Mandan Contacts

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, Muhammed Suleiman wrote:

> At the risk of reintroducing a question which might previously have been
> asked on this list, can anyone tell me why early accounts of the Mandans
> suggest that they are a lost Welsh tribe, having words supposeedly
> cognate with Welsh words, and one report even speaks of a Welshman
> communicating with the natives in his mother tongue. There are accounts,
> of course, of a Prince Madoc sailing to America long before Columbus;
> but does anyone know of any reason why these reports should have singled
> out the Mandans? Is it something to do with the lateral sounds of that
> language and the Welsh _ll_ sound of _Llangollen_?

I don't know why the Mandans should have been singled out for this
treatment, unless it was perhaps from comparing their use of skin-covered
boats with coracles.  The Mandans aren't the only components of
Madoc-mania, of course.  You can find loads of pop culture Madoc
speculation on the Web.

There aren't any real linguistic similarities, of course.  Mandan is a
Siouan language with a lot in common with Crow-Hidatsa on the one hand and
Mississippi Valley Siouan on the other.  Welsh is an Indo-European
language of the peculiar Celtic sort.  I suppose there may be some chance
vocabulary similarities, as there usually are, but the only list I've ever
seen was one circulated widely in European and American newspapers a few
years ago, traceable to some genial Welsh Madocist enjoying his moment in
the Sun.  I didn't look to see if the correspondences were regular, though
they were indeed striking.  The problem was that the supposed Mandan
material was not actually Mandan, and this violates a constraint on
comparisons that a linguist has to take rather seriously, even if he or
she is a bit loose on what constitutes a linguistically significant
similarity.

There are no non-genetic phonological or grammatical similarities between
the languages that I'm aware of - Mandan has no l, voiceless or otherwise,
for example, and typologically they are at opposite poles (Mandan SOV,
Welsh VSO).  I think the only folks who might stand a chance of
understanding Mandan without actually speaking it would be Hidatsa
speakers, and, of course, all Mandan speakers for some decades have been
bilingual in Mandan and Hidatsa and understand Hidatsa well.  In spite of
some vocabulary resemblances, however, and some strong grammatical
parallels, I don't think that would be especially easy for a Hidatsa
speaker to follow Mandan without actually knowing it.  Various sound
changes in the comparable grammatical and lexical morphemes would get in
the way.