MANDAN redux (was Re: Dakota Band Names and Pomme de Terre)

[Alan H. Hartley]

Koontz John E wrote:

> Well, Teton for Mandan is MiwataNni, but I shouldn't comment further,
> until I get the Plains volumes of the Handbook and review what we said on
> the list last time.  I don't know what the Assiniboine term for Mandan is
> apart from Verendrye's testimony.  French transcriptions are usually
> fairly good, but sometimes they fall shy of the mark.

HNAI 13.363 has Assiniboine mayátana, mayátani. I don't think Mantanne
is a likely transcription of either of those. And I imagine that had de
la Vérendrye's version been too far off the mark, it wouldn't have
survived alone so long without more accurate versions having appeared in
the written record. Fr.-Can. traders had a great deal of first-hand
experience of the Assiniboine language.

Is A. -y- in such an environment a regular reflex of other Siouan -w- ?
HNAI 17.444 says that Lakhota intervocalic -y- and -w- are pronounced
weakly, if at all. That gets us to mátana, but we still have the first
-n- in Mandan to account for.

As far as Teton forms go, there are the Fr.-Eng. vars. in -l (ca. 1800),
e.g., Mandal, again without -w- or -y-, which I assume show Teton
influence.

The Mandans were centered at the confluence of the Heart River and the
Missouri which would accord pretty well with Le Sueur's gloss of
Mantanton 'village d'un grand lac qui se decharge dans un petit'. And
Hayden (1862 p.426) has "The Mandans, or Mi-ah'ta-nes [h dot above, e
with macron] 'people on the bank' (of the river), as they call
themselves": note the similarity to A. mayátana.

Alan