Missouri, etc.

[Michael McCafferty]

From: Alan Hartley <ahartley at d.umn.edu>
To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
Subject: Re: Historical questions
Date: Thu, Jan 1, 2004, 11:56 am


In Michael's absence, here's what I have for Missouri(a):

< French Missouris (pl.; 1687) < Fr. 8emess8rit (1673; the character 8
is used in French transcriptions of North American languages to
represent the sounds spelled ou in French) < Illinois we:mihso:rit
'person who has a big canoe' < we:- (3d pers. sg. prefix o- in the
changed mode of the conjunct order) + mihso:ri 'big canoe' (as missouri
1725, Internat. J. Amer. Ling. LVII. (1991) 374) + -t (3d pers. sg.
conjunct suffix); < mihs- 'big' + -o:ri 'canoe' (< PA *o:si).

MM: Actually, /we:mihso:rita/. As I noted in my paper on the topic, this is
morphophonemic wi-mihs-oor-i-t-a.
wi (and ablauted /wee-/)is the third-person possessive prefix. The rest of
the term is ‘wood’-‘watercraft’-inanimate noun suffix-third person animate
intransitive participle marker-third person animate intransitive participle
ending.



Illinois mihs- could stem from either Proto-Algonquian *me?T- [glottal
stop; unvoiced th]  'big' or *mehT-  'wooden' which have identical
reflexes in Illinois, but the gloss 'wooden canoe' is made less likely
by the existence of the Illinois word meehtikoosia 'Frenchman' (lit.
'wooden-boat person').


MM: In my paper I went down the wrong path in analyzing Miami-Illinois
/mihs-/. I took it to mean ‘big’ as in Miami-Illinois /mihsisiipiiwi/ ‘big
river’, /mihsihkinaahkwa/, the term for the painted terrapin but literally
‘big turtle’, and perhaps even /mihsiimina/ ‘pawpaw’ (although that’s
debatable.). In any event the “Miss-“ of “Missouri” is /mihs-/ ‘wood’. At
the time I was working on “Missouri” I was aware of only one term in
Miami-Illinois with the /mihs-/ ‘wood’ initial and that was /mihsi/ ‘piece
of firewood’ and so I naturally avoided that analysis. However, Ives Goddard
set me straight. In the last couple of weeks I’ve found a handful of
‘wood’-related terms in Miami-Illinois with the initial /mihs-/.

Michael

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