Locative Postpositions

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 28 Oct 1999, Alan H. Hartley wrote:
> John Koontz wrote:
> > I think Winnebago is a locative in Ojibwa, something like 'at the
> >smelly water'.
>
> It's not locative. Susan Golla and Ives Goddard (HNAI 15.706) suggest as
> the etymon Potawatomi winpyeko (pl. -k) 'people of the dirty [i.e.,
> muddy] water'. There are similar forms in various other Algonquian
> languages, none of which looks locative.

OK, I stand corrected!

> > What's really potentially a problem here is the combination of an attested
> > Mandan term with a Dakotan locative.
>
> There are parallels, e.g.,

These are certainly linguistically parallel, but I notice they all involve
contact between English and a Native American language, or between two
European languages.  One of the observations wrt to Native American
languages, at least in the East and Plains, is that they seem to be
relatively impervious to loans.  No one's quite sure why this is, and, in
fact, we are recognizing more loans as we go along, but this situation
(Mandan root word, Dakotan locative) still strikes me as odd.  The most
likely scenario to me seems to be adapting a Mandan original.  It would be
nice to have some evidence of such a form.

> In fact, how is a Mandan placename with a Dakotan locative suffix
> essentially different from an Ojibway placename with an English locative
> preposition, e.g., "in Bemidji"?

It's not, really, but I've never had my attention drawn to a case where a
Siouan language had a substantial body of borrowed placenames.  For cases
like the names for the Platte, the Missouri, the White, etc., I've
suspected for several years that if it were possible to assemble
substantial sets of place names for the area (it might be, to some extent,
possible) we might find that many were calqued.

It looks like ethnonyms are often borrowed, however, and that's promising
for your case.

> A more serious problem is, as John points out, that Siouan ethnonyms are
> not usually formed from locatives.

It occurs to me that there is likely to be a connection between Ogalala
(OP Ubdhadha) and the Niobrara (OP NiN Ubdhadha), but I'm not sure in
which direction (or how), and the ethnonym is not a formal locative.