Osage

[Koontz John E]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002 rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu wrote:
> > What I meant was to poke a little fun at the possiblity that Ohio /ohaio/
> > in English could have come from anything in Dhegiha at all.  [...]
>
> All right, John, you drew me out and got me square on that one!  Well
> done!!  I'll take it as established from here that Omaha Uhai is a
> morphologically rationalized adoption of the English name 'Ohio'.

The fun is at this point mostly historical, and wasn't intended to be at
Rory's expense, but (on past occasions) at the expense of a series of
somewhat innocent ethnohistorians, who never seem to comment on the
etymology.

> By the way, what is the Osage name for the Ohio River, really?

I don't know.  I'm not sure there is one at present.  I'm not sure that
there's actually an unborrowed Omaha-Ponca name for it, either, though
there's a good possibility that such terms existed in the past, even
without the Ohio Valley connection.

JEK