Michigamea is not Dhegiha (Re: Quappa)

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 mmccaffe at indiana.edu wrote:
> It was Marquette and Jolliet et al. who met a Michigamea man, who could
> speak Miami-Illinois, living among Dhegiha near the mouth of the
> Arkansas River. I forget whether if was Quapaw or some other group he
> was with.

This is not quite correct, though closer than my own recollection.  I had
to look at the account again to recall the details to my mind.  I'm using
a 1966 reprint of the Thwaites edition of 1900.

In 1673, below the Ohio on the Mississippi the the Jolliet & Marquette
Expedition encountered a village of gun armed people whom they are later
informed are enemies of the Akamsea - perhaps Chickasaw, or at least
particpating in the later Chickasaw trade with the English.
Communications with these people were weak, perhaps by signs.  They did
not understand Huron and spoke an unknown language.  They reported trading
with Europeans to the east.  They thought it worth reporting that their
trade contacts played musical instruments.  I mention these people because
it shows the ethnic diversity of the sub-Ohio Mississippi in 1673.

The next village, near the 33rd degree of latitude, was called Mitchigamea
[recognizably Miami-Illinois for big-water].  "At first we had to speak by
signs ['parler par gestes' in the parallel French version], because none
of them understood the six languages which I spoke.  At last we found an
old man who could speak a little Ilinois.  [In regard to the distance to
the sea] we obtained no other answer than that we could learn all that we
desired at another large village, called Akamsea, which was only 8 or 10
leagues lower down.  [They are accompanied there by their translator.] We
fortunately found there a young man who understood Ilinois much better
than did the interpeter whom we had brought from Mitchigamea."  Presumably
the new translator was a native of Akamsea, which seems to have been Cappa
(Okaxpa or 'Downstream').

The Akamsea indicated that they traded through nations to the east of
them, or through an Illinois village four days to the west.  This latter
village was apparently not the Mitchigamea village, which a day to the
north.

A short description of the Akamsea follows including the comment "Their
language is exceedingly difficult, and I could succeed in pronouncing only
a few words notwithstanding all my efforts."  ["Leur langue est
extremement difficile, et je ne pouvois venir about d'en prononcer
quelques mots, quelque effort que je pusse faire."] Once an Algonquianist,
always an Algonquianist, I guess!  A pity he didn't essay to write down
some of those words he could pronounce, not to mention some examples of
Michigamea.

After spending some time at Akamsea, the Expedition decided to return
north, feeling ill-prepared to deal with hostile gun-armed people to the
south, or th Europeans beyond them, and perhaps taking the hint that the
Akamsea preferred that they not go further and open relations with the
Akamseas' enemies to the south.

It may be added that Marquette visted the Peoria and Kaskasia et al.,
coming and going and seems to have been familiar with Miami-Illinois, or
perhaps a pidgin form of it.  He says of the Illinois "They are divided
into many villages, some of which are quite distant from that of which we
speak, which is called peouarea [Peoria].  This causes some differences in
their language, which on the whole resembles allegonquin, so that we
easily understood each other."  One presumes that his six languages
includes at least Huron, Alleqonquin (Eastern Ojibwa), and perhaps
Miami-Illinois, if he distinguished it from the former.

The La Salle Expedition in 1686 used Guides from Cappa, the northernmost
Quapaw (Akansea) village on the Mississippi to pass throught he hostile
Michigamea lands to the Illinois villages on the Illinois River.

In the 1750s Jean-Benard Bossu, while living among the Michigamea recorded
two somewhat strangely translated sentences from weird contexts which he
attributed one to a Michigamea man and the other to a group of Peoria men.
Neither sentence is Miami-Illinois, apparently, but it is possible to
interpret them as a sort of Siouan with approximately the senses he gives.

More precisely, with several valuable suggestions from Bob Rankin I have
deduced fairly mundane Siouan analyses of the highly colored examples
Bossu offers.  However, I wouldn't call the results Dhegiha, let alone
Quapaw.  They have points in common with both Dhegiha and Ioway-Otoe, and
some with other Siouan languages further afield, like Mandan.  However,
whatever it is, it stands alone.

The main morphological oddity is that there appears to be a circumfixal
negative construction *we-...=s (?), cf. Mandan wa-...=riN-x ~ wa-...=xi,
though circumfixal negatives are also known from, e.g., Winnebago and
Southeastern.  In Mandan the choice of final element depends on the shape
of the embedded stem.  The final element *=s (?), is present once and
missing once in the "Michigamea," which may be simple carelessness.  The
Mandan and Michigamea final elements are both perhaps comparable to
Dhegiha =z^i NEG, Stoney/Assiniboine =s^i NEG, Dakotan =s^i 'adversative',
Winnebago =z^i 'at least'.

