Tywappity Bottoms

[Michael Mccafferty]

I guess I should've added the translation for /oonsaalamooni/, the stream
known today as the Salamonie. Maybe I didn't, because it's a little
tricky.

The term literally means 'yellow ocher'. Also known in English as
limonite, yellow ocher is a mixture of hydrated iron oxide minerals,
FeO(OH).nH20, that occurs near oxidized iron deposits, or other ore
deposits, as well as in sedimentary beds. Aboriginally, yellow ocher was
ground into a powder and used as a source of yellow paint. Linguistically
speaking, the term is composed of, as noted, the initial /oonsaa-/
'yellow, brown' and the independent noun /alamooni/, which by itself is
the Miami-Illinois term for the mineral hematite, Fe2O3, otherwise known
as red ocher and commonly glossed "vermillion" in the historical French
sources.

The historical record, however, does not show 'yellow ocher' as an English
translation for recordings of Miami-Illinois /oonsaalamooni/. This native
language term was not recorded, however, until quite late and by the time
it was written down, it was apparently used only as the name for bloodroot
(Sanguinaria canadensis), the rhizomes of which were an important
botanical source of a red juice producing a yellowish stain that was also
used by local native peoples as paint. Ives Goddard's discussion of yellow
ocher suggests, at least to me, that Miami-Illinois /oosaalamooni/ as the
name for the bloodroot plant might be a secondary attribution based on
this plants' capacity to produce a yellowish paint that resembled the
paint originally made from yellow ocher. (Goddard's discussion is in Ives
Goddard, "Contractions in Fox (Meskwaki)," Proceedings of the 32nd
Algonquian Conference, 222-223.)

Michael



On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Alan Hartley wrote:

> Thanks, Michael.
>
> > Given the date that "Ze-wa-pe-ta" was transcribed, it is most likely a
> > word written down by an English speaker. Therefore, the final -a of
> > "Za-wa-pe-ta" is probably /i/. As you probably know, English speakers
> > commonly heard native /i/ as /e/ and then wrote the latter vowel as an a
> > in keeping with the pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet.
> > This would be why "Tywappety" has a y at the end. In other words, there
> > *is* a neat correspondence between, at least, the end of those two words.
> >
> > In this connection, the penultimate -e- in both terms is probably /i/,
> > reflecting the pronunciation of E is in the English alphabet.
> > So, the last three syllables of this place name are probably
> > /-wa(a)pi(i)ti(i)/.
>
> Which suggests the Algonquian 'white-rump' word for 'elk'. Shawnee
> wa:piti, would be a good candidate, given their occupation of SE
> Missouri at about the time Tywappity Bottoms was settled by
> Euro-Americans. But, about the first syllable...
>
> Alan
>
>
>