Behind the 8-ball

[David Costa]

As one of the two authors of that article on Algonquian numeral words in the
Siebert Festschrift, I can say that number borrowing is *very* common within
Algonquian, but *much* rarer if you're talking about Algonquian borrowing
from outside the family. We didn't address the issue of 'why' any of these
numbers were borrowed, beyond pointing out possible trade contexts. The
number eight doesn't have any special mythical significance that I'm aware
of, and that question seems unanswerable to me. All I can say is that the
original Proto-Algonquian word for 'eight' was lost by the earliest records
of Miami-Illinois, and replaced with a neologism meaning 'two missing' or
something like that (/nii$omeneehki/); that form is preserved in certain
Illinois dialects. But in other Illinois dialects, you have the Tutelo loan
/paraare/, and by the modern language it's /palaani/. Intervocalic Illinois
/r/ becoming later M-I /n/ is not normal, but both of those variants *are*
attested in Tutelo. So what seems to be happening is the Tutelo > M-I
borrowing was so recent, it was borrowed in different forms in different M-I
dialects, and other dialects didn't do it at all. Which says that the period
of the M-I speakers being next to the Tutelo wasn't all that long ago, which
seems very interesting to me, since Indiana and Illinois aren't very
geographically close to central Virgina...

David


> Can't say for sure, of course, but those higher numeral terms, esp. 8 and 9,
> seem rather unstable within Siouan at least.  Nine is widely borrowed in or
> between Siouan and Algonquian, i.e., the /ki$aNhka/ term.  It is very hard to
> reconstruct 7, 8, 9 for Proto-Siouan without appealing to "irregular" changes.
> 'Eight' is also borrowed in Kansa (and, I think, Osage) and resulted in
> competing forms.  Kaw has /ppe:ya:bliN/, the inherited form, along with
> /kkiado:ba/ which looks very much like a Caddoan borrowing -- prob. from
> Wichita (although there is a folk etymology analyzing it as "two X four").

> There's that article on Algonquian numeral words in the Siebert Festschrift,
> but I haven't read it yet.
>
> Bob
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Mccafferty" <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
> To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 8:34 AM
> Subject: Behind the 8-ball
>

>> As many of you know, the Miami-Illinois term for "eight" /paraani/ is, as
>> Bob Rankin pointed out in an article in IJAL several years ago, a
>> borrowing from a Siouan language. Tutelo typically gets the nod.
>>
>> Can anyone suggest why this happened? No, not that Bob wrote it up, but
>> that such a borrowing occurred. It's one of the strangest things. I
>> imagine, since we're talking numbers, that it was borrowed probably in the
>> process of trading. But does the number 8 have any mythological meaning?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Michael
>>
>>
>