Virtues-wolves-coyotes

[Michael Mccafferty]

On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, David Costa wrote:
>
> 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),

Illinois speakers would have likely been in contact with the
prairie-dwelling coyote by ca. 1000 A.D. perhaps slightly before, a time
frame generally applicable to any Algonquian language that pushed south
and west into the prairies or had prairie connections such as the
Potawatomi and Mascouten.

Michael McCafferty