Talk:Ho-Chunk language

Vowel Length - A Much Larger Discussion
roohą / rōhą ′a lot′ - actually pronounced roohąą / rōhą̄

taanį / tānį ′three′ - actually pronounced taanįį / tānı̨̄

caasga - white deer; sheep - actually pronounced caasgaa / cāsgā

With much gratitude to early linguists, it seems they might have had a bit of trouble hearing that Hoocąk can and often does have two long (or stressed) syllables in a word.

To add extra oomph, we can see that length isn't a stable indicator of meaning, given that length/stress easily shifts without sacrificing meaning:

ciožu (pronounced cióóžùù), "inside the house"

Underlying structure: cíí hožùù

The length (better: stress) of cii- moves right (cíí hožùù --> cióóžùù) but the remaining ci- in cioožùù still means "house," and the (h)oo, though now long (better: stressed) hasn't become a fish ;)

One guess is that early linguists over-extrapolated the very common morph-Dorph pattern (regular morpheme + Dorsey morpheme), e.g. caa.xete (big deer; buck) which is pronounced cáá.xéte, with the first /e/ of the Dorsey morpheme, xete, truly being short-and-stressed. When looking at non-Dorsey-containing compounds (are they really compounds?) such as caasgaa (white deer; sheep), the early linguists presumed this should be caasgá. In reality there is absolutely no difference in either /a/. It would be more helpfully written caasgaa, cásgá or cāsgā or simply casga / ca sga.

I would respectfully submit that Hoocąk is (phonologically) very much like its linguistic relatives when it comes to length/stress (listen to a Lakȟóta stressed /a/ next to a Hoocąk long /a/, for example.)

It doesn't mean there isn't a place for length - say in cases where a morpheme with permanent length (-nąąk, they are) needs to be distinguished from one with permanent shortness (-nąk, s/he is), and in cases of elision (nąącawa --> nąącaa, "ear"). It's worth considering that the -nąąk is very likely an elision itself of some older form.

The elephant in the room: PITCH! Someday we'll need to discuss that.

Just my žuurašu(u)c nųųpra :) All Hoocąk spelling methods from BaBeBiBo all the way up to today's system have been very elegant compared to, for example, English :)

What a beautiful language! So deserving of its name: Sacred Language - Original Language.

"Tribe"
The Winnebago/Ho-Chunk are not a tribe, though they may have once been a tribal people. Their governments are "Tribes", but that is something different. — kwami (talk) 20:33, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi! I believe then the correct terminology for them would be a "Nation" Linglenglang (talk) 17:35, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Move review
The arguments in favor of the are not simply an appeal to "political correctness." Ho-Chunk is the common and contemporary name for the language in all contemporary sources, including other Wikipedia articles. Very little linguistic work on the language was published prior to the 1980's (perhaps 5-10 articles total) and the article explains that the language was at one time known by another name. Proposed evidence with N-grams is complicated because there is an RV company known as Winnebago (founded in 1958 by non-Ho-Chunks) which may skew results for how the language and the people have been referred to. N-gram can not compare references to "Winnebago language" to "Ho-Chunk language." Linglenglang (talk) 15:19, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Support In Wisconsin, the term Ho-Chunk is the common term, and is how the nation self-identifies and brands their casinoes. The Wikipedia page Ho-Chunk also uses the term, meaning this page is inconsistent with that one. The common term in current scholarship is Hocąk. --Gacorley (talk) 14:06, 18 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Both sides have made reasonable arguments, and votes are roughly split. SST flyer  05:28, 2 June 2016 (UTC)

