dialect in novels

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:46 PM -0500 2/24/01, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>I ate crawdads, not crawfish, when I lived in Georgia.  Anything
>else would stick in the cray.
>
>Herb
>
I wonder whence the "dad" in "crawdad".  The sources I've checked
just have "crawfish" + "dad", which doesn't help much.  Since the
"fish" part of "crayfish"/"crawfish" is itself a folk-etymological
invention (cf. écrevisse, earlier Fr. crevice), I was wondering if
the crawdad might have come directly from the French without an
intermediate stage of -fish to be replaced, but it's hard (for me) to
tell.

larry