horse paper

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004 lcumberl at indiana.edu wrote:
> ... 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?

Unless there are also early attestations of 'big dog' it sounds like it
must be a neologism.  It's true that s^uNkawakhaN is given as the
independent form in at least Teton, but in most compounds and phrases just
s^uNka is used, and rederivations from that of new independent forms or
what one might call "unmarked descriptive phrases" would be possible.

I mentioned that Allan Taylor had suggested 'big dog' for Santee.  I
haven't checked this and wonder whether he might have been thinking of
Assiniboine instead, as he also mentioned it as the etymology of the Cree
term, and he is elsewhere on record as explaining many details of Stoney
phonology as due to Cree influence.  Perhaps lexical influence also
occurs.