U.S. President and cloud/sky: more. (fwd)

Lance Foster ioway at earthlink.net
Fri Feb 16 13:15:36 UTC 2001


>
>
> I suspect the spellings of 'White Cloud' are intended to render MaNgheska,
> in which maNghe is the "form 1" 'sky' term not otherwise attested in
> Ioway-Otoe and Winnebago.  I wonder if the name is borrowed froma language
> that does have this term or if this is a relict.  I can't think of any way
> to be sure!  I suppose the name might be MaNghuska, too.

Something to consider...JGT may have some thoughts on this.

>
>
> I think hka is a variant of (older) ska ~ (newer) <th>ka.

I think there was a change from shka to ska to a kind of lisping ska/thka, then
finally thka. Whitman describes this. Don't know why.. that's why I'm here.. to
learn :-)

>
> Notice that here we have IO ? khera, cf. Dieterle's report of Wi kera, and
> LaFlesche has kkedha 'sky, the unclouded or clear sky.  (What is the
> source for the IO form, by the way?)

I have to go through my horrible mess of a filing system for the short form, but
one source is Skinner's list of gentes (1926:193) in which one subgentes of the
Buffalo Gens/Clan is given as " Kxe'rata' ", "Clear Day." I know I have seen the
short form Kera as well, in another work of Skinner's.

> Teton has kheya 'to make a roof of',
> analyzed as a causative of 'turtle' by Buechel.  I'm not sure if that's a
> clue or a red herring.  I think earth is a turtle shell, but not the sky.

IO has "ketan" as turtle. IO tended to look at the earth as a domed lodge, and
the earth as an Island, but Turtle was conceived as being one of the layers of
the World, and it is possible to think of the sky as the inside of a domed
shell. The archaeological antecedent of the IOM was Oneota, and Oneota was a
heavily intertribal/interlinguistic phenomenon involved with much trading up and
down the Mississippi and Missouri, a role the Ioway continued into historic
times.


--
Lance Michael Foster
Email: ioway at earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~ioway
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