Virtues-wolves-coyotes

[David Costa]

True, when I said that business about acquiring words for 'coyote' when
being forced into Kansas or Oklahoma, it overlooked the fact that the
Illinois already had the 'common wolf/ordinary wolf' word by the late 17th
century. And there's also the possibility that the Woodlands groups could
have known about coyotes from trips out onto the Plains to hunt bison. But
maybe this wasn't all that common, since I'm told Fox and Kickapoo don't
have any particular word for 'coyote'. I think I was told that the Kickapoo
use the same word as for 'wolf', which would make sense, since their
familiarity with the coyote would have come at roughly the same time as the
extinction of the wolf over most of the Lower 48. Just a matter of shifting
a word from one animal to the similar one that takes its place.

David

> 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
>
>