land=mother???

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Wallace Chafe wrote:
> Yes, the Caddo expression is ina? wa:dat (? for glottal stop, and wa:dat
> has an accent on the first syllable). It's quite literally "mother earth".
> Can ina? be a borrowing from Osage (assuming that Osage women captives
> often became Caddo mothers)?

Is ina? then not the usual term for mother in Caddo?  Or is this term not
typical of Caddoan generally?  If it isn't the usual mother term, it's
interesting that it is still glossed as 'mother'.  I think na ~ ma and so
on are in the usual range for 'mother' terms in many languages, like pa ~
ta, etc., for 'father', but it would be interesting to have a demonstrable
borrowing, with or without a special usage.  A special usage would be like
learned mater, alma mater, maternal and so on in English.

The Siouan terms for 'mother' and 'father' are all fairly clearly related,
in spite of being within the range of non-genetic similiarity for these
terms.  One oddity that is fairly regularly repeated (along with regular
sound correspondences) is the presence of two suppletive stems in each
case.  In Dhegiha -naNhaN is the 'first person/vocative' stem for
'mother', while the third person is stem is -haN.  I don't think the
suppletion always goes along those precise lines.

Dhegiha also has iN as the first person possessive for these stems,
otherwise not found in Dhegiha (except maybe iNs^?age '(my) elder'?), but
rather similar, I think, to the first person possessive in Ioway-Otoe,
though I doubt it's a loan.

JEK