A little more on Iroquoian

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Wallace Chafe wrote:
> 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, ...

Like other terms for mountain lions.  But I guess this makes sense if the
less marked wildcat is a bobcat/lynx, which hasn't got much of a tail. I
can't remember if Heike made this point already!

> One of the cleverest paper titles I've ever seen was Roy Wright's "The
> Nation of the Cat: A Long Erie Tale".  ...
>
> None of this has anything to do with Siouan, but since we seem to have
> branched out into Algonquian...

But worth it for Roy Wright's title alone.