butterfly

[Pamela Munro]

The person Kathy refers to here is John Johnson, the director of
Anthroplogy for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The exhibit
was fabulous, as was the list.

Pam

Kathleen Shea wrote:

>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
>
>
>
>
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Pamela Munro
Professor, Department of Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 USA
http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/linguistics/people/munro/munro.htm