butterfly

[Kathleen Shea]

A couple of summers ago at the Linguistic Institute at UCSB in Santa
Barbara, I sat in on the Friends of Uto-Aztecan meeting, which took place at
the Natural History Museum in Santa Barbara.  There was an interactive
exhibit going on at the time of live butterflies from all over, and one of
the presenters at the Friends of U-A conference was a curator at the museum.
(I forget his name, without looking it up.)  He had us all put the word for
'butterfly' in various languages (Uto-Aztecan and others) on the blackboard
and took a picture of it.  Most of the words had reduplication, as might be
expected, and there might have been other similarities across the languages
represented.  Anyway, the Ponca word for 'butterfly' is wac^c^i'ninikka ('
representing accent of the preceding syllable), and the word for
'hummingbird' is wac^c^i'ninikka wazhiN'ga (lit., 'butterfly bird'), by the
way.  This gives me a chance to correct myself since I remember that I got
confused at the time and put the wrong spelling on the board at the museum,
leaving out a geminate or two.  Pardon such a wordy answer for such a small
question!

Kathy