The phrase "Híŋhaŋni wašté!" means "good morning!" in the Dakota language, one of the Siouan dialects spoken historically by the Native American people who live in western and southern Minnesota.
Back in 1992~93, I studied the Dakota Language. There's an actual community of speakers in Minneapolis (a city that has a Native "name" that's different from it's modern name: Bdeota – a term etymologically connected with the name "Minnesota," believe it or not).
The University of Minnesota had (still has?) a department of Native American Languages that teaches not just Dakota but also Ojibwe as living foreign languages. As a habitual language geek, how could I resist? So I took Dakota as a night class, for a semester. Dakota is a rich and complex and, in my opinion, beautiful language, and I have often thought that someday I would like to return to studying it.
Yesterday, I spent part of Buddha's Birthday online, researching Dakota pronunciation – as I sat on a rainy holiday Tuesday in my apartment in South Korea. Why was I doing this? The story is a bit complicated.
My best friend, Brother Bob, is a music teacher and choral conductor in Wisconsin. Sometimes, he sends me these "Ask A Linguist" styled emails, where he tries to get my insights on things that will relate to a piece of music he's working with. Over the weekend, he sent me an email about a choral music piece that included some bits in the Dakota Language.
The unfortunate thing about Dakota is that is part of a broad spectrum of Siouan dialects, which are very different among themselves. Further, much extant Dakota and Sioux literature was written down by non-experts. The consequence of these two factors is that spelling is quite non-standard, if not downright obscure (somewhat like English spelling, right?).
So Bob was asking me about how to pronounce the snippet of Dakota he had. Here's the original text he sent me. It includes a close translation by the transcriptist.
Sioux Ghost Dance Song, transcribed by Louis Ballard
ÄH-THE HEY-EY OO-YOU,
MÄH-KOH CHĒ-WU W’SH-TE CHĒ’CH’OO (p)BĒ-CHÄ,
YÄH’-NEH BEEKT’EH OO-YOU,
ÄH-THE HEY-EH OO-YOU.
When Ballard gives the translation, he omits the diacriticals and prints the text in lower case. “Vocables” refer to non-sense syllables that are common in Native American songs.
ah-teh (father) hey-eh-oo-you (vocables) mah-koh-che-wu- (the earth) w’sh’te (good) che’ch’oo (p) be-cha (which I gave you) yah-neh beekt’eh oo-you (you’re going to live again) an-teh (father) hey-eh-oo-you (vocables).
Bob followed up with a different version/spelling of the same song, yesterday morning. Here's what he sent me. I've "activated" his link.
So the question is, how are these things pronounced? Neither of the above matched my recollections of canonical contemporary Dakota orthography such as it was taught to me during my study of the language at the University of Minnesota. So I wasn't very helpful. I remembered, vaguely, some things about difficult consonant clusters and de-voiced (whispery) vowels.
Bob finally sent me the phrase "Híŋhaŋni wašté!" which means "good morning," along with the link to its pronunciation that he'd found. I remember this phrase from my Dakota class, vividly. You can hear the de-voiced vowels clearly, at that link – it sounds like Japanese, a little bit, which makes sense, since that's another language with prominent de-voiced vowels (think of the final -/u/ in a phrase like 元気です [genki desu = "I'm fine"]).
I sent him some of my observations, which I've repeated above. I wish I was in Wisconsin – I want to hear how this piece sounds when he performs it.
That's the story up to this point. And this is the strange way I spend some of my free time. Habitual language geek, indeed.
Thanks, Bob. Love ya. Good luck with that piece of music.
