Native American welcomes at Olympic opening

[Alan H. Hartley]

Mike Cleven wrote:

> The new Navajo Nation Homepage at http://www.navajo.org uses Dine',
> however, so maybe the final 'h' in the other version might be a glottal
> stop?

Young and Morgan's _Navaho Language_ (not the most recent word) has
diné, where the accented e carries high tone: no indication of glottal
stop (which, incidentally, they say is the most common consonantal sound
in Navaho).

> As far as
> "Eskimo" goes, as we know this was originally a Cree (or Ojibway?)
> derisive which got picked up by the French ("esquimaux") and is no
> longer acceptable (officially) in Canada.

HNAI V.5-7 has a very thorough discussion of Eskimo synonymy. Briefly,
ESKIMO comes into French and English from Montagnais through the
intermediation of Basque whalers. The most likely meaning of the
Montagnais name is 'netter of snowshoes'. "In the 1970s in Canada the
name Inuit all but replaced Eskimo in governmental and scientific
publications and the mass media, largely in response to demands from
Eskimo political associations. The erroneous belief that Eskimo was a
pejorative term meaning 'eater of raw meat' had a major influence on
this shift." Shades of SQUAW...

ESKIMO is still a valuable term, the only one I know of that covers all
Eskimo-speaking people from Siberia to Greenland.

Alan