horse paper

[lcumberl at indiana.edu]

I suppose I should track down this horse paper, but in the meantime, I noticed
in Dave Miller's introduction to Denig's "The Assiniboine" that JNB Hewitt
replaced the word "medicine" with "divining" in Denig's manuscript:
"consequently ... 'medicine dog' (the Assininboine term for horse) became
'divining dog'" (2000:xvi).  Now, this is surprising, because the word for horse
in every Asb dialect, as far as I know, is (as I communicated earlier) "big
dog", not "sacred/medicine-dog" as it is in Sioux.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Denig's authority on the Assiniboine
words for things in the mid-19th century, living as he did for two decades at
the central trading site in the heart of Assiniboine territory, is pretty
unassailable.  So what happened?

Linda

Quoting Anthony Grant <Granta at edgehill.ac.uk>:

> A propos of horses, dogs etc.:  Tonkawa had a word for horse that meant
> 'dog for carrying things'; it had also had one which meant something to
> do with burdens, which had been used in Gatschet's day -Hoijer collected
> this word but not n a text (maybe it had been subject to taboo at some
> time).  Given that Spanish was the major source of loans into Tonkawa,
> it's a little odd that it never took over a form of caballo/cahuayo.
>
> Anthony
>
> >>> John.Koontz at colorado.edu 20/04/2004 20:58:37 >>>
> On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Michael Mccafferty wrote:
> > The elk-based thing is neat. Thanks. This seems to arise from the
> same
> > semantic pool as the early Nahuatl term for the Spanish horse:
> "mazatl"
> > ('deer'). (Later in Nahuatl the term becomes "cahuayo".
>
> Alan confirms that he hasn't written anything on 'horses', but
> comments
> "So you have words like "big dog" (Cree; also Santee Sioux) or "elk
> dog"
> (Blackfoot and Gros Ventre)."
>
> It has occurred to me that any comments I recall from class on 'horse'
> might just as well be from David Rood, rather than Allan Taylor. The
> pig
> paper probably led to a mythical horse paper through a sort of mental
> short circuit.
>
>
>