A little more on Iroquoian

[Wallace Chafe]

Just a couple things about Iroquoian. Please note that ati:ru and similar
words refer (in Mohawk as elsewhere) to the raccoon, not to the skunk,
which is ani:tas and similar. I've left off accents, a few differences in
vowels, etc. I notice this is what Marianne had in Extending the Rafters.

I believe it was Ives Goddard who first suggested that takos and similar
words come from Dutch de poes. It spread throughout the Northern Iroquoian
languages as the word for the domestic cat. Words for North American
Felidae differ among those languages. The most widespread, keNhres and
similar words, means long tail, and at least in Seneca heN:es (with a
masculine prefix) refers to a larger species (Felis concor?). It's
interesting that the name Erie comes from this, originating in the form
Eries, apparently interpreted in English as a plural. The -es means long.
We don't know much about the Eries, who inhabited northern Ohio, but they
were called the Cat Nation. One of the cleverest paper titles I've ever
seen was Roy Wright's "The Nation of the Cat: A Long Erie Tale".

The smaller species, usually identified in English as wildcat (probably
Lynx canadensis), is called in Seneca jikoNhsahseN', which means fat face.
In the legend of the founding of the League of the Iroquois it was also the
name of the so-called Peace Queen who was the first to receive the message
of peace from the peacemaker.

None of this has anything to do with Siouan, but since we seem to have
branched out into Algonquian...

Wally