wild cats etc

[Michael Mccafferty]

Algonquians from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi refer to Frenchman as
'wood-watercraft-person', as in Montagnais /m at stuku:Su/, Potawatomi
/wemt at goZi/ and Illinois /me:htiko:Sia/. The traditional interepretation
of this ethnonym asigns it the English translation "dugout canoe person".
In my estimation, this gloss was a later, secondary meaning; the original
sense, since the term dates to the very earliest contact between St.
Lawrence river Algonquians and the French, would seem to be the latter's
wooden and ships.

Michael McCafferty


On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Anthony Grant wrote:

> Dear all:
>
> I assume Lewis and Clark referred to skunks as pole cats/polecats because both animals emit vile odo(u)rs and are rather vicious - in shortt they share some salient if disagrreable characteristics.
>
> Yes, Bruce, Michigan is indeed the Wolverine State.  (I knew that Ohio was the Buckeye State but it took me a long time to find out that buckeye is what we Brits normally call horse chestnut).
>
> As to little people -  it's not Siouan per se, but I happen to know that 'little people' (discussed in extenso by Elsie Clews parsons in her 'Notes on the Caddo')  are called /yahyahsacci'/ in Caddo, which is itself a diminutive, and that a form of this stem, spelt 'yayecha' and suggesting that whites were regarded as other-worldly, occurs in the first recording of Caddo (vfrom c. 1688) as a term for white people, one long since eclipsed by /inkinisih/ from 'English'.    Are there any records of similar metaphors being used for Euroamericans in Siouan languages (as can be found in some Oceanic languages for example)?  I know about the usual tropes - 'long knives', derivations of Ojibweised French forms for 'the English', etc.
>
> Anthony Grant
>


Michael McCafferty
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Indiana University
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