(O)maha

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, R. Rankin wrote:
> He acquired the tribal name for his map while exploring the Mississippi.
> There's no telling how many tribes the name might have filtered through before
> getting to the Illinois Algonquians.

True, but the simplest assumption is that it filtered along the Missouri
and up and down the Mississippi, or across Iowa-Minnesota-Wisconsin to the
Mississippi and Great Lakes to the places where he might most logically
have encountered it.  We have a general idea what the list of languages
would have been, in these cases, and we know his main contact languages,
too.  Of course, there are some anomalies like the mysterious Michigamea
language to warn us that we don't have all the cards from the original
deck.