wild cats etc

[Anthony Grant]

Dear Wally and other Siouanists:

I suspect that the name was used because what Europeans the Caddos had met
seemed to have supernatural powers (for instance a knowledge of firearms,
eyeglasses, etc). This was a belief originally shared by a number of other
groups, for instance some Polynesian groups - a belief soon shattered, of
course.   Maybe this is why terms for 'whiteman' and 'trickster' (and both
of these from 'spider') are the same in some Northern Plains languages.

Anthony
----- Original Message -----
From: Wallace Chafe <chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu>
To: Anthony Grant <anthony.grant3 at btinternet.com>;
<siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 3:37 AM
Subject: Re: wild cats etc


> 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
>
>
>