This *we-...=s negative pattern which I think to recognize in Michigamea
should be compared to Dakotan =s^niN NEG (Stoney and Assiniboine =s^i),
Dhegiha =z^i NEG, and IO =s^kuNni (later =skuNyi) NEG.  Compare also
Winnebago =s^guNniN 'weak dubitative' and (haN)ke ...=niN NEG.  Even
without the prefixal we- the Michigamea negative is not of a known
pattern, though in my view it is reasonably comparable in form and could
derive from the same complex of elements that appear variously combined in
the attested Siouan negatives.  The point here is that this hypothetical
Michigamea negative is different from the negatives in known Mississippi
Valley Siouan languages, so that it doesn't seem that Michigamea falls
into any of these subgroups.  I could make the same observation with
regard to several other aspects of Michigamea, but perhaps this suffices
for present purposes.

To summarize,

- "Michigamea" is reported to be a mysterious language other
than Miami-Illinois in the 1670s and 1750s, even though there is by the
c. 1700 also a somewhat distinctive Michigamea version of Miami-Illinois,
too, as I understand it (Masthay 2002).

- This mysterious "Michigamea"  language might be Siouan, given the two
sentence examples in Bossu.

One would have to say, in fact, it is Siouan that it is Mississippi Valley
Siouan.  Since the morphology is in the range attested for MVS or the more
MVS aspects of Mandan, but not Crow-Hidatsa or Southeastern.  sTILL, it
definitely isn't any of the attested MVS languages or even sub-branches.
It is odd enough that it would be hard to call it either Dhegiha or
Chiwere - the latter in the sense of a sub-branch containing Ioway-Otoe
and maybe Winnebago.  If one did, it would stretch the understanding of
the sub-branch adopted very considerably.

Apart from the somewhat weak linguistic evidence we can tell from all
acounts of the Michigamea in the late 1600s that they are politically
distinct from the Arkansas/Quapaw and also from the Illinois, even though
both the Arkansas/Quapaw and Michigamea have some people among them who
speak Miami-Illinois, and even though the Michigamea later merge quietly
with the Illinois.

Of course, who knows how bad Bossu's Michigamea was.  Even taken as Siouan
the presentation seems a bit less than fluent, though there's very little
of it.  Not really enough to judge certainly.  There is no extant word
list.  If Bossu's grasp of the langauge was truely wretched, he might be
trying to represent something better known in the Siouan way, e.g., one of
the Dhegiha languages, even Ioway-Otoe, though probably not Miami-Illinois
or Winnebago or Dakota or Mandan.  However, I think the negative precludes
this.

Maybe he just made it up because he couldn't remember any real
Miami-Illinois?  But then why the ghostly resemblance to a Siouan
language?

Since some of the attested speakers are Peorias, maybe it's Peoria, not
Michigamea, or Peroria-Michigamea?  The last seems unlikely, as the Peoria
were plainly speaking an Algonquian language to Marquette, though he
records only placenames, personal names, and one line of a song.  But then
why does Bossu attribute half his Michigamea to Peoria speakers?

Looking at the problem from another direction, what languages might Bossu
have known and substituted for Michigamea?  And why not Miami-Illinois?
How could he have missed MI if it was being spoken around him as it
presumably was and had something of the status of a lingua franca?

If he chose to use a minority language spoken only by some Michigea, why
supply only these two bizarre sample sentences and not a word list?  Why
not mention the minority status?  Why no trace of distinctive Michigamea
personal or place names?  The whole subject is plagued with uncertainty,
unfortunately.

It occurs to me that we don't even really know if the two Michigamea
groups - Marquette's and Bossu's - were the same.  "Big water" is
certainly a fairly generic name, and, e.g., it is also the gloss usually
offered as a Siouan gloss for the otherwise unknown Moneton on the upper
Ohio.  As far as that goes, if the Ofo may have moved from the Ohio Valley
to Arkansas by 1690, might not the Monetons have done so, too?
Naturally, if Moneton was Siouan and if the 'big water' gloss of the
ethnonym is correct, then any Moneton translator rendering the name into
Mimai-Illinois would have come up with Michigamea without any qualms.
However, our only real evidence of a Siouan identity for Marquette's
non-MI Michigamea is Bossu's data, and so we are back to assuning the two
are one, whether or not we accept the Michigamea as refugee Monetons.

I discuss the Michigamea data briefly - with the full text of Bossu's
examples and fairly pragmatic "translations" - at
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/michigamea.htm