wild cats etc

[Wallace Chafe]

For whatever it's worth, the Caddo word for the little people is
yahyashattsi?. That's in the popular orthography, where h is murmured (an
interesting feature of Caddo phonetics), sh is the shibilant, ts is
properly an affricate, and ? a glottal stop. The suffix -tsi? is indeed a
diminutive, but I have no idea what yahyashat- might have come from. It's
interesting to hear that somebody once used it for white people. Maybe it
was used derisively? Those Spaniards may have been short, compared to the
Caddos.

Wally

--On Tuesday, July 16, 2002 8:10 PM +0100 Anthony Grant
<Anthony.Grant3 at btinternet.com> wrote:

> As to little people -  it's not Siouan per se, but I happen to know that
> 'little people' (discussed in extenso by Elsie Clews parsons in her
> 'Notes on the Caddo') are called /yahyahsacci'/ in Caddo, which is itself
> a diminutive, and that a form of this stem, spelt 'yayecha' and
> suggesting that whites were regarded as other-worldly, occurs in the
> first recording of Caddo (vfrom c. 1688) as a term for white people, one
> long since eclipsed by /inkinisih/ from 'English'.    Are there any
> records of similar metaphors being used for Euroamericans in Siouan
> languages (as can be found in some Oceanic languages for example)?  I
> know about the usual tropes - 'long knives', derivations of Ojibweised
> French forms for 'the English', etc.
> Anthony Grant