Bows (IO tradition)/Yankton sociology

[Rankin, Robert L]

> 1. Regarding bows, one thing that Skinner notes (1925) is
> that there was an Ioway tradition that the Wolf Clan "spoke a different
language" when they met up with the other clans. This is notable, as the
Wolf Clan brought the bow and arrows. Could the IO Wolf Clan originally have
been an Algonquian group?

Possibly so. The Ioway-Otoe-Missouria and the Winnebago words for 'bow' seem
to be from a different Algonquian language than the Dakotan or (probably)
Dhegihan terms. The most likely extant candidate is Menomini (which has an
[ae] vowel rather than the more common [i]).

I was just talking with Kay Fowler and Jane Hill about this set and they
mentioned that the Uto-Aztecan term is *wata. This is not too different from
the Siouan terms, differing only by the feature [nasal] and the
stem-formative vowel. So for some of the languages we are faced with more
than one possible direction of spread. The Ioway term, with its [tk]
cluster, is clearly from Algonquian though.

Bob