Missouri, etc.

[Michael McCafferty]

rom: "David Costa" <pankihtamwa at earthlink.net>
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Historical questions
Date: Thu, Jan 1, 2004, 12:16 pm


Funny, Michael and I just had a discussion about this last month. Ives
Goddard showed a while ago that the reconstruction of Illinois /mihsooli/,
Kickapoo /me0ooni/ 'boat', Menominee /mEhno:s/ 'raft' and Cree /mihtot/
'raft' has to be Proto-Algonquian */meh0we0-/ ('0' = theta), where the
*/meh0-/ does indeed mean 'wood'. The Cree & Menominee cognates show that a
*/?0/ reconstruction is impossible.



Miami /meehtikoo$ia/ 'Frenchman' is from
an unrelated etymon, PA */me?tekwi/ 'tree'.

MM: My gut feeling is that the eastern cognate of this term, in Montagnais,
originally did not refer to the French as paddlers of dugout canoes—hell,
**everybody** had dugout canoes! I feel it applied originally to the
Montagnais experience of the novelty of wooden ships, that the French were
‘wood-ship-people’, not ‘dugout canoe people’.


Michael

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