Oregon

[janilta]

Aron, Mike,

Well, I never thought of it before...
And Aron, you're right, this could be an interesting theory ie 'the land
of the moose'... ;-)
But in fact, even if the origin of Oregon is apparently quite obscure,
its earlier forms were Ouragon, Ourgan, Ourigan which tends to show that
the hard 'g' sound was always present, which is not the case in
'orignal' where it is only a writing convention to represent the 'n +
tilde' sound... (the final 'l' becoming 'n' is quite common in
linguistics though)...
Mike, you're right, 'our(i)gan' has a form close to French 'ouragan'
(hurricane) but I cannot really figure why the explorers would have
given such a word to a river...
Wisconsin misspelling is thus the official theory, but not so satisfying
though...

Regards, Yann.