Another Proto-Mississippi Valley *py Set

[Rory M Larson]

>On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Jimm GoodTracks wrote:
>> "pyúbraN" (mint; Indian perfume plant) is from:
>> pi    =    good
>> ubráN    =    to smell; emit an odor
>>
>> The "y" is the contracted sound resulting from  "pi + ubráN".
>
> Aha!  After I got done kicking myself for not seeing this it occurred to
> me that next question was what does OP nubdhaN mean?  If it has some
> fairly straightforward analysis that explains nu from another source,
then
> this set is just a figment of my imagination.  Otherwise it offers a nice
> example of how *py clusters can arise.  The obvious possibilities for nu
> that occur to me are niN 'water' + ubdhaN or compounds with nu 'male' or
> nu 'potato'.  None of these seem especially plausible, but I may well be
> missing something.
>
> If this is a valid example, then note that *py here is from *hpi + u.

I suppose "smelly wild potato [plant]" would be an obvious parsing of
OP /nubdhaN/, assuming there is some reason for semantically associating
mint with wild potatoes.

The next question would be the meaning/cognancy of u- in IOM /ubraN/.  I
assume -braN is the root that actually means "smell", along with OP
/bdhaN/.
In OP, u- relates to MVS? o-, and means "in", or "in context of".  But IOM
u- ought to relate to some variety of OP i-.  So what is the meaning of
pre-verbal u- in IOM?

One possibility is that OP /nubdhaN/ is a reinterpreted loan word from
IO.  There seems to be an historical friendship and association between
these two groups, and it shouldn't be too hard to imagine a
well-constructed
IO term /pyubraN/ < /hpi=u=braN/ being heard by Omahas who understood that
the -braN meant -bdhaN, but couldn't make sense of the phyu-.  In this
case,
they might have heard the /y/ as /n/, rejected the initial /ph/ as
phonologically
unacceptable, and mapped the IO /u/ to OP /u/.  This would give them /nu/,
meaning "potato", which might be an odd species association, but still
quite
plausible, grammatical and memorable as the name of a plant.  Thus, IO
"mint",
"smells good", being loaned into OP, becomes "mint", meaning "smelly
potato"
through the Omahas' best interpretation of the IO word.  John's intuition
that IO /pyubraN/, "mint", and OP /nubdhaN/, "mint", form a set would be
correct, though not at the level of proto-MVS.

Rory