Muskogean 9

[Jack Martin]

Looking at Byington, it's hard for me to see that chakali means 'great with
child' rather than just 'pregnant'.  He cites Matt. 1:23 (Behold a virgin
shall be with child, and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name
Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us), where 'great with
child' doesn't really fit well, I think.

He also defines it as 'to teem', so my feeling is that Eric's connection to
nine months is funny but doubtful.

As for Tunica:  Haas compared to'hkusa'hku 'nine' to sa'hku 'one' in her
dictionary, but was apparently doubtful of what to'hku- meant.  Two
possibilities include to'hku 'to strike ... together' and t-o'hku-sa'hku
'the-offspring-one' (which she evidently didn't think of or rejected).  But
I'm confused about this:  if the word for 'nine' is a "Wanderwort", I don't
see how it could also be derived from 'one' in Tunica...

Jack



At 03:08 PM 12/2/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>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?