Cherokee term for 'china clay'

[A.W. Tüting]

John,
thanks for your reply.

It is this that I wrote to Dr. L.:

"Dear Siu-Leung,
I read this press release before. I just can suggest (and hopefully 
this had been done already!) to gather and save every minute detail 
about who was the person 'discovering' the medal, his/her entire 
personal, ethnical, educational etc. background, the very details of 
when, how etc. the medal had been unearthed and, and, and... I'd 
imagine that if it were one of our cases to investigate, we'd 
interrogate that person for many days about each single detail in order 
to exclude possible fraud. Going to the public before that might be 
making it (i.e. the highly important circumstances of the discovery 
itself) a 'cold case' irreversibly. IMO, all other investigations (e.g. 
on the medal itself, not to speak of those moreorless speculative ones 
on linguistic or geological grounds) is nothing but 'secondary 
evidence' (Hilfsbeweistatsachen) and of very little value even in the 
best case that the medals authenticity is proved (and not a fake). As 
for me, I'm very skeptical, given the high interest in Chinese circles 
worldwide (albeit at least in the sense of wishful thinking!). Also, 
the fact reported by you that the 'brass' medal was not oxidated and 
only covered by soil/earth(!) actually seems to be highly ominous to 
me.
  I only can wish that something as important as this had already been 
investigated and examined to the bottom before by real experts and not 
just by enthusiastic laymen. If not, the main facts might already be 
lost for ever.

  Best wishes!"

My guess was that the term 'unaker' (and there's even a mountain with 
this name, i.e. Unaker Mt.) and the Chinese u-na(-ke) or such are 
somewhat 'similar' in sound only (hence merely coincidental as very 
often) and that there maybe the 'native' unaker actually exists in, 
say, Cherokee with an etymology of its own that possibly could be 
traced back and broken down. Actually the Chinese characters provided 
by Dr. L. read (UTF-8) 堊泥 and do not represent a 3rd syllable/word as 
it should be giving the -ke(r) of unaker. The two characters are 
spelled [è ní] in Putonghua (Mandarin), a compound word that doesn't 
exist (at least!) in modern language. The (separate) meanings of the 
words is 'chalk' and 'mud' respectively. Also, in at least one 
'southern' (i.e. Cantonese) language, the two syllables' pronunciation 
is [ok-] and [naih\] respectively what is not so strikingly close to 
the word given by Dr. L. (nor to unaker itself).
BTW, if there actually were a 3rd syllable in Chinese, (UTF-8) 殼 ké 
could be making a lot of sense: it means 'shell', somewhat reminding me 
of the Cherokee way of processing their white clay to make it smooth, 
fine and flexible, adding ground/pounded shells to the mixture.

Dr. L. provided this additional information to me:

"I bought it from a metal detector hobbyist, who does not have interest 
in it. He has no reason to spend the effort to fake something and 
charge almost nothing for it. I went to the site and did a lot of 
research in 3 months."

Alfred


Am 10.07.2006 um 21:38 schrieb Koontz John E:

> On Mon, 10 Jul 2006, A.W. Tüting wrote:
>> ... He owns a Chinese medal unearthed in the East Coast area (former
>> Cherokee/Catawba territory) and is reflecting about linguistic
>> relationship of the term for 'china clay' in former southern Chinese 
>> and
>> the Native American languages respectively. ...
>
> Well, it never hurts to look, though I'd be concerned in the 
> provenance of
> his artifact.  It doesn't sound like he has any way of proving where it
> came from.  The web site is full of specifics like depth in soil and
> distance from coast, but oblivious to anything of actual archaeological
> use. (...)
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