Dakota yellow

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Louis Garcia wrote:
> Wazican is a pine tree in Dakota. Waziyata is toward the north or pine
> trees. Instead of zi being a reference to yellow, I thought it was
> zhi, to murmur or whisper, as the wind blowing through the pine
> branches in the winter. Over time has the zhi changed to zi?

There is a set of cognates in Siouan:

Cr ba'ac^ii
Da wazi'
IO ba'(a)dhi
Wi waazi'
OP ma'azi
Os pa'azaN
Tu wa'(a)sti

These suggest Proto-Siouan *Waasi or *Waazi, which in Dakotan comes out
looking like wazi 'something yellow', but is probably not historically
connected with yellow at all.

> The dragonfly is a symbol of warrior swiftness, it is used on a number
> of artifacts. I noticed Father Buechel left the term blank in his
> Lakota dictionary. Here at Ft. Totten there are two terms for a
> dragonfly. Ps'ko (spelling?) used for the sound they make as they fly,
> and susbeca. Father Buechel has the ps'ko listed under birds, as a
> Night Hawk. probably an old term because they eat mosquitoes at night.

The CSD does't list a dragonfly form, but I believe we've discussed cases
where insect and bird terms overlaps or fall into the same folk categories
before, e.g., 'owl' and 'moth'.  I think that dragonflies (or some of
them), like butterflies, are classified as whirlwinds in Cheyenne
ethnotaxonymy.

The Omaha-Ponca term for 'dragonfly' seems to be just haNt?ega
ttaNga 'big fly'.