Cherokee term for 'china clay'

[A.W. Tüting]

My guess is that this 'southern Chinese' u(k)na(ke) has nothing to do 
with the American term 'unaker' (in the the sense that coincidentally 
both terms are just - moreorless - similar in sound).
I'd like to summarize what are my tentative conclusions so far (plz 
correct/object etc. if necessary!):
(the following is a quote from my response to Dr. SLL)

  I'd state (as pretty obvious)

  1)
  that the American term 'unaker' (as a denotation of 'Kaolin' or 'white 
clay') has to do with Unaker Mt. (obviously the place of this natural 
resource in the US).

  2)
  This place seems to be located in North Carolina (having to do with 
peoples (once) living there, e.g. the Cherokee).

  3)
  The term 'unaker' seems to be based on the Cherokee word for the 
colour 'white', i.e. _unega_ or _yonega_ (the American spelling of [g] 
given as /k/ and the schwa-like [a] spelled as /e(r)/ seems very common 
(as - partly - pointed out already): in Native American tongues, 
consonants very often can have several different pronunciations, e.g. 
in Lakota, the consonant /k/ has three distinct pronunciations, namely 
[k], [kh] and [kx] which means that only [k] is unaspirated, hence - 
according to the different orthographic ways - often are written as 
/g/. This 'hard' (unaspirated) consonant doesn't exist in English 
except if NOT intervocalic. This also holds for Cherokee /g/ (a 
voiceless but unaspirated consonant that speakers of English actually 
'hear' as [k]). The English way to give it as /k/ is misleading.

  4)
  What IMO is highly doubtful here is the crucial question of whether or 
not the Cherokee term for the (basic) colour 'white' is a loan word 
from a southern-chinese dialect. Colour words can undergo changes 
within one language or within related languages (e.g. the different 
words for 'blue' or 'red' in Romance languages e.g. 'blu'/'azurro', 
'azul', 'bleu'... but 'albastru/albastrã' in Romanian). But I don't 
think that one would take a term for it from a so distant language as 
Chinese. (This wouldn't hold for a very special foreign pigment or dyer 
like indigo 藍 lan2 that even is a loan word in Chinese.)

(...)

  As far as I can state in the moment, the final -r (of unaker) might be 
due to a - former - special way of notation by earlier linguists in 
order to indicate that the preceding vowel has to be pronounced.
  I'd tend to assume that the word 'unaker' might derive from an 
original Native American term only coincidentally (and quite vaguely!) 
of somewhat similar sound(?)/spelling(?) to that obscure 'southern 
Chinese' word given by SL. 堊泥 (e4 ni2) as such doesn't appear to exist 
in modern Chinese language(s) - the consisting parts of it would be 
pronounced in - at least - one 'southern' (i.e. Cantonese) language, 
[ok-] and [naih\] respectively what is not so strikingly close to the 
term mentioned.


Up to the moment, my friend didn't provide the 3rd word/syllable in 
Chinese character (telling - as far as I could grasp his idea - that 
this ending '-ke' was a pecularity of southern dialects, i.e. 
Cantonese, Hakka or Jiangxi).
I had a pretty vague idea to support his assumption: had the 3rd word 
actually been 殼 ke2 (shell), this word could have indicated the special 
Cherokee way of processing white clay adding ground shells to the 
mixture to make it fine and flexible. This word is pronounced hok_ in 
Cantonese (and also in Hakka or Jiangxi) so there would not be a 
similar sound to '-ga' (of Cherokee unega).

Alfred

(for the Chinese characters' correct display, plz switch to UTF-8 
encoding)


Am 15.07.2006 um 22:06 schrieb Koontz John E:

> What about the other term - the u(k)na[ke] one?  Any evidence it was 
> ever
> used in the early ceramics trade?  I suppose we might want to consider
> "coincidences" noticed by early investigators.
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