic group, the Sioux. In 1881, the Swiss-American scholar Albert Gatschet documented the Catawba language of South Carolina and commented on its similarity to the Siouan languages of the Great Plains of North America. 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 1836, Gallatin built on the work of Johann Adelung and Johann Vater, describing the Siouan and Catawban languages as sister branches of one family. Work published by Frank Siebert in 1945 is considered to have definitively proven the relationship.
In 1984, several Siouanists led by David S. Rood began compiling a comparative dictionary after receiving funding form the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation. Though advanced copies of the dictionary were distributed in 1997 and again in 2006, the project broke down following the "retirement, disappearance, or focus shift" of most of the staff after the unexpected death of Robert L. Rankin, its most comprehensive contributor, in February 2014. The dictionary was published in May 2015 with its original commentary.
Although historians have identified at least twenty-five Siouan-speaking ethnic groups, dialectal differences and, in some cases, scant attestations make determining the precise number of Siouan languages difficult. David Rood and John E. Koontz estimate that there are between fifteen and eighteen attested Siouan languages. Rankin puts the number at simply "more than fifteen".
Origins Dating Proto-Siouan's parent language, Proto-Siouan–Catawban, 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 the end of the Pleistocene around 9700BC to around 800AD, but archeological records and research into shared vocabulary have yielded a narrower estimate of around five thousand years ago. Glottochronological dating, which treats replacements in a language's vocabulary as having a relatively consistent rate over time, in determining the Eastern–Western split similarly yielded mixed results, though modern linguistics no longer regards this method as scientifically sound. Rankin argued that this split should be dated to roughly 2000BC.
Archeological evidence may also help in dating Proto-Siouan. The gourd species Cucurbita pepo, for example, has been used as one basis for this estimate; cucurbits begin to appear 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 or and its descendants include Crow ('squash, pumpkin'), Mandan ('squash'), Biloxi ('gourd, gourd cup'), and Osage (; 'cucumber'). However, by the time these gourds were domesticated as a food source around 1000BC, evidence suggests that the family had already split into its four main branches: Missouri River Siouan, Mississippi Valley Siouan, Ohio Valley Siouan, and Mandan, with the Mississippi Valley languages already showing signs of further division.
Several other terms for plants have helped linguists frame and reconstruct lower phylogenetic relationships within the Western Siouan family. For example, the languages do not share a common term for corn; thus, the first divisions of Proto-Siouan precede corn's introduction from Mesoamerica around 200AD. Terms related to the agricultural production of corn are pervasive in the Siouan languages, which allows for much more stable estimates for timing since, while one word may fall out of use in any language at any point during its history, a cluster of related words is less likely to all be replaced. The terms for corn are fairly disparate. For example, the Mandan term () was borrowed into Hidatsa () and Crow () after the Mandan probably introduced either the plant itself or techniques related to its cultivation; Ofo and Biloxi borrowed their term from a Caddoan language, while the other languages typically adapted a dated term for squash.
Location
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 in the mid-20th century, argued that the Siouan languages were originally spoken somewhere in the Allegheny Piedmont in modern-day Virginia and North Carolina. Siouan-speaking peoples had a wide area of influence in the eastern regions of the modern-day United States. Horatio Hale, for example, noticed that several toponyms in the Appalachian region appeared to be of Siouan origin, especially between 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 in accounts given 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".
The westward migration began as a result of several wars of conquest over hunting grounds by the Iroquois pushing southward from their own homeland 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 neither instantaneous nor universal; the Lakota are attested near modern-day Chicago in 1648, with estimates of their migration over the Mississippi River placed sometime around the turn of the 18th century. Other Siouan-speaking peoples, 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 Ohio River Valley 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 , or linguistic area. The Ofo language, spoken in 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 spoken in the Gulf Coast regions of modern-day Mississippi and Louisiana, placed it within the Siouan family; his work was later supported by Dorsey's ethnographic work on the tribe in 1893.
Phonology
Vowels Proto-Siouan's vowel system had five oral vowels and three nasal vowels, each of which had contrastive vowel length. The vowels reconstructed for Proto-Siouan are as follows: Front Central BackOralNasalOralNasalOralNasal Close * *i• *į *į• * *u•*ų *ų• Mid * *e• * *o• Open * *a•*ą *ą•
It is possible that an earlier form of the language, known as "pre-Proto-Siouan", had nasalized forms of and , but these may have been lost as the result of a merger with the oral forms. Because most Siouan languages contrast vowel length, vowels in Proto-Siouan have been reconstructed as having both long and short forms. However, understanding vowel length in the family's extinct members has proven difficult, as earlier fieldwork with Siouan languages did not typically discuss vowel length at all. Length in Proto-Siouan was probably somewhat predictable and may have affected tone in the daughter languages. When short vowels occurred before a stressed syllable, they were often deleted if the first consonant was a sonorant, such as or ; this process remained productive in several descendant languages as well. All examples of nasal consonants in modern Siouan languages are explainable through series of sonorants followed by nasal vowels; for example, when is followed by a nasal vowel, it may become .
Consonants The consonants have been reconstructed as follows: +LabialAlveolarPalatalVelarGlottalStopplain****preaspirated*hp*ht*hkaspirated*ph*th*khglottalized*pʔ*tʔ*kʔFricativeplain**š**glottalized*sʔ*šʔ*xʔSonorantplain***y"funny"*W*R