Ofo ( ), also known as Mosopelea, is a language formerly spoken by the Ofo people, also called the

Mosopelea The Mosopelea or Ofo (also Ofogoula) were a Siouan-speaking Native American people who historically lived near the upper Ohio River. In reaction to Iroquois Confederacy invasions to take control of hunting grounds in the late 17th century, they ...

, in what is now

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

, along the

Ohio River The Ohio River () is a river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing in a southwesterly direction from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to its river mouth, mouth on the Mississippi Riv ...

, until about 1673. The tribe moved south along the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the main stem, primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri River, Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Ita ...

Mississippi Mississippi ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Deep South regions of the United States. It borders Tennessee to the north, Alabama to the east, the Gulf of Mexico to the south, Louisiana to the s ...

, near the

Natchez people ttps://archive.org/details/dcouverteett01marg The Internet Archive website The Natchez ( , ) are a Native Americans in the United States, Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area in the Lower Mississippi Valley, n ...

, and then to

Louisiana Louisiana ( ; ; ) is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It borders Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, and Mississippi to the east. Of the 50 U.S. states, it ranks 31st in area and 25 ...

, settling near the Tunica. In the 18th century, the Mosopelea were known under the names ''Oufé'' and ''Offogoula''. On the basis of the presence of the phoneme /f/ in these names, early linguists once suspected that Ofo was a Muskogean language. However, anthropologist John R. Swanton met an elder Ofo speaker, Rosa Pierrette, in 1908 while he was conducting fieldwork among the Tunica. From her information, he was then able to confirm that the language was Siouan and was similar to

Biloxi Biloxi ( ; ) is a city in Harrison County, Mississippi, United States. It lies on the Gulf Coast of the United States, Gulf Coast in southern Mississippi, bordering the city of Gulfport, Mississippi, Gulfport to its west. The adjacent cities ar ...

. Pierrette had spoken Ofo as a child, but Swanton says she told him that the rest of her tribe "had killed each other off" when she was 17.

Phonology

Ofo follows a process similar to

Grassmann's law Grassmann's law, named after its discoverer Hermann Grassmann, is a dissimilatory phonological process in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which states that if an Aspiration (phonetics), aspirated consonant is followed by another aspirated consonant ...

, with counting as an aspirated consonant: 'crane' + 'white' > 'white egret' and 'fire' + either 'to burn' or 'to breathe' > 'smoke'. The inventory is as follows: Rankin, Robert L.br>"The Ofo Language of Louisiana: Philological Recovery of Grammar and Typology"
''LAVIS III: Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives''. University of Alabama, 2004. PDF file. :

Vowels

All vowels, including , may bear stress.

Morphology

Ofo is considered to be a mildly

polysynthetic language In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

Possession

Ofo distinguishes between alienable and inalienable possession by the use of a prefix for first-, second-, and third-person singular as well as first-person dual. That can be abbreviated to 1sg, 2sg, 3sg, and 1du, respectively. The alienable possessions include the following: 1sg , 2sg , 3sg , 1du . The inalienable possessions include the following: 1sg , 2sg , 3sg , 1du .

Negation

Ofo uses the enclitic suffix ''-ni'', to demonstrate negation. That enclitic is usually after the predicate.

Pluralization

Ofo uses the enclitic suffix -''tu'' to pluralize the subject, the object, or both.

Instrumental prefixes

Instrumental prefixes describe the manner in which an action is carried out. Some instrumental prefixes are below: *atə- 'by extreme temperature' *tu-, du- 'by pulling/hand' *ta- 'by mouth' *pa- 'by pushing' *la- 'by foot' *ka- 'by striking' *pú- 'by pressure' *po- 'by blowing/shooting'

Person

Gender

Ofo appears to have no grammatical gender.

Space, time, and modality

Irrealis mood consists of the suffix -abe. It is the equivalent to the future in English: *óktat-,abe, 'he will kill you' *tcóktat-abĕ, 'you will work' *atcikthé-be, 'I will kill you' Continuative aspect is formed using the word nóñki. Iterative aspect is created by

reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a Morphology (linguistics), morphological process in which the Root (linguistics), root or Stem (linguistics), stem of a word, part of that, or the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The cla ...

: *è-te-te, 'sick, keep on suffering' *šni-šni-we, 'itch, keep on itching' *tó-fku-fku-pi, 'wink, blink, keep on winking or blinking'

Syntax

The documentation of Ofo does not provide enough information to develop a complete syntax of the language. However, structures also found in related languages have been found. Ofo appears to have a head-dependent ordering in sentences, which gives it an object-verb word order. The order of verbs may be described as being clause-final. Many cases appear to support that. An example can be seen below:

Case

Only some forms are known because of a lack of documentation.

Dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this exampl ...

case appears in Ofo and can be interpreted as resembling an

accusative In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", " ...

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but so ...

in English.

Complements and causatives

There is no information in the Ofo data to support Ofo having explicit complement clauses. However, it is apparent that embedded clauses precede the main clause. The causative is marked by the

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

''-we''.

Sources

A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages

* * Holmer, Nils, M., "An Ofo Phonetic Law," ''International Journal of American Linguistics'', 1, no. 1, 1947. * Moseley, Christopher and R. E. Asher, ed. ''Atlas of the Worlds Languages'' (New York:Routelege, 1994) Map 5 * Dorsey, J. Owen, and John R. Swanton. 1912. "A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages." ''Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin'' 47. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. * Swanton, John R., ca. 1908. ''Ofo-English dictionary'', Typed and Autographed Document, 613 cards. National Anthropological Archives, 2455-OFO, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. * Swanton, John R. 1909. A New Siouan Dialect. "Putnam Anniversary Volume: Anthropological Essays Presented to Prederic Ward Putnam in Honor of His Seventieth Birthday," pp. 477–86. New York: G. E. Stechert.

References

External links

Ofo on Native Languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ofo Language Extinct languages of North America Western Siouan languages Languages of the United States Languages extinct in the 1990s