[Algonquiana] Prehistoric Language contact ?

David Costa pankihtamwa at earthlink.net
Thu Nov 20 19:30:34 UTC 2014


> Thanks to all who have replied so far. I'm totally amazed by the sophistication of your suggestions and explanations. The reason of my question is that I'm presently working on Mi'gmaq place names related to early PEA migrations into the Gaspe Peninsula and Atlantic Canada. The more I read in archaeology, the more I wonder about the cultural contacts that might have taken place when the PEA arrived in these territories.   Except for Peter Denny, no archaeological writings seem to advocate for such contacts. All they say is that the Planos arrived ca 9,000 BP and the PEA ca 3,000-4,000 BP. Nobody (to my candid knowledge) talks about possible encounters between the two groups. And none talks about the disappearance - or not- of the Planos.

Well that’s the whole point — perhaps the Planos didn’t go anywhere, but simply switched to speaking Algonquian. If so that would help explain why Mi'gmaq looks so weird from an Algonquian perspective.

> From this, a new question arising in my mind: did someone ever tried to compare John Hewson's Dictionary of Proto-Algonquian with a Mi'gmaq dictionary to try and list the Mi'gmaq words that do not belong to PA; and then to analyze these words and try to draw a kind of phonetic/phonological sketch of a possible (dead) loaning language of some kind ?

I’m not aware of any such study, but someone should attempt it. Also, someone who knows way more Mi'gmaq than I do would also have to examine the anomalous vocab to see how much of it could be explained by normal Mi’gmaq-internal derivational processes. That is, some of the anomalous words could simply be neologisms, and not necessarily ancient pre-Algonquian loans.

There’s a parallel for this in California — if you examine Harrington’s notes on Island Chumash (the indigenous language of Santa Cruz Island, in the Channel Islands), in addition to the normal Chumashan vocab there’s a large residue of very basic vocab that can’t be found in any other Chumashan language, or indeed in any other language anywhere. Not only do these words not match Chumashan, they're phonotactically weird for a Chumashan language. The odds are good that they're retained archaic vocab from the language that was spoken on the Channel Islands before Chumash, preserved from when they switched to speaking Chumash.

> If Peter Denny's hypothesis is correct, and if Fiedel 1987 is correct that Mi'gmaq shares only 50 percent of its lexicon with other Central and even Eastern Algonquian languages, this should be feasible. In comparison, if French had disappeared from the records, one should be able to deduce its phonological patterns by analyzing all the words that English doesn't share with any other European languages, More or less.
> 
> Am I too far gone ?

I certainly don’t think so!


David
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