Dakota itazipA 'bow' (loans and speculations)

[Koontz John E]

On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, R. Rankin wrote:
> > We were speculating on the meaning of the -zipA component of the
> > Dakota 'bow' word a while back.

> The only other possibility is that zibe is a borrowing from Dakotan --
> a folk etymology based on itazipela.

That latter is always a possibility, and think one that students of Siouan
have tended to overlook in the past, for several reasons.  I certainly
find I seldom worry about it myself!  For one thing, it's a simplifying
assumption, if a somewhat naive one.  There's a certain tendency to think
as if "whitemen"  encountered the Omaha in 16-something and shortly after
that the Omaha got into regular communication with the Dakota groups, too,
...  For another, there's a feeling - not unsupported by the available
data - that loans in Siouan languages are comparatively few.

Of course, loans between Siouan languages can be difficult to identify,
given the similarities in phonologies and morphosyntax, and a apparent
tendency to adapt phonologies in borrowings.  I'm thinking of the way that
ethnonyms and place names often look like cognates, though, presumably,
they must have been borrowed.  Or maybe not, if we allow the concept of
phonological adaptation, then loans can be difficult to distinguish from
calques and inheritences.  If you start with an analyzable form in one
language and translate it into cognate morphemes of the same meaning
arranged in the same morphosyntax, you get about the same thing you would
get if you inherited the form or borrowed the form intact, adapting it by
the usual "correspondences" to your own phonology. There might well be
differences, but they would be subtle.

I wonder to what extent the often regular similarities of ethnonyms across
the Siouan-speaking regions fuels the logic of recorded native speculation
on ethnic origins, which take the approach that when one traces back the
various Dhegiha (or Mississippi Valley, etc.) groups one finds not an as
yet undiverged proto-entity, but a micro-cosm of the later (present)
situation, in which all of the later groups exist, but in a harmonious
community of the whole.  On the other hand, that might as easily come out
of things like lineal kinship systems, clan structure, and the familiar
mechanics of village division.  The linguistics of the situation are
perhaps less likely to be causal than mutually consistent.