Osage

[Wallace Chafe]

Just for the record, the origin of the name Ohio in the Seneca language is
quite clear, as is its passage from French into English, where of course
it acquired a spelling pronunciation. The Senecas never "rationalized" it.
The Omaha thing, which apparently resembles the later English spelling
pronunciation, seems to me to be a coincidence, but there I'm outside my
field.

Wally

> If the resemblance of the Omaha term Uhai to
> the English form Ohio is not pure coincidence,
> then the name of the Ohio River must have been
> common to both Dhegihans and Iroquoians, with
> both rationalizing a single 'international'
> name into something plausible in their own
> respective languages.  For the Iroquoians, it
> was rationalized as 'Great River', and for
> the Dhegihans it was rationalized as something
> like 'Roadway', or 'They Pass Through on It'.
> If we accept this, then there are two main
> possibilities:
>
>   1) The Dhegihan term is primary.  It was
>      reduced from something like Opha=p=a
>      originally to something like *Oha=i in
>      that wing of Dhegihan closest to the
>      Seneca, who picked up the name from
>      them and rationalized it to ohi:yo?.
>
>   2) The Dhegihan name is a loadword from
>      Seneca or some other source.  In that
>      case, the wing of Dhegihan most closely
>      involved with the Ohio River rationalized
>      the term as Uha=i or whatever, and passed
>      it back to the Osage, who recast it into
>      their own dialect as Opha=p=a.