Muskogean 9

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Eric wrote:
> Ok, I'll ask the obvious: could "nine" be the original Choctaw meaning with
> the "(be) pregnant" meaning referring to number of the month the pregnancy
> is in?

Bob Rankin replies:
> This would require looking at the time-keeping structure of the Choctaws
> (et al.), which was probably lunar, although I'm in near total ignorance
> of it.  ...

Or it might not.  If it was something like "at nine (months)" the form
could arise solely from the context of Bible translation (per Pam Munro:
"used in Byington's translation of the Bible (expressing 'great with
child',...)").  That is, the term could be a neologism created to express
a particular conception of the meaning of "great with child."  The
potential for this sort of problem - neologisms to handle an alien concept
- is one of the reasons linguists are often reluctant to consider
linguistic data from Bible translations or any comparable in-translation
full of alien concepts, of course).  Another reason would be the
possibility of imported syntax - the syntactic equivalent of a neologism -
a neosyntagmism?

> All I know is that Dhegiha "month" terms are most often not cognate
> and aren't really months -- they are descriptive terms for "short
> seasons" that have sort of coalesced around Euro-month names since
> contact.

Somewhere I read an assessment of this that suggested that underlying
these systems in languages of the Old Northwest was probably a fairly
standard lunar calendar, in which the basically there were 12-13 month
names and some local authority would intercalate the extra month whenever
the lunar months difted too far out of synchrony with the solar year, not
unlike a lot of pre-Classical European systems.

I suppose the descriptive names of the months might vary from place to
place, too.

> Right now I still think of the "shanhka" word as a Wanderwort, native to
> none of the three families where we find it.

I agree, except that I wonder about the forms in a fourth family - Tunica.
The significance of the Tunica forms is that there sahku 'one' looks like
it connected with tohkusahku 'nine', and I wonder if the latter isn't
derived from the former along the usual lines of 'one less (than ten)'.
I don't know if tohku- can be analyzed in terms of the existing Tunica
data.  The phonology isn't too far out of line, especially if you consider
that Tunica might easily be an isolated remnant of something larger.

I'm curious whether the term Wanderwort implies that the source language
is uncertain.  Is it sufficient for the word to be widely distributed?