ASB puza

[David Costa]

Well, I can't speak for Siouan, but in Algonquian it's not uncommon for the
old 'bobcat' word *pe$iwa to end up meaning plain old 'cat'. This is at
least the case for Miami pin$iwa and Kickapoo pesia (tho not Shawnee or
Ojibwe).

Given the morphological transparency of *meh$ipe$iwa ('big bobcat'), it
might not be of Proto-Algonquian or even Proto-Central Algonquian vintage.
Moreover, I'm not convinced panthers existed in the original
Proto-Algonquian homeland. In Central Algonquian words for 'panther', one
often sees forms that reference the animal's long tail or long body, such as
Shawnee keenwaaloweeta ('one who has a long tail'), Miami kinoosaawia, and
Fox kenwaasoweewa.

best,

Dave Costa


I think it pretty unlikely for lynxes (lynx canadiensis and lynx rufus, both
designated by PCA *pešiwa, BF natááyo, occasionally also occuring with
initial change: nitááyo) to end up in the same biotaxon as domestic cats,
for which A mostly uses the same loan already mentioned by David Rood (BF
poos, PC poosiis-, poosiy-, poosiiw-, also from French minoos-). However,
there is a second — quite uncharming — etymon PC kaasakees "glutton; cat" <
PCA *kaašakeensa (anachronistically glossed just "cat" instead of
"wolverine" in Hewson, A computer-generated dictionary of Proto-Algonquian,
p. 53 #0857).

What may be interesting to note is that is that many NAN languages derive
the word for "puma" from "lynx/bobcat" (BF omahkatááyo, PCA *me'šipešiwa
"puma; Great Lynx, Underwater Manito" as in Nakoda ig^mu-thaNka, Dhegiha
iGdháN-seN-snéde "long-tail-bobcat"). A differentiation between Canadian
lynx vs. bobcats is rare (bobcat as "spotted lynx": Miami-Illinois
wiikwee-pinaiwa, Minnesota-Ojibwe gidagaa-bizhiw, BF kííhstsipimi-natááyo) —
as are overlapping habitats...



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