rattlesnakes

[David Costa]

The Miami-Illinois name for the Massasauga (the smaller of the two species
of rattlesnakes in that area) is /$iih$iikwia/ ($ = s-hacek). All the sister
languages have cognates, like Ojibwe /zhiishiigwe/ & Shawnee /sihsiikwe/.
But I don't think it's necessary to posit an Algonquian -> Omaha-Ponca loan
here. /s^(e)e'kki/ and the Algonquian etymon are clearly onomatopoeic, and I
wouldn't be at all surprised for the different languages to independently
create names like that.

Dave Costa


> Also, for some reason, Omaha-Ponca seems to have borrowed its term for
> 'rattlesnake' - s^(e)e'kki - from Miami-Illinois or something very
> similar.  Unfortunately, I seem to have left David Costa's MI Dictionary
> in my other bookshelf, but I know the first two syllables were quite
> similar.  I wonder if this might not be a form of name avoidance, or
> perhaps I should say antinominalism or something like that?  The standard
> Siouan term for snake, OP w(e)e's?aN, is intact.