calumet de paix

Koontz John E John.Koontz at colorado.edu
Thu Mar 4 08:08:49 UTC 2004


When I was looking for matches for OP nudaN' I stumbled on Da (Te) zuya'
(wazu'ye A1, etc.), which is listed in Ingham as 'to go on a war party,
raid'.  This is pretty much equivalent to OP nudaN in definition.
Buechel has it as 'to go on a war party, to make war, to lead out a war
party' and agrees with prefixal inflection.  The definition is taken from
Riggs in this case, but Riggs shows the inflection as zuwa'ya A1, etc.

On the other hand the cognate for nudaN' is found in Te blota'huNka 'war
chief', cf. OP nudaN'haNga 'war leader'.  This is the term (in OP)
specifically for the leader of a raiding party.

So the Mississippi Valley forms are:

Te blota'-
(Not attested in Santee that I can see.)

OP nudaN', Ks dodaN', Os totaN', Qu totaN'

IO dothaN', Wi doochaN'

This is a fairly irregular set.  The Dhegiha set suggest *RotaN, or given
that *pr behaves like *R in nouns, it could be *protaN.  Compare Te ble'
'lake' and OP ne', Ks j^e, etc.  The IO and Wi set suggest *RohtaN' (or
*prohtaN').  Teton is consistent with *prota', lacking the nasalization.

The irregularities may be explicable.  The CSD compares Madan rotki- 'to
hit' and Tutelo e'ruta'one 'warrior', where at last the latter looks
reasonable.  Perhaps because we know so little about Tutelo, of course!
The editors (Carter, Jones and Rankin) suggest that the final nasal where
present is due to fusing with *uN 'to do, make', and point to the -one at
the end of the Tutelo form (oN + ???).  They then observe that the Hidatsa
form maceeriiri 'warpath, war party' is a transparent compound of matse
'man' (not 'male') and dide 'walk'.  (I have these component forms from W.
Matthews, who gives matsedidi for 'warparty'.  The difference in source
explains the change in orthography.  Note that c = ts.)  The editors
suggest that the underlying form is *pro-ta=(uN), with -ta- unexplained.
They wonder if analysis of *pro- as a separate morpheme 'male' is
secondary.  They suggest that the aspiration in IO-Wi may be due to an
analogy with *htaNh- 'to run'.

They note Choctaw tanampi 'be hostile, fight, beat war', though, of
course, the resemblance here pretty vague.  (I might be responsible for
noting the similarity.)  Munro and Willmond give clearly related Chickasaw
tanap (IIIp => III series pronouns for possession) 'war' with related
stems intanap 'enemy', tanampo 'gun', tannap 'other side'.  I could be
wrong, but I think these related stems might represent something like a
typical selection of derived stems, i.e., in this case dative,
continuative (?), and intensive.  However I am not the person to go to for
Muskogean morphology!  My Muskogean resources are pretty limited, but I
didn't notice a comparable Alabama form in Systestine, Hardy and Montler.
Choctaw and Chickasaw are pretty close - different points in a dialect
continuum, perhaps.

Terms for 'foreign nation' and 'stranger' in OP generally tend to imply
enmity, too.

On Sat, 28 Feb 2004 bi1 at soas.ac.uk wrote:
> Interesting about 'war'.  I have seen a phrase ob kicis unpi 'they were
> figting them' meaning they were at war with them.  Generally also the
> phrase thokkiciyapi 'consider eachother enemies ' is heard, but as in
> many societies 'foreigners' or 'strangers' were generally 'enemies'
> unless some special arrangement had been made. Or at least that is the
> picture that emerges from texts such as those of Buechel, Deloria and
> Bushotter.  In arabic too the word qom meaning in one sense 'people'
> also means 'enemies', or at least among the bedouin that is so.



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