O/P term for one thousand

Rory M Larson rlarson at unlnotes.unl.edu
Thu Jan 19 00:07:23 UTC 2006


> And also, the Miami word for 'beaver' also means 'dollar'. Any Siouan
languages have that?

I don't recall ever seeing that one, and I have looked through several.

Didn't the market for beaver collapse about the 1820s?  If so, that might
suggest that the Miami 'beaver' word for 'dollar' was coined before that
time, since it suggests the sort of stable price you would expect if
trading houses were eagerly buying them.

Fletcher and La Flesche state on page 617 that beaver skins were sold for
$4-$6 in the middle of the 19th century.  Assuming that there was general
inflation as time went on even back then, and that prices didn't vary too
radically for different parts of the frontier at any given time, that would
also argue for an early date for this term.

Rory



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