Winnebago language → Ho-Chunk language – This article should be moved from “Winnebago” to “Ho-Chunk.”  The motivation behind this move is that Winnebago is an outdated and pejorative term. I have three main reasons to support this claim. First, the name Winnebago was assigned to Ho-Chunk people by outsiders around the time of European contact. The label Winnebago was officially decried in 1993 as part of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s constitutional reform of the mid-nineties, and the tribe has exclusively used Ho-Chunk in all official capacities since then. The tribe’s website provides a background on the the term. Second, renaming the Winnebago language page would make it more consistent with Wikipedia’s main entry on the Ho-Chunk people which itself acknowledges the negative connotations of “Winnebago” in its Etymology section. Finally, all current academic papers on the Ho-Chunk language (tribally sponsored or not) refer to it as Ho-Chunk (or a spelling variation of that term), while those published around the 1980's and earlier use Winnebago. There are also a few papers which use Ho-Chunk as the primary term with Winnebago in parenthesis, to show that the more prominent modern term is referring to the same language as the former term did. One example of a recent publication can be found here: Hocak Teaching Materials, Volume 1. Several other graduate thesis/dissertations use this updated term as well, including Narrative particles in Hocak myths, People of the Sacred Language: Revival of the Hocak language, and The Syntax of Adjectives in Hocak. Linglenglang (talk) 17:52, 3 May 2016 (UTC) --Relisted. Steel1943  (talk) 23:26, 25 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Support, per nom (very well written nomination). Randy Kryn 17:27, 4 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Oppose. The English term is "Winnebago", just as other languages are Crow language (not "Apsáalooke language") and Sioux language (not "ENDONYM language").  Let's continue using the name that's been established for centuries and not jump on the bandwagon of adopting a newer term under the influence of political correctness by bowing to a comparatively new claim of being offended.  Nyttend (talk) 01:55, 13 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Support. "Political correctness" may be one influence on the decision by academia to call the Ho-Chunk what they prefer to be called, but what concerns us is what the reliable sources use. If Ho-Chunk is the common term in the best, most up-to-date sources for the subject, that's what we should go with. I do note that the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska is nearly as large as the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, so "Winnebago" shouldn't be avoided (only) on the grounds that the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk dislike it.--Cúchullain t/ c 15:59, 13 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Oppose per WP:Commonname. The only rationale for making this move would be POV and Political Correctness and in the long view of things, might run afoul of WP:Recentism.  Ngram for these terms is clearly in favor of Winnebago .  Whereas a search of scholarly sources (JSTOR) is overwhelmingly in favor of Winnebago as the most common usage in English language sources:
 * ((Winnebago) AND (not Ho-Chunk)) - 7422 hits ranging from 1822 to 2016
 * ((Ho-Chunk) AND (not Winnebago)) - 193 hits ranging from 1997 to 2016
 * (Ho-Chunk) - 364 ranging from 1996 - 2016
 * (Winnebago) - 7594 ranging from 1822 - 2016

--Mike Cline (talk) 13:45, 20 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment I'm not voting here, but I few thoughts:
 * I'm not sure what the purpose of comparing 20 years of papers to 170 years except to say that lots of papers were written about the Ho-Chunk when the term Winnebago was common. What does a similar stretch of time from 1976-1996 look like for Winnebago? It may be more, but I'd guess it's not an order of magnitude more.
 * There's no injunction to not be politically correct embedded in Commonname, and I think bringing that up is diversionary. When I urged to make this request, I assumed it would be relatively uncontroversial, considering that our article on the Ho-Chunk is named Ho-Chunk. Absent some evidence that the language itself should be named Winnebago even when we've accepted the name for the article on the people, it feels like this is a framing effect.
 * Thanks. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:31, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Comment, in addition to the tribes' and nation's main article being named Ho-Chunk, there is also Ho-Chunk mythology. So consistency seems to favor this move. Randy Kryn 13:28, 27 May 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

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Phonemic inventory
Why does it say that "Ho-Chunk has aspirated /p/ and /k/ phonemes but no aspirated /t/." and yet the phonemic inventory shows ejectives not aspirates? Is this a typo? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.154.65.167 (talk) 04:19, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

The phonemic inventory is incorrect. The consonants listed as "voiceless" should be aspirated, and the "voiced" consonants should be plain. This was probably from an earlier source that labelled it as a voiced/voiceless distinction -- maybe based on a perception coming from the misanalyzed distinction in English? --2600:6C44:F7F:C80D:3186:693D:F962:2EAB (talk) 13:52, 18 May 2021 (UTC)

Requested move 5 May 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) Megan B....   It’s all coming to me till the end of time  14:34, 12 May 2023 (UTC)

Winnebago language → Ho-Chunk language – The people that speak this language article is named Ho-Chunk and the mythology is under Ho-Chunk mythology. This article should match the naming conventions already used on Wikipedia for the sake of consistency.

New dictionaries created by the Ho-Chunk Nation use Ho-Chunk over Winnebago in reference to their language. The dictionary, at dictionary.hochunk.org, contains more than 11,000 entries, each accompanied by audio pronunciation of the word or phrase and is the first online version of their dictionary, along with the app version. See: Naming conventions (ethnicities and tribes) as well. oncamera (talk page) 09:30, 5 May 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support, per nom. Self-identification alone should probably be sufficient, but I also note that there seems to be a clear trend in the scholarship: limiting Google Scholar results to "since 2019" yields 20 hits for "Ho-Chunk language" vs. 15 hits for "Winnebago language" (several of which are actually quoting or discussing older writings). -- Visviva (talk) 00:30, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Support. “Winnebago” typically refers to the Ho-Chunk people forced to relocate to Nebraska. The language originated in and is primarily spoken in the Ho-Chunk’s core homeland of Wisconsin. Yuchitown (talk) 02:13, 6 May 2023 (UTC)Yuchitown