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).

> Well, probably people these days aren't very much better off than the
> civilization junkies in our zoos who can't even tell a cheetah from a leopard,
> not to speak of a leopard from a jaguar... It also might be English calque.

Not necessarily. It's simply that once White settlers started pouring into
the Great Lakes, the tribes would have started seeing bobcats much less
often and European house cats much more often. Given that the two animals do
look strikingly similar (much more than the panther would), and that they'd
need a word for the house cat, the shift of 'bobcat' -> 'cat' is totally
logical. So by the late 19th century, Miami speakers called cats /pin$iwa/
and indicated actual bobcats by adding the prenoun /nalaaohki/ 'wild' to the
front of /pin$iwa/: /nalaaohki-pin$iwa/.

The same semantic shift happened with the original Miami 'buffalo' word:
when cows started appearing all over and buffalo started disappearing, the
old 'buffalo' word shifted to mean 'cow', and buffalo, when they still had
to be referred to, were then called by a term literally meaning 'wild cows'.
One certainly doesn't have to imply that the Miamis couldn't tell bobcats
from house cats, or buffalos from cows.

>> Given the morphological transparency of *meh$ipe$iwa ('big bobcat'), it might
>> not be of Proto-Algonquian or even Proto-Central Algonquian vintage.

> Why should transparency preclude a certain age? I mean, it certainly is the
> other way round, that an eroded form as a rule won't be particularly fresh,
> except when dealing with allegro forms or disfigurement for taboo reasons.

I wouldn't call */pe$iwa/ an 'eroded form', simply the noun that lacks the
'big' prenoun. Also, */pe$iwa/ is morphologically unsegmentable, and is much
more widely reconstructible in the family: it's found in all the Central
languages and in several Eastern languages. (But not the Plains languages,
evidently!) Far as I can tell, */meh$ipe$iwa/ is found in most the Great
Lakes languages and nowhere else, and in half of these languages it actually
indicates the mythical underwater panther and not plain old pumas. So it
doesn't strike me as the most satisfying candidate for a Proto-Algonquian
term, tho perhaps it was.

> The Proto-Algonquian homeland is about as fixed as flowing water. In more
> naive times Siebert placed it in southern Ontario around Georgian Bay; Goddard
> has recently correctly repositioned "west of Lake Superior," but meaning
> what?--somewhere between Duluth and Hokkaido?

It's entirely true that the Proto-Algonquian homeland is still nebulous.
However, it's quite possible to state that certain animals WERE present in
the PA homeland, and certain others were not. For example, moose, skunks,
and elk were unquestionably present in the PA homeland, wherever it was,
while, say, possums, alligators and coyotes were very likely not, even tho
many modern Algonquian languages have coined names for them. Of course many
other animals are much less clear candidates one way or the other.

> In any event, the Proto-Algonquians would no doubt have had contact with the
> mountain lion since it's original habitat included all of what is now southern
> Canada.

Can we actually verify this? I know that animal ranges now are generally
drastically different from what they were 500 years ago, but my sources SEEM
to indicate that mountain lions weren't present in Canada east of the
Rockies -- tho that could well be just due to habitat loss. Either way, I
would like to verify where mountain lions lived pre-contact, if possible.

It's worth noting that in Siebert's article on the Proto-Algonquian
homeland, he did NOT reconstruct a term for cougars/mountain
lions/pumas/panthers, despite his kitchen-sink tendency in that article to
throw in everything he possibly could.

best,

David