Fwd: Re: Chintimini

[hzenk at PDX.EDU]

I'm sceptical about this one.  Gatschet's transcriptions are
underdifferentiated (e.g. he didn't record glottalization) but not wildly off.
He also records Jargon t'aman(a)was, but his spellings don't suggest -timanwi.
There are lots of Kalapuyan names with a similar "lilt" (many of which also
lack known etymologies), e.g. Can-tikini, Ca-meewi7, etc. (actually, those two
do have etymologies, but they were the two that popped into my head), so the
name LOOKS reasonable as pure Kalapuyan.  The name appears in Gatschet's 1877
Tualatin fieldnotes in a guardian spirit song which translates:  "Here, on the
timanwi, it's full of blood!"  A marginal note explains:  "tchatimanui--a big
mt'n west of Corvallis ... it was an ayuLmi [= Tualatin for t'amanwas] mt'n".

Anyway, I don't believe Gatschet would be that far off, so I feel that equating
the name with t'amanwas is probably Jargon "folk etymology." Here's
another one:  one of the Grand Ronde elders I worked on Jargon with told
me that the name Chemawa (for the government Indian school near Salem, Oregon)
is from Jargon "chxi wawa".  (Chemawa just happens to be the English form of
the name Ca-meewi7 above:  in Kalapuyan it is supposed to mean 'place of
low-lying, frequently overflowed ground').  Henry

Quoting David Robertson <ddr11 at COLUMBIA.EDU>:

> The supposed Jargon loanword was t'amanwas (spirit).  The connection of
> both mountains with spirit quests would tend to encourage proponents of
> the loanword theory, no?
>
> --Dave R.
>