Mountain Beaver & Jargon & Chehalis & ... ?

[terry glavin]

partly inspired by this thread, i'm just about to write my fortnightly
chronicles column about the beast, also known as a ground bear, two
subspecies of which exist in british columbia. it's a cat-like, marmot-like,
wholly unique thing that exists in an evolutionary cul-de-sac. it's a living
fossil. it's taxonomy's oldest rodent - a contemporary of north american
camels and sloths.

it does look a bit like a beaver, without a tail. nobody is making this up,
mike - but give yourself a break: at first i shared your consternation with
the subject, and i thought i knew a few things about wildlife in the
rainforest. everybody knows about the spotted owl and the marbled murrelet.
their glamorous. some people know about the pacific giant salamander, but
very few people are aware of the boomer. it spends most of its life
underground, and it tends to come out of its burrow colonies only at night.
i've found two naturalists in b.c. who have worked on the animal's life
history and range (limited to an area confined by an
abbotsford-hedley-merritt triangle).

i'll post my column here when it's done.

cheers.

t
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cleven <ironmtn at BIGFOOT.COM>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2001 9:33 PM
Subject: Re: Mountain Beaver & Jargon & Chehalis & ... ?


> "Alan H. Hartley" wrote:
> >
> > Bates, Hess & Hilbert's _Lushootseed Dictionary_ (1994) (Puget Sound
> > Salish) has:
> >
> > s^áw'kwL [s-hacek, a-acute, laryngealized w, labialized k, barred ell]
> > 'mountain beaver'; also recorded as s^aw'L and s^Ew'L [E = schwa]
>
> What I'm really not figuring out here is why the term "mountain beaver";
> don't y'all Yankees and Hiyu Bostons have the word "muskrat" in your
> vocabulary or am I missing something here?  It would strike me as odd
> that HBC posts south of what became the 49th would ever confuse real
> beaver with muskrat; sure they both have smelly tails but the fur
> quality's quite a bit different IIRC.  What I mean here is you'd think
> that fur-bearing animal terms would relate more either to HBC usage or
> to the local argot (eena and nenamooks etc.); where the heck did
> 'mountain beaver' come from?  East of the Rockies, or is it a NW
> invention?
>
> MC