The Ofo language was a language spoken by the Mosopelea tribe until c. 1673 in what is now

Ohio Ohio () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Of the List of states and territories of the United States, fifty U.S. states, it is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 34th-l ...

, along the Ohio River. The tribe moved down the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it ...

Mississippi Mississippi () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States, bordered to the north by Tennessee; to the east by Alabama; to the south by the Gulf of Mexico; to the southwest by Louisiana; and to the northwest by Arkansas. Mis ...

, near the

Natchez people The Natchez (; Natchez pronunciation ) are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area in the Lower Mississippi Valley, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi in the United States. They spoke a language ...

, and then to

Louisiana Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a U.S. state, state in the Deep South and South Central United States, South Central regions of the United States. It is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 20th-smal ...

, 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, it was once suspected that Ofo was a

Muskogean language Muskogean (also Muskhogean, Muskogee) is a Native American language family spoken in different areas of the Southeastern United States. Though the debate concerning their interrelationships is ongoing, the Muskogean languages are generally div ...

. However, anthropologist John R. Swanton discovered an aged female speaker of Ofo, Rosa Pierrette in 1908 while he was conducting fieldwork among the Tunica, he was then able to confirm that the language was Siouan and was similar to

Biloxi Biloxi ( ; ) is a city in and one of two county seats of Harrison County, Mississippi, United States (the other being the adjacent city of Gulfport). The 2010 United States Census recorded the population as 44,054 and in 2019 the estimated pop ...

. 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, 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
"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 to ...

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: *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 "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jaco ...

case appears in Ofo and can be interpreted as resembling an

accusative The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark 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,' 'us,' and ‘th ...

pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) 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 parts of speech, but some modern theorists would n ...

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, 13:1, 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, D. C.: Government Printing Office. * Swanton, John R. c.1908 fo-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