Cayuse <=> "horses" in Spanish?

[hzenk at PDX.EDU]

>
>    The Interior Salishan word appears in derivatives
> meaning spotted hoofed animals -- Montana Salish
> q'ayic `elk calf (with spots)', etc.
>
>    Chinook Jargon has a word lik'ay `piebald, spotted
> fawn', which looks a lot like a version of (Interior)
> Salish q'ey with the French article glommed onto it at
> the beginning.
>

I knew this rang some kind of a bell.  In Gatschet's 1877 Tualatin Kalapuya
field notebooks there is a word given:  atEkayi, atkai 'colt'.  Leo J.
Frachtenberg took Gatschet's original notebooks to Yakama Res with him in 1915,
where he went over them with Louis Kenoyer, presumed last speaker of Tualatin.
Beside the foregoing two forms he wrote the re-elicited forms [a tqaii],
[tq!aii], respectively (ii = "i" with a bar over it; a- is a nominal prefix
which Frachtenberg writes as though it were a separate element, or just skips
as in the second form).  These are given as Tualatin, and there is a t- prefix
in many Kalapuyan names of flora and fauna.  So the q'a(y)i part could well be
a borrowing--in fact, most probably is since q' is unusual in Tualatin except
in borrowings.  For what it's worth!

Also for what it's worth, I have a note giving Bruce Rigsby as authority for
Sahaptin q'ayik 'elk colt', 'horse colt'.  Henry


   What's most interesting to me here is that Montana
> Salish (and possibly this is found in some other Int. Sal.
> languages too) has a word q'ay'e(lxw) `pinto' -- the
> suffix -elxw means `skin, hide'.  The stress is on the e,
> and in Montana Salish this word is usually truncated after
> the stressed vowel, putting the pronunciation very
> close to French caille'.
>
>    I don't have a form for `spotted face' in my
> files, but if it exists, it would be q'ay'us, again
> with stress on the second vowel.  (And the y might
> or might not be glottalized.)  The suffix -us
> means (among other things) `face'.
>
>    So you see why I keep wondering if this root
> for `spotted' has anything to do with the etymology
> of cayuse, either as the sole source or as one of
> the sources; the French words would, I'd think, also
> play a role.  Multiple sources are common in
> etymologies, especially in contact situations, so
> mushing together (to use a technical term!) a Salish
> root and a French root wouldn't be peculiar, given
> their phonetic similarity and their semantic overlap.
> It also wouldn't be weird for a Spanish-origin word
> to play a role but not the only role in the development
> of such a word.  Many generic words for `horse' in the
> Northwest are derived from words for `elk', so the
> extension of a word that means`spotted elk calf/fawn'
> in some of its derivatives would be unsurprising.
>
>    Of course, maybe pintos weren't prominent in
> the horse herds of the era, and maybe spotted horse
> faces weren't more common than all-over spotted
> horses.  My idea is a non-starter if spots on horses
> weren't common in the 19th (or possibly late 18th?)
> century.  Does anyone know?  *Can* one know?
>
>    -- Sally
>
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>

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