Virtues-wolves-coyotes

[David Costa]

> Referring to coyotes as 'slasher' smacks of taboo replacement, doesn't it? I
> guess Crow borrows the term from Kiowa but most Siouan languages use a
> derivation of *$uNke 'canid'.

I find it interesting that most Siouan languages don't have a totally
separate word for 'coyote' as opposed to 'dog'. Does this mean that there
isn't a clearly reconstructible Proto-Siouan word for 'coyote'?

I can at least add my take on how Algonquian handles this issue. Proto-
Algonquian was pretty clearly NOT spoken in the geographic range of coyotes,
since there's no reconstructible Proto-Algonquian word for the animal. (Tho
there are words for 'wolf' and, especially, 'dog'.) Therefore, as some of
the daughter languages have later moved into the range of coyotes (usually
when the speakers were forced to move to Kansas or Oklahoma), they've have
had to acquire words for the animal. As it turns out, most of the 'Central'
languages use derivations of the Algonquian 'wolf' word, never the
Algonquian 'dog' word. So Miami and Potawatomi use a formation that
transparently means 'common wolf', and Shawnee uses the diminutive of the
'wolf' word to mean 'coyote'.

Arapaho and Cheyenne, on the other hand, share a word which one of the two
languages seems to have borrowed from the other. Ives Goddard, who spotted
this, has pointed out that the forms would regularly reflect Proto-
Algonquian */pa:xkahamwa/, which would mean 'the one that opens it by tool',
but his position is that it's an innovation, and not a Proto-Algonquian name
for the animal. Don't ask me why 'coyote' should be called 'the one that
opens it by tool'.

Do most Siouan languages have a separate 'wolf' word independent from their
'coyote'/'dog' word? *If* no clear Proto-Siouan word that unequivocally
means 'coyote' can be reconstructed, then I guess that means that the
Proto-Siouans didn't have them, and that either some Siouans moved into the
range of them, or that coyotes themselves expanded their range (definitely
known to have happened at least over the last couple centuries).

Dave Costa