Cf. IO khera 'sky'

[Koontz John E]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Lance Foster wrote:
> > Notice that here we have IO ? khera, cf. Dieterle's report of Wi kera, and
> > LaFlesche has kkedha 'sky, the unclouded or clear sky.  (What is the
> > source for the IO form, by the way?) (JEK speaking)
>
> I have to go through my horrible mess of a filing system for the short form, but
> one source is Skinner's list of gentes (1926:193) in which one subgentes of the
> Buffalo Gens/Clan is given as " Kxe'rata' ", "Clear Day." I know I have seen the
> short form Kera as well, in another work of Skinner's.

Thanks.  Jimm Good Tracks' IOM Dictionary is otherwise such a thorough
collection of the existing materials that I was surprised not to find it
there.  I'd say that Skinner's kx confirms the aspiration.

> > Teton has kheya 'to make a roof of',
> > analyzed as a causative of 'turtle' by Buechel.  I'm not sure if that's a
> > clue or a red herring.  I think earth is a turtle shell, but not the sky.
>
> IO has "ketan" as turtle. IO tended to look at the earth as a domed lodge, and

Cf. OP kkettaNga, which is usually translated 'big turtle', though
something I saw somewhere suggested to me that it referred to a 'snapping
turtle'.

> the earth as an Island, but Turtle was conceived as being one of the layers of
> the World, and it is possible to think of the sky as the inside of a domed
> shell. The archaeological antecedent of the IOM was Oneota, and Oneota was a
> heavily intertribal/interlinguistic phenomenon involved with much trading up and
> down the Mississippi and Missouri, a role the Ioway continued into historic
> times.

I'll have to see if David Costa thinks there's anything in the MI
resemblance.  On reflection I think that 'turtle' itself has some
resemblances between Siouan and Algonquian.

The Siouan correspondences for *hkera are quite regular as far as they go.

JEK