A little more on Iroquoian

[Marianne Mithun]

And a couple more. Wally is right about the raccoon and skunk. The wildcat
words in Mohawk and Oneida are actually a bit different from what Blair lists,
and would suggest a different interpretation from what we find in Seneca:
Mohawk ken:reks (with en representing a nasalized caret, with falling tone,
indicative of an earlier h).

Marianne


Quoting Wallace Chafe <chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu>:

> 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
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