butterfly

[Rory M Larson]

John wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Rory M Larson wrote:
>> I'd like to know which way the borrowing went. If it's a natural pun in
>> Dhegihan, could southern U.S. English slang have borrowed the meaning
>> from bilingual Quapaw or Osage speakers?
>
> I think it's clear it comes from English.  The similarity of Dhegiha
nikka
> 'person' and mikka 'raccoon' is made humorous by the existence of the
> English epithet coon.  I don't know if the latter really comes from
> raccoon, but it's an obvious assumption.  [...]

If it's clear that it comes from English, then
there ought to be a known derivation for it,
or else the contrary hypothesis has to be ruled
out by something else, like place or time of origin.
If the term is attested from east of the Appalachians
in the 1700's, then it's probably not Dhegihan.
Or if 'coon' is known to be a corruption of
'Cameroun', then again it's coming through other
channels.  But if it's from the 1800's, and we
don't even know whether it relates to 'raccoon' or
not, then it certainly isn't clear to me that it
comes from English.

Why would English speakers derisively refer to
blacks as "raccoons", rather than, say, "skunks",
"muskrats", "possums", or whatever?  Although we
can certainly imagine the Quapaw and Osage terms
as a very clever pun on a prior English term 'coon',
it seems much easier to me to explain the whole
relationship as originating in these languages
around the time of first contact.  The Dhegihans
would generally refer to blacks as /nikka sabe/,
"black man".  But in these languages, it would be
very easy to maliciously convert that to /mikka sabe/,
"black raccoon", and that may have happened now and
then.  A white frontiersman dealing with Dhegihans
learns about the pun, and gleefully shares it with
his fellows.  In their dialect, raccoons are called
"coons", and this term spreads among frontier and
lower-class southern whites as a derogatory term
for blacks.

So do we know anything about the term 'coon' that
shoots down the above hypothesis?

Rory