Nishnabotna etym.

[Rankin, Robert L]

I can't add a thing to John's analysis except that it might pay to look at
the original handwriting in the L&C journals to see if anything else can be
made of the last couple of syllables.  That's sort of a last resort, I
guess.

Bob


-----Original Message-----
From: Koontz John E [mailto:John.Koontz at colorado.edu]
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 9:32 PM
To: Siouan
Subject: Re: Nishnabotna etym.


On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Alan H. Hartley wrote:
> Can anyone tell me the meaning of the river-name written by William
> Clark in 1804 as Neesh-nah-ba-to-na? Clark identifies it as Omaha, but
> Gary Moulton, in his end-note, says "According to Thomas Say [it] is
> an Oto Indian name signifying 'canoe making river'."

I assume Clark was representing something like /nis^nabetone/.

My recollections of working on this term for Moulton with Bob Rankin and
Doug Parks are about the same as Bob's. It corresponds, I believe to the
placename usually spelled Nishnabotna, which is somewhat syncopated over
Clark's form.

In accord with Tom Leonard's suggestion, /tone/ might possibly represent
Osage or Kaw versions of /htaNka/ (Os) or /ttaNga/ (Ks), which I think may
tend tend to lose the velar.  Omaha-Ponca has /ttaNga/.  The same form would
come out /thaN<ng>e/ ~ /than[y]e/ in Ioway-Otoe, but IO substitutes another
term for 'big'.  The phonology isn't quite right for any of these, except
maybe the hypothetical and entirely unattested IO one.

Bob Rankin and I did note that same form s^nabe 'dirty' that Tom came up
with.  The name in that parallels the (Little and Big) Nemaha 'Miry River'
in sense.  Actually a lot of river names in this area embody a comment on
the amount of sediment in the water (or maybe the soil on the banks).

The IO term for 'boat' is ba(a)j^e < *Waat(e).  One might just think to
discern it in "bot," but then the rest of the word (after ni) doesn't work.
Of course, it would be possible to have a term that implied boats and
referred, say, to making them, but the form doesn't seem to have an
etymology in those terms.

What I have noticed since then is a form in LaFlesche 1930, the Osage
dictionary, p. 107v ni-hni'-bo-shta 'two springs not far from each other,
one clear and sweet, the other black and bitter.  A strange feature in
connection with these springs was that there was a peculiar movement that
caused the Indians to call them shooting springs.  This was the final camp
of the second buffalo trail.'

Immediately before this is ni-hni' 'water cold; a spring or well.' The
remainder, bo-shta seems to have the 'shooting instrumental' (cf. OP mu=).
The particular verb doesn't seem to be attested in LaFlesche as an
independent form.

I'd make the form in something less Omaha-influenced and more Osage looking,
something like niN s^niN pos^ta.

I think pos^taN might be 'to miss in shooting'.  Osage does have
bo-gthoN-tha 'to miss a mark' (LaFlesche 1930:294b).  This would be
poloNdha, or earlier on [pogloNdha ~ podloNdha].  I suppose this might have
been heard as [podnodha], given the nasalized vowel (with [dha] alternating
with [ra] or [la] or [na] or, in fast speech [a]).

If the latter term were substituted for the first (and this substitution
were deemed reasonable), I suppose a name like niN s^niN podnoN(n)a might be
produced.

That's probably a bit tendentious, however, and I'm pretty sure that we're
not dealing with the same places, but only parallel names.

I'm not sure that the 'spring' term is reall 'cold water', though IO has
what I take to be n[y]i(N)<th>riN=xti < niN sniN=xti 'very cold water'.

JEK