ASB puza

[Heike Bödeker]

At 21:56 13.08.03 -0700, David Costa wrote:
> > A couple of questions here: Could we get an expansion of the acronyms
> BF and
> > PC for those of us who are Algonquian-challenged? Also, without
> > presuppositions about which way borrowing is supposed to have gone, are BF
> > poos, PC poosii- and Penobscot p at so (@ = schwa) reasonable reflexes of
> > Proto-Algonquian?

If asked this way: no, because the former two and the latter are two
distinct etyma.

>I think 'BF' is Blackfoot; I'm not sure what 'PC' is supposed to stand for;
>among Algonquianists, it usually stands for 'Plains Cree',

Yep.

>but the Plains Cree form for 'cat' is /pisiw/ (unless it also borrowed the
>English word).

Indeed, as well as French minou.

>I think the historical development of Blackfoot from Proto-Algonquian is
>too ill-understood to be sure whether 'poos' could come from */pe$iwa/. At
>least, *I* don't know for sure.

Well, we at least have Proulx' outline... according to which the expected
reflex of *pešiwa would be a hypothetical **pihsi (in standard
orthography). But then, BF uses a different basic term anyway: natááyo
(with accretive nasal, occasionally subject to initial change, and AFAIK
nevertheless without Algonquian cognate... Somehow I couldn't help being
vaguely reminded of the makeup of the Athapaskan word for "lynx" as
outlined by Pinnow, which looks like a categorizer-formation "the one who
...es", just that in both cases one can't indentify an underlying verbal
root, e.g. as in lynx from PIE *leukw- referring to the glowing eyes, or
maybe also whatever the bobcat did in the pumpkin field... [eating the
turkey raw? but no, this was the maize field IIRC...], but this is all too
speculative...).

All the best,

Heike