Virtues-wolves-coyotes

[Alan Knutson]

Just an aside, in Kickapoo Voorhis indicates 'wolf' as "mahweea" and 'dog'
as "anemwa".

Alan K

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Costa" <pankihtamwa at earthlink.net>
To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 11:16 AM
Subject: Re: Virtues-wolves-coyotes


> 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
> >
> >
>