Apologies to Roy Wright

[Wallace Chafe]

I did Roy Wright a disservice if I implied that the association of Eries
with long tails was his idea. In fact he just mentioned it as one thing
that had been suggested by others in the past. The correct title of his
paper was The People of the Panther - A Long Erie Tale (National Museum of
Man, Mercury Series No. 10, Ottawa, 1974). The title wasn't meant to
suggest his endorsement of that explanation. I mentioned it in my message
only because I thought the multifaceted pun was so clever.

I'm very grateful to Blair for setting me straight on that word for
mountain lion etc. With ks at the end, it couldn't mean "long". As Blair
said, Senecas can't tell final s from ts from ks. I think Lounsbury once
suggested that Senecas might have folk-etymologized words ending in -es as
if they meant something was long, even when they didn't originally. And it
isn't at all clear what the incorporated noun here would have been. It
looks as if everything after the pronominal prefix was *-ihreks, where the
s looks like the habitual aspect, and the k might just possibly be "eat",
but what was it that those cats ate?

Of more general interest might be the suggestion that Northern Iroquoians
distinguished two kinds of native cats. One may have been Puma concolor, if
that's a better name for the genus. That's the one referred to by the above
word. I guess it had a long tail anyway, even if that's not what the word
meant. The name later got extended to tigers in circuses, which became
popular in the 19th century. Sometimes lions too, but not in Seneca, where
the lion word is interesting for reasons I won't go into here. The other
animal recognized in precontact times was one or more species of the genus
Lynx. It was smaller, without much of a tail. "Fat face" seems a good name
for it. There the Seneca etymology is uncontroversial. I'm hoping this is a
fair summary of the ethnozoology, which we can't necessarily expect to
coincide with Linnaean categories, as was pointed out.

Some of you may think that Marianne and I aren't on speaking terms. She's
in Australia.

Wally