Just 2 minor notes on realia (was: A little more on Iroquoian)

[Heike Bödeker]

At 10:13 11.08.03 -0700, 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, 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 "long-tail", of course, matches the pattern already known from
Algonquian and Siouan... designating the puma (mountain lion, panther,
cougar...), which I'd scientifically preferred to refer to as puma
concolor. There has been some debate on whether to group this species
together with the very archaic golden cats (profelis spp.), caracals
(caracal caracal), possibly also servals (leptailurus serval), but there
seems no consensus about this (maybe cold comfort to historical linguists
that biologists have this type of group-problems, too...). However, felis
should be reserved to the group of Central to Western Eurasian and African
small cats (with only the octolobus manul as a close relative) comprising
the jungle cat (felis chaus), probably the primary split..., the very
archaic blackfooted cat (felis nigripes), Chinese desert cat (felis bieti),
sand cat (felis margarita), wildcats <strictu sensu> (comprising the
archaic ornata [in arid regions from Iran to Pakistan and Middle to Central
Asia], as well as the silvestris [in Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus] and
ocreata [in the Near East and Africa] groups).

>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.

"Wildcat" usually is synonymous to bobcat (lynx rufus), if not understood à
la lettre as "wild cat", which, alas, is very common, too, and then
difficult to guess what really is meant...

Also interesting to see that the puma playing important mythological roles
is widespread, too...

All the best,

Heike