iron/ metal [and other loans and calques]

[David Costa]

> Incidentally, are you all aware of Frank Siebert's (1967) suggestion that
> Proto-Algonquian *ooteeweni 'town, village' was borrowed from Siouan (cf. Da
> oti)?

This strikes me as rather implausible. The root is Proto-Algonquian
*/o:te:-/ (*o:te:weni is just a nominalization off that), & it seems to have
meant 'dwell together as a group'. It's very well integrated into the
Algonquian lexicon in that it appears in several different reconstructible
collocations, plus it's found throughout the family. So if it was a loan, it
really was all the way back at the PA level. If the Siouan cognate is only
present in one or two branches of Siouan, this would strongly suggest to me
that the borrowing had to have been Algonquian -> Siouan, which is actually
the usual direction.

> He also suggests that Da s^kec^a 'fisher (Martes pennanti) is from PA
> *wec^yeekwa

I agree with John that this one isn't real compelling. (Incidentally, the
correct PA reconstruction for 'fisher' is */wec^yeeka/.)

> and Da teteni^a, Catawba tinde 'blue jay' from PA *tiintiiwa (but
> onomatopoeia?) and notes several other suggestive similarities (Natl. Mus.
> Canada Bull. 214 pp. 48-59).

I think it's extremely risky to use onomatopoeic words as evidence of
*anything* in comparative exercises like this, even if all one is trying to
do is to track borrowing.

best,

Dave