Iskousogos

[Michael McCafferty]

Quoting Koontz John E <John.Koontz at colorado.edu>:

> On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, Michael Mccafferty wrote:
> > Unfortunately, the meaning of <8AB8SKIG8 was lost since Marquette died
> > before he could explain it. But when the place name made it back
> > to Quebec/France/civilization, it was tranliterated, incorrectly, to
> > "Ouabouskigou". Historians, at least beginning with Thwaites have thought
> > that Marquette's place name is related to Miami-Illinois /waapaah$iiki/,
> > the name of the Wabash River.
>
> And the crosswinds whip up again!
>
> Without in any way wishing to quibble with your etymologies, I would be
> grateful to know why 8ab8skig8 would be incorrectly transliterated
> ouabouskigou.  I thought that 8 was interchangeable with ou?  I thought
> that the only issue was knowing when it represented w and when u(:)?
>
> Puzzled in Sioux City (metaphorically speaking).
>




Dear Puzzled in (sort of) Sioux City:

This is a very good question.

Through my own digging and delving as well as by tapping Dave Costa's
reservoir, it’s clear that the letter 8, which is a circle surmounted by a
crescent (very hard to type in e-mail-available fonts...but often written like
an eight even by the Jesuits in the 18th century), represents many
phonological possibilities in the recording of the Miami-Illinois language, to
wit:

In word-initial position, this orthographic symbol can represent w-, sometimes
oow- before a vowel, and  oo- ~ uu- before a consonant. Between vowels, it
stands for - w-, sometimes - o(o)w-. Between consonants that are not followed
by w and a following vowel it stands for either  - o(o)w - ~ - u(u)w-. When it
appears between two consonants, the letter represents -o(o)- ~ -u(u)-, and in
word-final position, 8 typically represents -o(o) ~ -u(u). (I should add that
o(o) and u(u) are the same phoneme in Miami-Illinois).

As you know, French has no problem rewriting in standard orthograph any of
these phonological values for 8. In French they mostly show up as orthographic
ou, sometimes o. The thing is, though, there's a wild card.

The Jesuit missionaries in the Illinois, starting from the get-go with
Marquette in 1673 and running through Le Boullenger in the 1730s, at least,
also used the letter 8 quite freely and indiscriminately to stand for wa(a).
It was surely shorthand. If you were a busy Jesuit (and we know they were
*very* driven, busy people) you would write < irenans8 > 'bison', for example.
Now, you knew very well that your 8 here stood for wa. But for any document
created by a Jesuit in the West that made it back to Quebec or France,
ambiguity, the bane of linguists (and far more so of historians), raised its
ugly head for folks back home. It's clear that they had no idea the priests in
the field were giving this phonological value to 8.

Each of the three Illinois dictionaries has many examples of 8 representing
wa. I've found fifty or so in the Illinois-French dictionary commonly
attributed to Jacques Gravier. But we don’t even have to go poking around in
musty old dictionaries to find examples. Marquette’s nice, clean holograph map
of the Mississippi demonstrates how the letter 8 had a very protean nature.
One example is his <P8TE8TAMI>, his spelling of Ojibwe pooteewaatamii.
(Marquette was fluent in Objiwe). As you can see, although the first 8 of his
recording predictably stands for oo, the second 8 represents waa. In addition,
his <8chage> is Miami-Illlinois waašaaši (š = sh), an ethnonym familiar to
Siouan listeros.

Then, if you look in Marquette’s holograph journal of his second trip to
Kaskaskia, you find <Chachag8essi8>, which was the name of a highly respected
Illinois Indian trader whom the priest met in 1675 while wintering over near
present-day Chicago. In this man’s name the first <-8-> stands predictably
for -w-, but the final <-8> was intended by Marquette to represent none other
than -wa. That said, what we see in the history books, both in French and in
English, is “Chachagwessiou”. However, not only does the final syllable of
this spelling not line up with the other spellings of this word on record,
which are in agreement, but also the word-final vowel sequence -io,
represented here by orthographic <-iou>, does not even exist in Miami-
Illinois. Marquette’s <Chachag8essi8> is Miami-Illinois
šaahšaakweehsiwa ‘copperhead’. As far as Marquette’s <8AB8SKIG8> goes, the
Jesuit scholar Camille de Rochemonteix showed that there was at least one
priest not working in the Illinois country who was somewhat informed about the
letter 8 when he translitereated <8AB8SKIG8> to “Ouaboukigoa”. Here De
Rochemonteix correctly wrote -oa, which in French represents the sound -wa.


Perenially Perplexed Pip

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