Cherokee term for 'china clay'

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, [ISO-8859-1] A.W. Tüting wrote:
> This makes a lot of sense to me. So it seems that my tentative
> expectation that unaker is not a Chinese loan might be supported,

Yes.  It would be a Cherokee loan in English, I guess!

> since terms for 'main' colours (like white) seldom are adopted from
> foreign languages.

I don't know if I'd go along with this, however, although I don't believe
it was being suggested that Cherokee had borrwed a color term.

Consider German blau, English blue, French bleu.

Or consider that terms for 'white' have not been particularly stable in
Italic/Romance languages over the past 2000 years or so.

Or consider that Dakota has two terms for 'red', neither of which is
cognate with the usual terms in the rest of MVS.

For that matter, several of the MVS color terms have resemblants in
Uto-Aztecan, though it's hard to know what to make of that.